FOOTNOTES:
[14] Atlantic Monthly, September, 1897.
[15]My predecessor in the Presidency of the Police Board.
[16]The italics are my own.
IX
THE VICE-PRESIDENCY AND THE CAMPAIGN OF 1896[17]
The Vice-President is an officer unique in his character and functions, or to speak more properly, in his want of functions while he remains Vice-President, and in his possibility of at any moment ceasing to be a functionless official and becoming the head of the whole nation. There is no corresponding position in any constitutional government. Perhaps the nearest analogue is the heir apparent in a monarchy. Neither the French President nor the British Prime Minister has a substitute, ready at any moment to take his place, but exercising scarcely any authority until his place is taken. The history of such an office is interesting, and the personality of the incumbent for the time being may at any moment become of vast importance.
The founders of our government—the men who did far more than draw up the Declaration of Independence, for they put forth the National Constitution—in many respects builded very wisely of set purpose. In some cases they built wiser than they knew. In yet other instances they failed entirely to achieve objects for which they had endeavored to provide by a most elaborate and ingenious governmental arrangement. They distrusted what would now be called pure Democracy, and they dreaded what we would now call party government.
Their distrust of Democracy induced them to construct the electoral college for the choice of a President, the original idea being that the people should elect their best and wisest men who in turn should, untrammeled by outside pressure, elect a President. As a matter of fact the functions of the electorate have now by time and custom become of little more importance than those of so many letter-carriers. They deliver the electoral votes of their states just as a letter-carrier delivers his mail. But in the presidential contest this year it may be we shall see a partial return to the ideals of the men of 1789; for some of the electors on the Bryan-Sewall-Watson ticket may exercise a choice between the vice-presidential candidates.
The distrust felt by the founders of the constitution for party government took shape in the scheme to provide that the majority party should have the foremost place, and the minority party the second place, in the national executive. The man who received the greatest number of electoral votes was made President, and the man who received the second greatest number was made Vice-President, on a theory somewhat akin to that by which certain reformers hope to revolutionize our system of voting at the present day. In the early days under the present constitution this system resulted in the choice of Adams for President and of his anti-type Jefferson as Vice-President, the combination being about as incongruous as if we should now see McKinley President and either Bryan or Watson Vice-President. Even in theory such an arrangement is very bad, because under it the Vice-President might readily be, and as a matter of fact was, a man utterly opposed to all the principles to which the President was devoted, so that the arrangement provided in the event of the death of the President, not for a succession, but for a revolution. The system was very soon dropped, and each party nominated its own candidates for both positions. But it was many years before all the members of the electoral college of one party felt obliged to cast the same votes for both President and Vice-President, and consequently there was a good deal of scrambling and shifting in taking the vote. When, however, the parties had crystallized into Democratic and Whig, a score of years after the disappearance of the Federalists, the system of party voting also crystallized. Each party then as a rule nominated one man for President and one for Vice-President, these being voted for throughout the nation. This system in turn speedily produced strange results, some of which remain to this day. There are and must be in every party factions. The victorious faction may crush out and destroy the others, or it may try to propitiate at least its most formidable rival. In consequence, the custom grew of offering the vice-presidency as a consolation prize, to be given in many cases to the very men who were most bitterly opposed to the nomination of the successful candidate for President. Sometimes this consolation prize was awarded for geographical reasons, sometimes to bring into the party men who on points of principle might split away because of the principles of the presidential candidate himself, and at other times it was awarded for merely factional reasons to some faction which did not differ in the least from the dominant faction in matters of principles, but had very decided views on the question of offices.
The presidency being all important, and the vice-presidency of comparatively little note, the entire strength of the contending factions is spent in the conflict over the first, and very often a man who is most anxious to take the first place will not take the second, preferring some other political position. It has thus frequently happened that the two candidates have been totally dissimilar in character and even in party principle, though both running on the same ticket. Very odd results have followed in more than one instance.
A striking illustration of the evils sometimes springing from this system is afforded by what befell the Whigs after the election and death of the elder Harrison. Translated into the terms of the politics of continental Europe of to-day, Harrison’s adherents represented a union between the right and the extreme left against the centre. That is, the regular Whigs who formed the bulk of his supporters were supplemented by a small body of extremists who in their political principles were even more alien to the Whigs than were the bulk of the regular Democrats, but who themselves hated these regular Democrats with the peculiar ferocity so often felt by the extremist for the man who goes far, but not quite far enough. In consequence, the President represented Whig principles, the Vice-President represented a rather extreme form of the very principles to which the Whigs were most opposed. The result was that when Harrison died the presidency fell into the hands of a man who had but a corporal’s guard of supporters in the nation, and who proceeded to oppose all the measures of the immense majority of those who elected him.
A somewhat similar instance was afforded in the case of Lincoln and Johnson. Johnson was put on the ticket largely for geographical reasons, and on the death of Lincoln he tried to reverse the policy of the party which had put him in office. An instance of an entirely different kind is afforded by Garfield and Arthur. The differences between these two party leaders were mainly merely factional. Each stood squarely on the platform of the party, and all the principles advocated by one were advocated by the other; yet the death of Garfield meant a complete overturn in the personnel of the upper Republican officials, because Arthur had been nominated expressly to placate the group of party leaders who most objected to the nomination of Garfield. Arthur made a very good President, but the bitterness caused by his succession to power nearly tore the party in twain. It will be noted that most of these evils arose from the fact that the Vice-President under ordinary circumstances possesses so little real power. He presides over the Senate and he has in Washington a position of marked social importance, but his political weight as Vice-President is almost nil. There is always a chance that he may become President. As this is only a chance it seems quite impossible to persuade politicians to give it proper weight. This certainly does not seem right. The Vice-President should, so far as possible, represent the same views and principles which have secured the nomination and election of the President, and he should be a man standing well in the councils of the party, trusted by his fellow party leaders, and able in the event of any accident to his chief to take up the work of the latter just where it was left. The Republican party has this year nominated such a man in the person of Mr. Hobart. But nominations of this kind have by no means always been the rule of recent years. No change of parties, for instance, could well produce a greater revolution in policy than would have been produced at almost any time during the last three years if Mr. Cleveland had died and Mr. Stevenson had succeeded him.
One sure way to secure this desired result would undoubtedly be to increase the power of the Vice-President. He should always be a man who would be consulted by the President on every great party question. It would be very well if he were given a seat in the Cabinet. It might be well if, in addition to his vote in the Senate in the event of a tie, he should be given a vote, on ordinary occasions, and perchance on occasions a voice in the debates. A man of the character of Mr. Hobart is sure to make his weight felt in an administration, but the power of thus exercising influence should be made official rather than personal.
The present contest offers a striking illustration of the way in which the Vice-President ought and ought not to be nominated, and to study this it is necessary to study not only the way in which the different candidates were nominated, but at least in outline the characters of the candidates themselves.
For the first time in many years, indeed for the first time since parties have fairly crystallized along their present lines, there are three parties running, two of which support the same presidential candidate but different candidates for the vice-presidency. Each one of these parties has carried several states during the last three or four years. Each party has a right to count upon a number of electoral votes as its own. Closely though the Democratic and Populistic parties have now approximated in their principles as enunciated in the platforms of Chicago and St. Louis, they yet do differ on certain points, and neither would have any chance of beating the Republicans without the help of the other. The result has been a coalition, yet each party to the coalition has retained enough of its jealous individuality to make it refuse to accept the candidate of the other for the second position on the ticket.
The Republican party stands on a normal and healthy party footing. It has enunciated a definite set of principles entirely in accord with its past actions. It has nominated on this platform a President and Vice-President, both of whom are thorough-going believers in all the party principles set forth in the platform upon which they stand. Mr. McKinley believes in sound finance,—that is, in a currency based upon gold and as good as gold. So does Mr. Hobart. Mr. McKinley believes in a protective tariff. So does Mr. Hobart. Mr. McKinley believes in the only method of preserving orderly liberty,—that is, in seeing that the laws are enforced at whatever cost. So does Mr. Hobart. In short, Mr. Hobart stands for precisely the same principles that are represented by Mr. McKinley. He is a man of weight in the community, who has had wide experience both in business and in politics. He is taking an active part in the campaign, and he will be a power if elected to the vice-presidency. All the elements which have rallied behind Mr. McKinley are just as heartily behind Mr. Hobart. The two represent the same forces, and they stand for a party with a coherent organization and a definite purpose, to the carrying out of which they are equally pledged.
It will be a matter of much importance to the nation that the next Vice-President should stand for some settled policy. It is an unhealthy thing to have the Vice-President and President represented by principles so far apart that the succession of one to the place of the other means a change as radical as any possible party overturn. The straining and dislocation of our governmental institutions was very great when Tyler succeeded Harrison and Johnson succeeded Lincoln. In each case the majority of the party that had won the victory felt that it had been treated with scandalous treachery, for Tyler grew to be as repulsive to the Whigs as Polk himself, and the Republicans could scarcely have hated Seymour more than they hated Johnson. The Vice-President has a three-fold relation. First to the administration; next as presiding officer in the Senate, where he should be a man of dignity and force; and third in his social position, for socially he ranks second to the President alone. Mr. Morton was in every way an admirable Vice-President under General Harrison, and had he succeeded to the presidential chair there would have been no break in the great policies which were being pushed forward by the administration. But during Mr. Cleveland’s two incumbencies Messrs. Hendricks and Stevenson have represented, not merely hostile factions, but principles and interests from which he was sundered by a gulf quite as great as that which divided him from his normal party foes. Mr. Sewall would make a colorless Vice-President, and were he at any time to succeed Mr. Bryan in the White House would travel Mr. Bryan’s path only with extreme reluctance and under duress. Mr. Watson would be a more startling, more attractive, and more dangerous figure, for if he got the chance he would lash the nation with a whip of scorpions, while Mr. Bryan would be content with the torture of ordinary thongs.
Finally, Mr. Hobart would typify as strongly as Mr. McKinley himself what was best in the Republican party and in the nation, and would stand as one of the known champions of his party on the very questions at issue in the present election. He is a man whose advice would be sought by all who are prominent in the administration. In short, he would be the kind of man whom the electors are certain to choose as Vice-President if they exercise their choice rationally.
The men who left the Republican party because of the nomination of McKinley would have left it just as quickly if Hobart had been nominated. They do not believe in sound finance, and though many of the bolters object to anarchy and favor protection, they feel that in this crisis their personal desires must be repressed and that they are conscientiously bound to support the depreciated dollar even at the cost of incidentally supporting the principles of a low tariff and the doctrine that a mob should be allowed to do what it likes with immunity. There are many advocates of clipped or depreciated money who are rather sorry to see the demand for such currency coupled with a demand for more lawlessness and an abandonment by the government of the police functions which are the essential attributes of civilization; but they have overcome their reluctance, feeling that on the whole it is more important that the money of the nation should be unsound than that its laws should be obeyed. People who feel this way are just as much opposed to Mr. Hobart as to Mr. McKinley. They object to the platform upon which the two men stand, and they object as much to the character of one man as to the character of the other. They are repelled by McKinley’s allegiance to the cause of sound money, and find nothing to propitiate them in Hobart’s uncompromisingly honest attitude on the same question. There is no reason whatever why any voter who would wish to vote against the one should favor the other, or vice versa.
When we cross the political line all this is changed. On the leading issue of the campaign the entire triangle of candidates are a unit. Mr. Bryan, the nominee for the presidency, and Messrs. Sewall and Watson, the nominees for the vice-presidency, are almost equally devoted adherents of the light-weight dollar and of a currency which shall not force a man to repay what he has borrowed, and shall punish the wrong-headed laborer, who expects to be paid his wages in money worth something, as heavily as the business man or farmer who is so immoral as to wish to pay his debts. All three are believers in that old-world school of finance which appears under such protean changes of policy, always desiring the increase of the circulating medium, but differing as to the means, which in one age takes the form of putting base metal in with the good, or of clipping the good, and in another assumes the guise of fiat money, or the free coinage of silver. On this currency question they are substantially alike, agreeing (as one of their adherents picturesquely put it, in arguing in favor of that form of abundant currency which has as its highest exponent the money of the late Confederacy) that “the money which was good enough for the soldiers of Washington is good enough for us.” As a matter of fact the soldiers of Washington were not at all grateful for the money which the loud-mouthed predecessors of Mr. Bryan and his kind then thought “good enough” for them. The money with which the veterans of Washington were paid was worth two cents on the dollar, and as yet neither Mr. Bryan, Mr. Sewall, nor Mr. Watson has advocated a two-cent copper dollar. Still, they are striving toward this ideal, and in their advocacy of the fifty cent dollar they are one.
But beyond this they begin to differ. Mr. Sewall distinctly sags behind the leader of the spike team, Mr. Bryan, and still more distinctly behind his rival, or running mate, or whatever one may choose to call him, the Hon. Thomas Watson. There is far more regard for the essential fitness of things in a ticket which contains Mr. Bryan and Mr. Watson than one which contains Mr. Bryan and Mr. Sewall. Mr. Watson is a man of Mr. Bryan’s type, only a little more so. But Mr. Sewall is of a different type, and possesses many attributes which must make association with him exceedingly painful, not merely to Mr. Watson, but to Mr. Bryan himself. He is a well-to-do man. Indeed in many communities he would be called a rich man. He is a banker, a railroad man, a shipbuilder, and has been successful in business. Now if Mr. Bryan and Mr. Watson really stand for any principle it is hostility to this kind of success. Thrift, industry, and business energy are qualities which are quite incompatible with true Populistic feeling. Payment of debts, like the suppression of riots, is abhorrent to the Populistic mind. Such conduct strikes the Populist as immoral. Mr. Bryan made his appearance in Congress with two colleagues elected on the same ticket, one of whom stated to the present writer that no honest man ever earned $5000 a year; that whoever got that amount stole it. Mr. Sewall has earned many times $5000 a year. He is a prosperous capitalist. Populism never prospers save where men are unprosperous, and your true Populist is especially intolerant of business success. If a man is a successful business man he at once calls him a plutocrat.
He makes only one exception. A miner or speculator in mines may be many times a millionaire and yet remain in good standing in the Populist party. The Populist has ineradicably fixed in his mind the belief that silver is a cheap metal, and that silver money is, while not fiat money, still a long step toward it. Silver is connected in his mind with scaling down debts, the partial repudiation of obligations, and other measures aimed at those odious moneyed tyrants who lend money to persons who insist upon borrowing, or who have put their ill-gotten gains in saving banks and kindred wicked institutions for the encouragement of the vice of thrift. These pleasurable associations quite outweigh, with the Populist, the fact that the silver man himself is rich. He is even for the moment blind to the further fact that these pro-silver men, like Senator Stewart, Governor Altgeld, and their compeers, strenuously insist that the obligations to themselves shall be liquidated in gold; indeed this particular idiosyncrasy of the silver leaders is not much frowned upon by the bulk of the Populists, because it has at least the merit of savoring strongly of “doing” one’s creditors. Not even the fact that rich silver mine owners may have earned their money honestly can outweigh the other fact that they champion a species of currency which will make most thrifty and honest men poorer, in the minds of the truly logical Populist.
But Mr. Sewall has no fictitious advantage in the way of owing his wealth to silver. He has made his money precisely as the most loathed reprobate of Wall Street—or of New York, which the average Populist regards as synonymous with Wall Street—has made his. The average Populist does not draw fine distinctions. There are in New York, as in other large cities, scoundrels of great wealth who have made their money by means skilfully calculated to come just outside the line of criminality. There are other men who have made their money exactly as the successful miner or farmer makes his,—that is, by the exercise of shrewdness, business daring, energy and thrift. But the Populist draws no line of division between these two classes. They have made money, and that is enough. One may have built railroads and the other have wrecked them, but they are both railroad men in his eyes, and that is all. One may have swindled his creditors, and the other built up a bank which has been of incalculable benefit to all who have had dealings with it, but to the Populist they are both gold bugs, and as such noxious. Mr. Sewall is the type of man the contemplation of which usually throws a Populist orator into spasms. But it happens that he believes in free silver, just as other very respectable men believe in spirit rapping, or the faith-cure, or Buddhism, or pilgrimages to Lourdes, or the foot of a graveyard rabbit. There are very able men and very lovely women who believe in each or all of these, and there are a much larger number who believe in free silver. Had they lived in the days of Sparta they would have believed in free iron, iron coin being at that time the cheapest circulating medium, the adoption of which would give the greatest expansion of the currency. But they have been dragged on by the slow procession of the centuries, and now they only believe in free silver. It is a belief which is compatible with all the domestic virtues, and even occasionally with very good capacities as a public servant. Mr. Sewall doubtless stands as one of these men. He can hardly be happy, planted firmly as he is, on the Chicago platform. In the minds of most thrifty, hard-working men, who are given to thinking at all about public questions, the free-silver plank is very far from being the most rotten of the many rotten planks put together with such perverted skill by the Chicago architects. A platform which declares in favor of free and unlimited rioting and which has the same strenuous objection to the exercise of the police power by the general government that is felt in the circles presided over by Herr Most, Eugene V. Debs, and all the people whose pictures appear in the detective bureaus of our great cities, cannot appeal to persons who have gone beyond the unpolished-stone period of civilization.
The men who object to what they style “government by injunction” are, as regards the essential principles of government, in hearty sympathy with their remote skin-clad ancestors who lived in caves, fought one another with stone-headed axes, and ate the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros. They are interesting as representing a geological survival, but they are dangerous whenever there is the least chance of their making the principles of this ages-buried past living factors in our present life. They are not in sympathy with men of good minds and sound civic morality. It is not a nice thing to wish to pay one’s debts in coins worth fifty cents on the dollar, but it is a much less nice thing to wish to plunge one’s country into anarchy by providing that the law shall only protect the lawless and frown scornfully on the law-abiding. There is a good deal of mushy sentiment in the world, and there are always a certain number of people whose minds are weak and whose emotions are strong and who effervesce with sympathy toward any man who does wrong, and with indignation against any man who chastises the criminal for having done wrong. These emotionalists, moreover, are always reinforced by that large body of men who themselves wish to do wrong, and who are not sentimental at all, but, on the contrary, very practical. It is rarely that these two classes control a great political party, but at Chicago this became an accomplished fact.
Furthermore, the Chicago convention attacked the Supreme Court. Again this represents a species of atavism,—that is, of recurrence to the ways of thought of remote barbarian ancestors. Savages do not like an independent and upright judiciary. They want the judge to decide their way, and if he does not, they want to behead him. The Populists experience much the same emotions when they realize that the judiciary stands between them and plunder.
Now on all these points Mr. Sewall can hardly feel complete sympathy with his temporary allies. He is very anxious that the Populists shall vote for him for Vice-President, and of course he feels a kindly emotion toward those who do intend to vote for him. He would doubtless pardon much heresy of political belief in any member of the electoral college who feels that Sewall is his friend, not Watson,—Codlin, not Short. He has, of course, a vein of the erratic in his character, or otherwise he would not be in such company at all, and would have no quality that would recommend him to them. But on the whole his sympathies must lie with the man who saves money rather than with the man who proposes to take away the money when it has been saved, and with the policeman who arrests a violent criminal rather than with the criminal. Such sympathy puts him at a disadvantage in the Populist camp. He is loud in his professions of belief in the remarkable series of principles for which he is supposed to stand, but his protestations ring rather hollow. The average supporter of Bryan doubtless intends to support Sewall, for he thinks him an unimportant tail to the Bryan kite. But, though unimportant, he regards him with a slight feeling of irritation, as being at the best a rather ludicrous contrast to the rest of the kite. He contributes no element of strength to the Bryan ticket, for other men who work hard and wish to enjoy the fruits of their toil simply regard him as a renegade, and the average Populist, or Populistic Democrat, does not like him, and accepts him simply because he fears not doing so may jeopardize Bryan’s chances. He is in the uncomfortable position always held by the respectable theorist who gets caught in a revolutionary movement and has to wedge nervously up into the front rank with the gentlemen who are not troubled by any of his scruples, and who really do think that it is all very fine and glorious. In fact Mr. Sewall is much the least picturesque and the least appropriate figure on the platform or platforms upon which Mr. Bryan is standing.
Mr. Watson, whose enemies now call him a Georgia cracker, is in reality a far more suitable companion for Mr. Bryan in such a contest. It must be said, however, that if virtue always received its reward Mr. Watson and not Mr. Bryan would stand at the head of the ticket. In the language of mathematicians Mr. Watson merely represents Mr. Bryan raised several powers. The same is true of the Populist as compared to the Democratic platform. Mr. Bryan may affect to believe that free silver does represent the ultimate goal, and that his friends do not intend to go further in the direction of fiat money. Mr. Watson’s friends, the middle-of-the-road Populists, are much more fearless and much more logical. They are willing to accept silver as a temporary makeshift, but they want a currency based on corn and cotton next, and ultimately a currency based on the desires of the people who issue it. The statesmanlike utterance of that great financier, Mr. Bryan’s chief rival for the nomination and at present his foremost supporter, Mr. Bland, to the effect that he would “wipe out the national debt as with a sponge,” meets with their cordial approval as far as it goes, but they object to the qualification before the word “debt.” In wiping out debts they do not wish to halt merely at the national debt. The Populists indorsed Bryan as the best they could get; but they hated Sewall so that they took the extraordinary step of nominating the Vice-President before the President so as to make sure of a really acceptable man in the person of Watson.
With Mr. Bryan denunciation of the gold bug and the banker is largely a mere form of intellectual entertainment; but with Mr. Watson it represents an almost ferocious conviction. Someone has said that Mr. Watson like Mr. Tillman, is an embodied retribution on the South for having failed to educate the cracker, the poor white who gives him his strength. It would ill beseem any dweller in cities of the North, especially any dweller in the city of Tammany, to reproach the South with having failed to educate anybody. But Mr. Watson is certainly an awkward man for a community to develop. He is infinitely more in earnest than is Mr. Bryan. Mr. Watson’s followers belong to that school of southern Populists who honestly believe that the respectable and commonplace people who own banks, railroads, dry-goods stores, factories, and the like, are persons with many of the mental and social attributes that unpleasantly distinguished Heliogabalus, Nero, Caligula, and other worthies of later Rome. Not only do they believe this, but they say it with appalling frankness. They are very sincere as a rule, or at least the rank and file are. They are also very suspicious. They distrust anything they cannot understand; and as they understand but little this opens a very wide field for distrust. They are apt to be emotionally religious. If not, they are then at least atheists of an archaic type. Refinement and comfort they are apt to consider quite as objectionable as immorality. That a man should change his clothes in the evening, that he should dine at any other hour than noon, impress these good people as being symptoms of depravity instead of merely trivial. A taste for learning and cultivated friends, and a tendency to bathe frequently, cause them the deepest suspicion. A well-to-do man they regard with jealous distrust, and if they cannot be well-to-do themselves, at least they hope to make matters uncomfortable for those that are. They possess many strong, rugged virtues, but they are quite impossible politically, because they always confound the essentials and the non-essentials, and though they often make war on vice, they rather prefer making war upon prosperity and refinement.
Mr. Watson was in a sense born out of place when he was born in Georgia, for in Georgia the regular Democracy, while it has accepted the principles of the Populists, has made war on their personnel, and in every way strives to press them down. Far better for Mr. Watson would it have been could he have been born in the adjacent State of South Carolina, where the Populists swallowed the Democrats with a gulp. Senator Tillman, the great Populist or Democratic orator from South Carolina, possesses an untrammelled tongue any middle-of-the-road man would envy: and moreover Mr. Tillman’s brother has been frequently elected to Congress upon the issue that he never wore either an overcoat or an undershirt, an issue which any Populist statesman finds readily comprehensible, and which he would recognize at first glance as being strong before the people. It needs a certain amount of mental subtlety to appreciate that it is for one’s interest to support a man because he is honest and has broad views about coast defenses and the navy, and other similar subjects; but it does not need any mind at all to have one’s prejudices stirred in favor of a statesman whose claim to the title rests upon his indifference to the requirements of civilized dress.
Altogether Mr. Watson, with his sincerity, his frankness, his extreme suspiciousness, his distrust of anything he cannot understand, and the feeling he encourages against all the elegancies and decencies of civilized life, is an interesting personage. He represents the real thing, while Bryan after all is more or less a sham and a compromise. Mr. Watson would, at a blow, destroy all banks and bankers, with a cheerful, albeit vague, belief that thereby he was in some abstruse way benefiting the people at large. And he would do this with the simple sincerity and faith of an African savage who tries to benefit his tribe by a sufficiency of human sacrifices. But Mr. Bryan would be beset by ugly doubts when he came to put into effect all the mischievous beliefs of his followers, and Mr. Sewall would doubtless be frankly miserable if it ever became necessary for him to take a lead in such matters. Mr. Watson really ought to be the first man on the ticket, with Mr. Bryan second; for he is much the superior in boldness, in thorough-going acceptance of his principles according to their logical conclusions, and in sincerity of faith. It is impossible not to regret that the Democrats and Populists should not have put forward in the first place the man who genuinely represents their ideas.
However, it is even doubtful whether Mr. Watson will receive the support to which he is entitled as a vice-presidential candidate. In the South the Populists have been so crushed under the heel of the Democrats, and have bitten that heel with such eager venom, that they dislike entering into a coalition with them; but in the south the Democrats will generally control the election machinery. In the far West, and generally in those States where the Populist wing of the new alliance is ascendant, the Populists have no especial hatred of the Democrats. They know that their principles are substantially identical, and they think it best to support the man who seems to represent the majority faction among the various factions that stand behind Bryan.
As a consequence of this curious condition of affairs there are several interesting possibilities open. The electoral college consists of the men elected at the polls in the various States to record the decrees of the majorities in those States, and it has grown to be an axiom of politics that they must merely register the will of the men who elected them. But it does seem possible that in the present election some of the electors may return to the old principles of a century ago and exercise at least a limited discretion in casting their votes. In a State like Nebraska, for instance, it looks as though it would be possible that the electoral ticket on the anti-Republican side would be composed of four Bryan and Watson men and four Bryan and Sewall men. Now in the event of Bryan having more votes than McKinley—that is, in the event of the country showing strong Bedlamite tendencies next November—it might be that a split between Sewall and Watson would give a plurality to Hobart, and in such event it is hardly conceivable that some of the electors would not exercise their discretion by changing their votes. If they did not, we might then again see a return to the early and profoundly interesting practice of our fathers and witness a President chosen by one party and a Vice-President by the other.
I wish it to be distinctly understood, however, that these are merely interesting speculations as to what might occur in a hopelessly improbable contingency. I am a good American, with a profound belief in my countrymen, and I have no idea that they will deliberately lower themselves to a level beneath that of a South American Republic, by voting for the farrago of sinister nonsense which the Populistic-Democratic politicians at Chicago chose to set up as embodying the principles of their party, and for the amiable and windy demagogue who stands upon that platform. Many entirely honest and intelligent men have been misled by the silver talk, and have for the moment joined the ranks of the ignorant, the vicious and the wrong-headed. These men of character and capacity are blinded by their own misfortunes, or their own needs, or else they have never fairly looked into the matter for themselves, being, like most men, whether in “gold” or “silver” communities, content to follow the opinion of those they are accustomed to trust. After full and fair inquiry these men, I am sure, whether they live in Maine, in Tennessee, or in Oregon, will come out on the side of honest money. The shiftless and vicious and the honest but hopelessly ignorant and puzzle-headed voters cannot be reached; but the average farmer, the average business man, the average workman—in short, the average American—will always stand up for honesty and decency when he can once satisfy himself as to the side on which they are to be found.
