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.