Who is it that cannot see how loftily he held his flag in those days? Who is it that does not realize how sadly it droops today?
From the noble stand of 1893 and 1896, what a falling off is there! Boldly he declared that he would never support for the Presidency an advocate of the gold standard. Yet, when Judge Parker slapped his face in public with the Gold Telegram of 1904, the dauntless Bryan turned the other cheek, like a very meek Christian indeed.
He had said that a Democrat might bolt his party temporarily upon the nomination of an unfit candidate; he had said that Judge Parker was an unfit candidate, but he did not bolt the nomination, even temporarily.
He had said that the voter might abandon his party permanently when that party changed its position upon a paramount public question; yet when the Democratic Party, with extraordinary suddenness, changed its position upon more than one paramount question in 1904, Mr. Bryan did not bolt his party permanently.
He had said that if the Democrats took up the Republican financial policy, which meant the slavery of the debtors of this country and the impoverishment of the people, he would go out and serve his country and his God under some other name, even if he had to go alone. Yet when his party did come over to the Republican financial policy, and came by telegraph at that, Mr. Bryan did not go out to serve either his country or his God under some other name.
He had said to his brother Democrats: “If you are ready to go down on your knees and apologize for what you have said” (abuse of the Republicans and the gold standard), “you will go without me.”
Yet when the Democratic Party, at the St. Louis Convention in 1904, went down on its knees, in effect, to apologize for the abuse which they had heaped upon the Republicans for eight years, they did not go without Mr. Bryan. The knees of Mr. Bryan hit the floor in timely cadence with the knees of all the others, and when he filed out of the convention hall the dust was there to show it just as it was there to show it on the knees of all the others.
Bryan himself asked the question in 1896: “Can a National Convention harmonize the discordant elements of the Democratic Party?” He answered his own question in the comprehensive word, “Impossible.”
The event of the campaign of 1896 showed that he was right, for the Cleveland-Carlisle-Belmont element knifed him.
In the campaign of 1900 they knifed him again. In the campaign of 1904, when the convention nominated a gold standard Democrat on a platform indorsing the gold standard, gold bonds and the gold bank currency, the people refused to support the sell-out of the National Democratic Party to Wall Street, just as Mr. Bryan, in 1896, prophesied that they would, in spite of the fact that the prophet of 1896 had become the gold standard nominee’s most earnest advocate in the campaign of 1904.