We admit that Bryan made a great fight against the Ryan-Belmont hirelings in the Democratic National Convention of 1904. His forensic powers are of a high order, and they were magnificently displayed in that debate. But he wasn’t true grit, wasn’t dead game,—did not prove himself a thoroughbred. No, he is not the kind of bird that dies in the cock-pit; he showed the “dominecker.”
Had he met Parker’s gold telegram with a defiant, “I accept the challenge! Let those who are true to Democratic principles follow me out of this Convention!” he would have smashed the Ryan-Belmont slate, forced Parker out of the lists, won the nomination for himself, and might have been President.
But he sunk the popular hero into the party hack,—let them put the harness on, hitch him up and drive him in a direction that his record, his vows and his convictions made it a disgrace for him to travel.
Then came the speeches in which he said as much in favor of Parker as he had said against him,—and Parker had not changed a bit. The change was there, and it was vast,—but it was in Bryan.
Then came the swing backwards to radicalism again. Bryan spoke at the Jefferson Day banquet in Chicago in 1906 and said that the time had come for the Democratic party to declare itself in favor of the Government Ownership of the railroads. He advanced the proposition that the states should own the local lines while Uncle Sam ran the trunk lines. This absurd plan was the burden of the Bryan talk and Bryan editorials for more than a year,—long enough for the whole country to realize what an impractical “statesman” he is. So ludicrous a “break” queered him still further with the men of the business world, and told heavily against him in the campaign of this year.
Then, after his home-coming speech in Madison Square Garden, he made his final declaration in favor of Government Ownership. Having toured Europe and witnessed the advantages of State-owned public utilities, his own convictions in favor of that system had been strengthened.
But Democratic editors and politicians raised a Bourbon outcry against Government Ownership, and Bryan, after shuffling about awhile, took to the woods.
Then he fell in love with the Initiative and Referendum. Mightily in favor of giving Direct Legislation to the people was Bryan. But again the Bourbons raised their hands in holy horror, and again Bryan flunked. “Willing to teach the children that the earth is flat, or that it is round, whichever a majority of the School Board prefer”;—that’s the kind of pedagogue partisan politics has made out of W. J. B.
Then we heard him endorse Roosevelt, and agree with the President that Congress ought to pay the campaign expenses of the two old twins,—Chang and Eng,—and that honest bankers should be punished for crimes they didn’t commit, and that the Government should not establish Postal savings banks but should perpetuate the National banks!
Then we saw him dictate the Denver platform which is more Hamiltonian than the Parker platform of 1904, and less favorable to the masses than the platform of Mr. Taft. We saw him choose a Standard Oil tool for the Chairmanship of his Finance Committee; we saw the Tobacco represented on the same Committee; we saw him courting David B. Hill, Judge Parker, Charles Murphy, Pat McCarren and “Fingy” Conners; we saw him yoke up with the liquor interests in Maine, Indiana and Ohio; we saw him change his whole political creed until Ryan, Belmont, Harriman and Rockefeller had nothing to fear from him, and we saw him conduct a campaign in which he stood for no distinct vital democratic principle, whatever. Then we saw him dodge when the President asked him, through the newspapers, how he stood on the Pearre bill which seeks to have Congress declare that a man’s business is not entitled to the same protection as his property. Impaled on that point, Bryan could do nothing but squirm.