How can the South, knowing these things as she now does, ever support Bryan again? To do so would be to reverse her position on that question which to her is the most important of all. During the heat of the campaign, Southern editors who knew of these things kept mum. It will not be so when Bryan seeks the fourth nomination.
In the next national convention of the Democratic party, the South will not be run over as the Bryanites ran over her at Denver.
If she demands the Vice-Presidency in 1912, it won’t go to the attorney of the Brewers’ Combine of Indiana. If Lincoln’s name should again be lugged into the Convention, it will again be honored, but when the name of Robert E. Lee is mentioned it will not be hooted and hissed. Democrats of the other sections may not be pleased by the attitude of Southern delegations, but we venture the prediction that no Haskell brass-bands will insult them by tauntingly playing, “Marching thro’ Georgia.”
III.
But it is not such a misfortune to Mr. Bryan that he will never be President. Several millions of very respectable men share that lot with him. He is rich,—the only man that ever got rich doing reform work. In Bryan’s case, indeed, there has been no reform work,—just floods of talk about it.
He has friends everywhere, has no personal enemies, is of sanguine temperament, is rounding out into a comfortable fatness, has no bad habits, no gentlemanly vices, and is so unconsciously self-righteous in all that he does that he fails to realize what bad taste he displays when he introduces his wife’s name into a public speech and sets forth at length her qualifications for the position of “First Lady in the land.”
Personally, we bear Mr. Bryan no ill will and wish him no harm, but it is our deliberate opinion that his inordinate ambition for office and his mistakes as a leader have done more immense injury to the cause of reform. He destroyed the Populist party, he has wrecked the Democratic party, he has driven thousands of Conservative men into the Republican ranks, and thousands of radical Democrats and Populists to the Socialists.
His career has been rich in substantial rewards to Mr. Bryan himself, but, on the whole, it has been the bane of Jeffersonian democracy.