PRESIDENT: Is there any careful estimate of the foreign holdings of American wealth?

SENATOR: That is the Democratic charge. Democracy not only supports the American, but foreign aristocracy— an important point in this canvass. (Hands table; PRESIDENT reads:)

TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY-TWO SECURITIES QUOTED
EXCLUSIVELY IN EUROPE.

TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTY-SEVEN SECURITIES QUOTED ALSO IN AMERICA, STOCKS AND BONDS, INCLUDING STATE BONDS.

Aggregate Principal.

From $1,846,000,000 to $2,386,000,000

Aggregate Interest.

From $91,700,000 to $118,700,000

PRESIDENT: How are we to answer an indictment charging us with a grand larceny by legislation, a stealth by statute of almost sixty-five billions of the product of labor?

SENATOR: Rather ask how is Democracy to audit the account! It would take one hundred Wellses, Wrights, Giffens, Porters, Baxters, Beaulieus, and Holmeses, aided by all the Census, Labor, and Manufacturers' Bureaus, and fifty expert accountants, one year to furnish the figures which would show how national wealth by furtive indirect taxation had been transferred from the producers to the Power-holding Class of the Republican aristocracy.

PRESIDENT: What is the answer?

SENATOR: As I foretold you, Hypocrisy and Dissimulation; hazy-silence without bounds, by the mystery that rings its coils under the veil, to the serpent whose lick wastes the stars.

PRESIDENT: Yes, the dissimulation, the hideous hypocrisy of Taxation indirect. The private use of public right is the black whirlpool. The twin tiger apes glare fiercely; dissimulation and hypocrisy, as in France under Louis XI., are the ultima ratio. Fame, politics, portentous embodied shams. Ach, Gott!

SENATOR: Mr. President, if you are to collapse into another Macbeth fainting fit I shall move an adjournment.

Quid times; Cæsarism vehis. You bear the Republican party and its fortunes. The dog Democracy is dead. The equality-of-man doctrine expired long since. We are preparing decently to inter the Constitution under which that doctrine lived, breathed, and had a being.

PRESIDENT: Will the Republican party en masse stand by us?

SENATOR: Republican obscurantism is the method by which our Newspaper Trust exploits the masses and prevents access to their intellect. Besides, we wall our partisan followers up within the folds of party orthodoxy, precisely as an insulator prevents the electric current from connecting with its sympathetic wire.

The science of Republicanism is to destroy the false social order of constitutional democracy.

Its coterie of exploiters are Funded Debt, High Tariff, Gold Standard, National Bank, and Trust. These are all private users of public right.

PRESIDENT: Are not the constitutional Titans too mighty for human opposition?

SENATOR: Yes. I suppose to make turtle soup we must first catch the turtle. While we gabble the Nebraskan scatters his seeds.

PRESIDENT: His practical wisdom is as conspicuous as his power of generalization. No one has a clearer comprehension or a firmer grasp of great principles of universal application; at the same time his policy rests on a wide and solid basis of information and experience. He is steeped in the history of the past, yet penetrated through and through with the reality of the present, and ever and always mindful of that future in which the speculations and measures of the day are to be tested and finally approved or condemned. His prodigious activity in public affairs springs not from an intellectual source alone nor from his patriotism; it is constantly fed from an inexhaustible store of moral energy. He is animated by a detestation of all forms of oppression, whether by kings or governors, parliaments or peoples, which is in him a consuming passion, from which his noble nature could only

obtain relief by denunciation of the oppressor and the destruction of his power. What is next in order in your brief?

SENATOR: The fundamental viciousness of Republican legislation which indirectly gives public property to private use. I am fain to shrink from facing its full import. The gravitating momentum of Funded Debt, National Bank, Gold Standard, and the Trust are overwhelming. They almost paralyze the mind. They are noumenon rather than phenomenon. Such economic policies are the enthronement of unreason.

PRESIDENT: The battle must be fought on these grounds.

SENATOR: We cannot cut the discussion down as Peter did the tree.

SENATOR: In founding St. Petersburg the Czar wanted it to be situated at the mouth of the river, so that it might resemble Amsterdam, where he had lived. An old sailor told him he would be troubled by the overflowing of the river, and pointed to an old tree which, like the Constitution, marked the various heights to which the water in times past ascended. Peter refused to believe the testimony. The tree was cut down that its unwelcome evidence might be suppressed and the work of building commenced. When facts are unwelcome, just take the principle of contradiction and cut them down.

PRESIDENT: Playing with the high-sounding but thoroughly empty defenses has been the fatal vice of Republican politics. The striking advantage of the two methods is in favor of the Nebraskan's plain speech. His method is an insurrection of the living against the dead; by ours the empire of the dead over the living continually increases; our progress defeats itself.

The Nebraskan's great battle-ground is the private use of public rights. Money is our Sun; the Millionaires of the Earth, like those of the sky, are the group which, held by his attraction, revolve around him; they comprise the major planets of Taxation, the minor planets, the satellites, and the hundred million comets of Trust.

SENATOR: By what system of sociology does the Nebraskan propose to revolutionize the planetary evolution of money in America?

PRESIDENT: By the cosmic philosophy of civil justice; by the organic dynamic sociology of right and wrong. Born under the influence of the Sun of Democracy, the Constitution, he distinguishes between molecular aggregates of money and their motor aggregations, Gold and Trust. He estimates the average depth of the money ocean in America should be 12,000 feet; our constitutional surface 140,000,000 square miles of advancing civilization. Jupiter Trust, he says, is 338 times larger than our Sun, the Constitution, though its real distance from that Sun is only 5.2. He thinks those triple stars, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus, the synonyms of Imperialism, High Tariff, and the Gold Standard, though they rank in density with the Constitution (the American Sun), are really gaseous bodies. He is engaged in the almost superhuman task of stripping them of their great cloud envelopes. I wonder how the Nebraskan astronomer acquired this information?

SENATOR: He examined the sidereal movements of Republicans through the same spectroscope by which Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison observed the American firmament when, like the Sun in the heavens, the Constitution arose.

PRESIDENT: Where is your Practical Politics Brief? The judges complain that lawyers waste so much time in dilating upon subjects not germane to the issue and outside the record.