a large part of its readers believed that the classes had been actually held. Coin, "a smooth little financier," was represented as meeting all comers in a kind of open forum on the silver question, and triumphantly refuting the arguments of lawyers, merchants, bankers, and professors. However, when the creator of the invincible Socrates-Coin attempted himself to match argument with Professor Laughlin of The University of Chicago, in the columns of Mr. Kohlsaat's Times-Herald, he quickly retired from the field. The specious text of Harvey's book was enlivened by pictorial argument calculated to make a more immediate appeal to the mind of the rural reader than the logic of the catechism. Crude woodcuts represented a truculent John Sherman cutting off the head of a beautiful maiden (the "Assassination of Silver"); or a farmer stuffing a cow with hay, while financiers and stock-jobbers milked her; or Uncle Sam firing a gun at John Bull ("Our Answer to England"), with Coin himself gleefully doffing his silk [!] hat in a more pacific salute. Cleveland and Sherman were depicted as desperate burglars plying their trade in the somewhat novel fashion of digging out the (silver) foundations of a mansion; while the proof of the necessity for bimetallism was furnished by the pathetic picture of a one-legged man hobbling along on a crutch. In like manner an early Church father had argued that there must be no more or no less than four canonical gospels because there were four cardinal points of the compass and a beast had four legs. Mr. Bryan spoke in high commendation of Harvey's book.

McKinley conducted his campaign as a continuous reception. He remained at home in Canton, Ohio, where he was visited daily by delegations of business men, teachers, clergymen, laborers, bankers, farmers, and representatives of various social organizations, whom he addressed from his front porch in carefully prepared speeches which were published broadcast by his managers. The campaign chest furnished plentiful provision for securing the best traveling speakers. An "old soldiers' touring special" carried a group of officers and privates of the Civil War through the states of the Middle West to work for "com

rade McKinley." Bryan, on the other hand, carried his message in person to the people. He traveled over eighteen thousand miles, from New York City to Aberdeen, South Dakota, and from Maine to Tennessee (during the latter part of the campaign in a Pullman car most inappropriately named Idler), addressing some five million people in twenty-nine states and making over five hundred speeches.

In August it looked dubious for the Republicans. But the campaign of education won for them in the end. At least, the majority of the American voters, confronted with the choice between the triumph of big business in politics and the theory of free silver, decided in favor of what they believed the lesser of two evils. McKinley carried all the states north of Mason and Dixon's line and east of the Mississippi, together with the border states of Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, and Kentucky and the Western states of North Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Oregon, and California, giving him 271 votes in the electoral college. Bryan's 176 votes came from the solid South and the mining states of the West (Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nevada, Colorado, and Utah), together with Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri. The popular vote was 7,111,607 to 6,509,052. It was a decisive victory for McKinley, who went into the White House with a more generous indorsement by the American voter than any presidential candidate had received since General Grant.2

1 An amusing incident of the campaign is told by G. F. Parker in his "Recollections of Grover Cleveland," p. 401. A Republican candidate in a Southern mountain district was making speeches in favor of silver. When Hanna heard of this, he sent word to the man to stop it and to respect the party platform, which the offending orator had probably never seen. He made his apologies, stating that he hadn't much interest in the currency question himself, but had been using passages from the speech of a certain William McKinley to the Farmers' Alliance of Ohio. He would drop the advocacy of bimetallism, of course, but, he added, he "would like to be informed by telegraph if William changes his mind again."

2 Curious statisticians of the "might have beens" figured out that a change of 34,000 votes in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, if rightly distributed, would have given Bryan the 51 electoral votes of these states and a consequent majority of 5 in the electoral college. But the results of almost every election in our history could be reversed by the juggling of a few thousands of votes in this fashion.

The election of 1896, both in its negative and its positive aspects, was the most important in our history since the Civil War. In the first place, it marked the end of the organized political effort of more than twenty years to commit the Federal government to a policy of currency inflation and paternalistic legislation in favor of the debtor classes. Mr. Bryan, with characteristic optimism, entitled his circumstantial account of the campaign of 1896 "The First Battle," as if it were only the preliminary test in the struggle between the farmer and the financier, the plow-holder and the bond-holder, the debtor and the creditor, the West and the East. But in fact it was the last battle. For although the explicit legislation establishing the gold standard was postponed for certain political reasons until the spring of 1900, and although the existence of the "farm bloc" in Congress today testifies to the unsatisfied demands of the agrarian West and the perennial political antagonism between the creditor interests of a capitalistic community and the debtor interests of a frontier community,1 classes and sections have not been arrayed against each other in any major political contest in our country since Bryan's first defeat.

The campaign also furnished a striking testimony to the firm ness of the Union. Though a few scare-heads and sensation mongers talked of the secession of the West and civil war, there was no such remotest idea in the mind of the free-silver leader. When accused of anarchism, Bryan replied with sincerity and

1"The relations between established settlements and their outlying frontiers seem everywhere and in all periods to follow certain simple and well-defined lines. In the first place, the older settlement has accumulated capital seeking investment, whereas the frontier, in spite of its natural resources, needs for their exploitation capital in the form of money or credit. The frontier, therefore, is always and everywhere in debt to the old settlement, and this relation breeds all those feelings a debtor seems by nature to entertain toward his creditor. As contrasted with one another, the older settlement is always conservative, the frontier always radical. ... The East has therefore always feared and sought to check the political growth of the West. . . . It has trembled for its investments in the too rapid expansion that the frontier always breeds. It has distrusted radical thought and has feared above all else that economic expansion might increase political power and transfer control to a section whose philosophy and outlook have seemed revolutionary" (James Truslow Adams, "Revolutionary New England," p. 12).