These sometimes gained control of the machinery of government as in Missouri. But these are the exceptions which prove the rule. Articulate America was industrial; it was Eastern and Northern, sectional and in absolute control of the economic life of the country. Preachers whose names were known far and near, universities that were known in Europe, the intellectuals, as a rule, were found in the industrial belt.

Unlike the planters of the old South, the masters of industry, bankers, managers of railroads and large business concerns, with incomes ranging from some thousands to a million a year, declined to hold office. How could they afford it? It proved easier and quite as safe to connect their business with political leadership through what all the world calls bosses, men like Conkling of New York, Don Cameron of Pennsylvania, and Mark Hanna of Ohio. These men controlled electoral machinery, set up candidates for Congress, town councils, and the presidency. They saw to it that the interests of property were more securely protected in free America than anywhere else in the world. As in the South before the Civil War constitutions, state and national, became sacred and the courts were held to be beyond criticism. Legislative, administrative, and judicial powers were kept so strictly separated that effective social regulation of industry was almost impossible. The dead men who had written constitutions were everywhere more powerful than the living people who sought relief from intolerable evils. Even the cities set up similar divided governments and let real estate, traction, and utility interests domineer them almost at will. In such a system great bankers, railway builders, and industrial leaders governed the United States quite as completely as ever the owners of great plantations in the 1 Croly's "Marcus Hanna-His Life Work," New York, 1912, and Samuel W. Pennypacker's "Autobiography," New York, 1918, give evidence of this at many points.

South had governed. One thinks of Collis P. Huntington, J. P. Morgan, and Stephen B. Elkins and of the days when their representatives were such powerful figures in Congress, in legislatures and city governments; of the challenge which Roscoe Conkling, the Republican boss of New York, gave in the Senate to President Garfield and of the enforced surrender of President Cleveland to the bankers of New York in 1895.1

It was a magnificent evolution. It must have been a joy to the man of affairs to live in those thirty years which followed the death of Lincoln. Fortunes piled high upon fortunes. The scattering millionaires of 1860 multiplied till they were like the sands of the sea in number. Men travelled first in special cars, luxuriously fitted out, then in special trains with private diners, parlour cars, smokers, and with liveried servants to attend their wants. They built yachts that only monarchs like William II could rival. Their palaces occupied blocks and double blocks in the great cities, costing often millions of dollars and requiring more than princely incomes to keep them going. Not only in the cities did these mansions rise. In the favoured parts of New England, in the Adirondacks, or upon the high ridges of Pennsylvania beautiful summer homes and vast private parks advertised the presence of men it were worth while for ordinary mortals to cultivate. The riches of the earth were pouring year after year into the narrow region which the census takers know as the industrial belt. New York City carried half the bank deposits of the country and her bankers issued ukases to the people of all industries.2 The treasury of the United States feared to act independently of half a dozen

The contract which the President was compelled to sign will be found in W. J. Bryan, "First Battle," Chicago, 1896, p. 134.

"Carl Hovey, "The Life Story of J. Pierpont Morgan," New York, 1911, Chaps. VIII-XI.

Eastern financiers. Country merchants far and near endeavoured to have their names on the books of these elect of the world; little bankers in every town and city scraped together as much money as possible in order to maintain big balances in Wall Street; clergymen learned the law from real masters rather than from musty books said to come from a certain mountain in ancient Palestine; and universities were very loth to fall into ill favour with the only men of power in the country. What else could men do? They were caught in a system, as the people of the old South had been caught in the slavery system.

Yet forces were forging for an emancipation. Conditions were becoming so hard that men, American men at least, would not endure them. Every year from 1866 to 1896 the returns of the farms of the South and West declined in purchasing power, although an increasing volume of output was the rule. The price of wheat fell from $2.50 a bushel to sixty cents; corn from $1.50 to forty cents; and cotton from forty cents a pound to five or six cents. A vicious economic law seemed to be operating to the disadvantage of those who furnished the country with the essentials of life and to the infinite advantage of those who set up the machinery of modern society. Westerners and Southerners had opposed and fought national debts, banks, and railroads many times during the period, but fighting separately or without persistence they had not effected any change. In 1880 they thought to capture the machinery of the Democratic party which had been demoralized in the Greeley campaign of 1872 and which had in part deserted the farmers

1A fair picture of representative men of this class may be seen in "The Memoirs of Henry Villard," 1994; in E. P. Oberholtzer's, "Jay Cooke, Financier of the Civil War," 1907; and in Miss Ida Tarbell's "History of the Standard Oil Company," 1904.

Henry Adams shows in "The Education of Henry Adams," Boston, 1918, what the dilemma of the intellectuals was.

in 1876. They failed. The Republicans, appealing always to the great name of Lincoln and more intimately industrial in leadership, were beyond the hope of capture.1

If one endeavoured to bring the Democratic party to the work of social reform, the cry was immediately made that narrow-minded Southerners and wicked rebels would ruin the country; if the progressive Republicans proposed childlabour laws or a national education bill, Southern men scented danger at once to their budding industrial communities or to that sacred shibboleth of state rights on which so many political battles had been fought and won. Again, if Eastern men like George William Curtis proposed any reform in the civil service, Westerners had their serious doubts; and if Western men sought to replace tariff laws by income taxes, Easterners shrieked, “long-haired radicalism." Moreover, interests and prejudices were so fixed that any real move toward a redemocratizing of the country was likely to bring on an economic panic, one of the terrors of both organized capital and organized labour. Was there ever a more complex situation?

But into this complex and tangled situation William Jennings Bryan, son of an Illinois judge and a protégé of Lyman Trumbull, Lincoln's friend of the Civil War period, plunged with all the enthusiasm of youth. Bryan was essentially a provincial, a farmer, a Westerner of Southern ancestry, a devotee of the old American ideals as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and as lived in farmer communities. Bryan not only believed in equality, he practised it. And he felt the heavy pressure of the industrial system upon agricultural life and ideals as every other Westerner who was not a beneficiary of the system felt it. He was gifted with a power of direct and earnest speech un1One needs only to read the reports of committees of Congress in 1912 to see the difficulties.