a graduated income
tax, postal savings banks, and government ownership of railways and
telegraphs. At the same time they approved the initiative, referendum,
and popular election of Senators, and condemned the use of federal
troops in labor disputes. On this platform, the Populists polled over a
million votes, captured twenty-two presidential electors, and sent a
powerful delegation to Congress.

=Industrial Distress Augments Unrest.=--The four years intervening
between the campaign of 1892 and the next presidential election brought
forth many events which aggravated the ill-feeling expressed in the
portentous platform of Populism. Cleveland, a consistent enemy of free
silver, gave his powerful support to the gold standard and insisted on
the repeal of the Silver Purchase Act, thus alienating an increasing
number of his own party. In 1893 a grave industrial crisis fell upon the
land: banks and business houses went into bankruptcy with startling
rapidity; factories were closed; idle men thronged the streets hunting
for work; and the prices of wheat and corn dropped to a ruinous level.
Labor disputes also filled the crowded record. A strike at the Pullman
car works in Chicago spread to the railways. Disorders ensued. President
Cleveland, against the protests of the governor of Illinois, John P.
Altgeld, dispatched troops to the scene of action. The United States
district court at Chicago issued an injunction forbidding the president
of the Railway Union, Eugene V. Debs, or his assistants to interfere
with the transmission of the mails or interstate commerce in any form.
For refusing to obey the order, Debs was arrested and imprisoned. With
federal troops in possession of the field, with their leader in jail,
the strikers gave up the battle, defeated but not subdued. To cap the
climax the Supreme Court of the United States, the following year (1895)
declared null and void the income tax law just enacted by Congress, thus
fanning the flames of Populist discontent all over the West and South.

THE SOUND MONEY BATTLE OF 1896

=Conservative Men Alarmed.=--Men of conservative thought and leaning in
both parties were by this time thoroughly disturbed. They looked upon
the rise of Populism and the growth of labor disputes as the signs of a
revolutionary spirit, indeed nothing short of a menace to American
institutions and ideals. The income tax law of 1894, exclaimed the
distinguished New York advocate, Joseph H. Choate, in a