Bryan has always been a reformer, but his programme of reform has
always been ill conceived. His first conspicuous appearance in public
life in the Democratic Convention of 1806 was occasioned by the acute
and widespread economic distress among his own people west of the
Mississippi; and the means whereby he sought to remedy that distress,
viz. by a change in the currency system, which would enable the Western
debtors partly to repudiate their debts, was a genuine result of
Jacksonian economic ideas. The Jacksonian Democracy, being the product
of agricultural life, and being inexperienced in the complicated
business of finance, has always relished financial heresies. Bryan's
first campaign was, consequently, a new assertion of a time-honored
tendency of his party; and in other respects, also, he exhibited a
lingering fealty to its older traditions. Reformer though he be, he has
never been much interested in civil service reform, or in any agitations
looking in the direction of the diminution of the influence of the
professional politician. The reforms for which he has stood have been
economic, and he has had little sympathy with any thorough-going
attempt to disturb even such an equivocally Democratic institution as
the spoils system. Yet his lack of sympathy with this aspect of reform
was not due to any preference for corruption. It must be traced to a
persistence of the old Democratic prejudice that administrative
specialization, like other kinds of expert service, implied a
discrimination against the average Democrat.

After the revival of prosperity among his own people had shown that
partial repudiation was not the only cure for poverty, Mr. Bryan fought
his second campaign chiefly on the issue of imperialism, and again met
with defeat. But in this instance his platform was influenced more by
Jeffersonian than Jacksonian ideas. The Jacksonian Democracy had always
been expansionist in disposition and policy, and under the influence of
their nationalism they had lost interest in Jefferson's humanitarianism.
In this matter, however, Mr. Bryan has shown more sympathy with the
first than with the second phase of the Democratic tradition; and in
making this choice he was undoubtedly more faithful to the spirit and
the letter of the Democratic creed than were the expansionist Democrats
of the Middle Period. The traditional American democracy has frequently
been national in feeling, but it has never been national in idea a