Did the purpose of this article permit, it would be interesting to
make Mr. Cleveland's speech the text of some examination into the
ex-President's peculiarities of style. It was Clevelandesque to the
core. All his protuberant characteristics are there: the leviathanic
egotism, the profound and tenebrous ponderosity, the labored intricacy
of the commonplace, the pedagogic moralizing, the oracular
inconsequence. How absurdly obvious it all is now, and how
inexplicable that the glamour of high place should ever have clothed
such matter as his with the seeming of philosophy and statesmanship!
'Tis the very frippery and trumpery of the stage after the lights are
out and the audience has departed.

In his opening Mr. Cleveland says: "On every side we are confronted
with popular depression and complaint." This language stirs an echo of
the long ago. In his special message to the extra session of the
Fifty-third Congress in August, 1893, he thus announced a similar
condition: "Suddenly financial distrust and fear have sprung up on
every side." But he accounts differently for these two identical
phenomena. The situation to-day he largely attributes to "the work of
agitators and demagogues." In 1893 he declared: "I believe these
things are principally chargeable to Congressional legislation
touching the purchase and coinage of silver by the general
government."

The ex-President's explanations are both wrong, and nobody ought to
know it so well as himself. His relations with the great gold bankers
were exceedingly intimate in 1892 and 1893, and have been so ever
since. It is notorious that the panic of 1893 was a bankers' panic
deliberately brought about by these men to frighten public sentiment
into supplementing their demand for the repeal of the purchasing
clause of the Sherman law of 1890. The agitation against that law was
a whooped-up and manufactured agitation. No legitimate interest had
suffered from its operation. On the contrary, the access of standard
silver dollars coined under the laws of 1878 and 1890 had been of
incalculable advantage to the country. In his annual message of
December 2, 1890, President Harrison had thus referred to this fact:
"The general tendency of the markets was upward from influences wholly
apart from the recent tariff legislation. The enlargement of our
currency by the silver bill undoubtedly gave an upward tendency to
trade and had a marked effect on prices." And again: "It is gratifying