Shall Never Touch Mine." There are regions which
would accept that parable as Gospel truth, and much to Bryan's credit.

Salem, Ill., is a little town which fairly shrieks at you its
pre-eminence as a picture of that type. As you pass through its
orderly little streets, with its little frame houses, all of the same
kind and all neat and unassuming, with its dirt roads and its typical
Town Hall, set correctly back behind a correct little patch of grass
in a neat square, you feel instinctively that the Darwinian theory
must be avoided in your Salem conversation. You know at once that the
same families have lived there for generations. So they have; one of
them was Bryan's, and he was born there on March 19, 1860.

Of course, he was the valedictorian of his class--Illinois College,
1881. Of course, he became a lawyer; and, of course, in the Middle
West, that involved politics. He lived now in Lincoln, Neb., in a
Republican district, but he was a Democrat. There was a landslide in
1890. The whole country went Democratic, and many a forlorn hope
leader in some hide-bound Republican district was swept into Congress,
Bryan among them. He made a great speech on the tariff, which won him
instantly a national reputation; but Lincoln had recovered its
Republican poise, and he did not go back to Congress. He added to his
reputation in his own State, however, as editor of its chief
Democratic organ, The Omaha World-Herald, and went to Chicago as the
head of its delegation to the National Convention of 1896.

At a moment when David B. Hill's masterly presentation of the
gold-standard case and Tillman's failure in his effort at rejoinder
had thrown a wet blanket over the silverites, Bryan came forward with
his "Cross of Gold" speech. The cheering delegations carried him
around the hall on their shoulders. None of the candidates before the
convention was dominating or really of Presidential size; the
convention was deadlocked for many ballots, and at last it turned to
Bryan and nominated him.

His defeat by McKinley really marked the beginning of his career as a
national leader. Despite the accident which had made him the
Democracy's nominal leader, he demonstrated that he was the ablest of
the radicals into whose hands it had fallen, and his nominal
chieftainship became a real one. It was evident from the beginning
that he would be renominated in 1900. When the Spanish war broke out
he offered his services and became Colonel of t