g the news came that Parker had refused to run unless the
word "gold" was written into the platform; the convention was thrown
into panic; the sick man rose from his bed and entered the wild and
turbulent hall, white-faced, breathing with difficulty, sweat pouring
down his face, and there took up the work again, single-handed still.
He fought on all night, was defeated again, and went under the
doctor's hands. Those speeches in that convention were really the
greatest of his life, though they may not read as well as others;
each of them was a battle.

Parker's defeat by Roosevelt again erased that ever-recurring epitaph
over Bryan's political grave. It was evident at once that nothing
could prevent him from being again the candidate in 1908. Again he was
defeated, and again the epitaph was jubilantly rewritten. He was
extinguished, he would never again be an influence in the party; it
was, to use the phrase of 1896, 1900, and 1904, "the end of Bryan."

Again the epitaph had to be erased. He was so far from being
extinguished that he became the dominating force of the convention of
1912. There is no doubt in the mind of the writer, who was there, that
Bryan had given up all hope of running for President, because, as he
expressed it in a thrilling midnight speech at that convention, he
recognized at last that he had too many enemies ever to expect to win.
But he did determine to be a king-maker if he could not be a king, and
king-maker he was.

Not even the convention of 1904 showed Bryan in better light as a
fighter than that of 1912. He was determined that the reactionaries
should not control the convention. At the beginning he was defeated,
but defeat never affected Bryan in the least in all his life, and this
time, as usual, he only went on fighting. When the convention rejected
him for Temporary Chairman and elected Parker, the embodiment of all
he opposed, he merely took a fresh hold and fought harder.

When he swung Nebraska from Champ Clark to Wilson he had won, and
thereafter Wilson's nomination was only a question of time. He was the
centre of violent scenes, as when maddened men swept down upon him and
shook their standards in his face and seemed on the verge of
assaulting him. When he tried to get a hearing and the opposition
shouted him down, he simply climbed up on the platform beside the
Chairman and forced them to hear. Once, while the whole convention
seemed to be yelling at him, and he stood in the m