ushing small producers, raising the prices of their own products and
lowering those of what they bought, depriving business officials and
business travellers of positions, and working a world of other mischief
politically, economically, and socially. They had rapidly multiplied
since the Republicans last came into power, and nothing had been done to
check the formation of them or to control them.

Why, then, was not Democracy triumphant in the campaign of 1900? When
the lines were first drawn a majority of the people probably disapproved
the Administration's departure into fields of conquest, colonialism, and
empire. Republicans themselves denied that a "full dinner pail" was the
most fundamental of considerations. Few Republican anti-imperialists
were saved to the party by the venerable Senator Hoar's faith that after
a while it would surely retrieve the one mistake marring its record. Nor
was it that men like Andrew Carnegie could never stomach the Kansas City
and Chicago heresies, or that the Republicans had ample money, or yet
that votes were attracted to the Administration because of its war
record and its martial face. Agriculture had, to be sure, been
remunerative. Also, before election, the strike in the Pennsylvania hard
coal regions had, at the earnest instance of Republican leaders, been
settled favorably to the miners, thus enlisting extensive labor forces
in support of the status quo; but these causes also, whether by
themselves or in conjunction with the others named, were wholly
insufficient to explain why the election went as it did.

A partial cause of Mr. Bryan's defeat in 1900 was the incipient waning
of anti-imperialism, the conviction growing, even among such as had
doubted this long and seriously, that the Administration painfully
faulty as were some of its measures in the new lands, was pursuing there
absolutely the only honorable or benevolent course open to it under the
wholly novel and very peculiar circumstances.

A deeper cause--the decisive one, if any single cause may be pronounced
such--was the fact that Mr. Bryan primarily, and then, mainly owing to
his strong influence, also his party, misjudged the fundamental meaning
of the country's demand for monetary reform. The conjunction of good
times with increase in the volume of hard money made possible by the
world's huge new output of gold, might have been justly taken as
vindicating the quantity theory of money value, prosperity being
pre