efining agencies and instrumentalities of
civilization. We must subdue our detestable habit of shaking hands with
prosperous rascals and fawning upon the merely rich. It is not permitted
to our employers to plead in justification of low wages the law of
supply and demand that is giving them high profits. It is not permitted
to discontented employees to break the bones of contented ones and
destroy the foundations of social order. It is infamous to look upon
public office with the lust of possession; it is disgraceful to solicit
political preferment, to strive and compete for "honors" that are
sullied and tarnished by the touch of the reaching hand. Until we amend
our personal characters we shall amend our laws in vain. Though Paul
plant and Apollos water, the field of reform will grow nothing but the
figless thistle and the grapeless thorn. The State is an aggregation of
individuals. Its public character is the expression of their personal
ones. By no political prestidigitation can it be made better and wiser
than the sum of their goodness and wisdom. To expect that men who do not
honorably and intelligently conduct their private affairs will honorably
and intelligently conduct the affairs of the community is to be a fool.
We are told that out of nothing God made the Heavens and the earth; but
out of nothing God never did and man never can, make a public sense of
honor and a public conscience. Miracles are now performed but one day
of the year--the twenty-ninth of February; and on leap year God is
forbidden to perform them.

IV.

Ye who hold that the power of eloquence is a thing of the past and the
orator an anachronism; who believe that the trend of political events
and the results of parliamentary action are determined by committees
in cold consultation and the machinations of programmes in holes and
corners, consider the ascension of Bryan and be wise. A week before the
convention of 1896 William J. Bryan had never heard of himself; upon his
natural obscurity was superposed the opacity of a Congressional service
that effaced him from the memory of even his faithful dog, and made him
immune to dunning. Today he is pinnacled upon the summit of the tallest
political distinction, gasping in the thin atmosphere of his unfamiliar
environment and fitly astonished at the mischance. To the dizzy
elevation of his candidacy he was hoisted out of the shadow by his own
tongue, the longest and liveliest in Christendom. Had