164 The Campaign of 1896 



is, on the Chicago platform. In the minds of most 

 thrifty, hard-working men, who are given to think- 

 ing at all about public questions, the free-silver plank 

 is very far from being the most rotten of the many 

 rotten planks put together with such perverted skill 

 by the Chicago architects. A platform which de- 

 clares in favor of free and unlimited rioting and 

 which has the same strenuous objection to the exer- 

 cise of the police power by the general government 

 that is felt in the circles presided over by Herr Most, 

 Eugene V. Debs, and all the people whose pictures 

 appear in the detective bureaus of our great cities, 

 can not appeal to persons who have gone beyond 

 the unpolished-stone period of civilization. 



The men who object to what they style "govern- 

 ment by injunction" are, as regards the essential 

 principles of government, in hearty sympathy with 

 their remote skin-clad ancestors who lived in caves, 

 fought one another with stone-headed axes, and 

 ate the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros. They 

 are interesting as representing a geological survival, 

 but they are dangerous whenever there is the least 

 chance of their making the principles of this ages- 

 buried past living factors in our present life. They 

 are not in sympathy with men of good minds and 

 sound civic morality. It is not a nice thing to wish 

 to pay one's debts in coins worth fifty cents on the 

 dollar, but it is a much less nice thing to wish to 

 plunge one's country into anarchy by providing that 

 the law shall only protect the lawless and frown 

 scornfully on the law-abiding. There is a good deal 



