1 68 The Campaign of 1896 



the Vice-President before the President so as to 

 make sure of a really acceptable man in the person 

 of Watson. 



With Mr. Bryan denunciation of the gold bug 

 and the banker is largely a mere form of intellectual 

 entertainment; but with Mr. Watson it represents 

 an almost ferocious conviction. Some one has said 

 that Mr. Watson like Mr. Tillman, is an embodied 

 retribution on the South for having failed to educate 

 the cracker, the poor white who gives him his 

 strength. It would ill beseem any dweller in cities 

 of the North, especially any dweller in the city of 

 Tammany, to reproach the South with having 

 failed to educate anybody. But Mr. Watson is 

 certainly an awkward man for a community to 

 develop. He is infinitely more in earnest than is 

 Mr. Bryan. Mr. Watson's followers belong to that 

 school of Southern Populists who honestly believe 

 that the respectable ancj commonplace people who 

 own banks, railroads, dry-goods stores, factories, 

 and the like, are persons with many of the mental 

 and social attributes that unpleasantly distinguished 

 Heliogabalus, Nero, Caligula, and other worthies 

 of later Rome. Not only do they believe this, but 

 they say it with appalling frankness. They are very 

 sincere as a rule, or at least the rank and file are. 

 They are also very suspicious. They distrust any- 

 thing they can not understand; and as they under- 

 stand but little this opens a very wide field for dis- 

 trust. They are apt to be emotionally religious. 

 If not, they are then at least atheists of an archaic 



