180 THE AGRARIAN CRUSADE 



Taller and broader than most men and of more 

 commanding presence, Bryan was a striking figure 

 in the convention hall. He wore the inevitable 

 black suit of the professional man of the nineties, 

 but his dress did not seem conventional: his black 

 tie sat at too careless an angle; his black hair was a 

 little too long. These eccentricities the cartoonists 

 seized on and exaggerated so that most people who 

 have not seen the man picture Bryan, not as a de- 

 termined looking man with a piercing eye and tight- 

 set mouth, but as a grotesque frock-coated figure 

 with the sombrero of a cow-puncher and the hair 

 of a poet . If the delegates at the convention noticed 

 any of these peculiarities as Bryan arose to speak, 

 they soon forgot them. His undoubted power 

 to carry an audience with him was never better 

 demonstrated than on that sweltering July day in 

 Chicago when he stilled the tumult of a seething 

 mass of 15,000 people with his announcement that 

 he came to speak "in defense of a cause as holy as 

 the cause of liberty the cause of humanity, " and 

 when he stirred the same audience to frenzy with 

 his closing defiance of the opponents of free silver: 



If they say bimetallism is good, but that we cannot have 

 it until other nations help us, we reply that, instead of 

 having a gold standard because England has, we will 



