THE STORY OF THE NONPARTISAN LEAGUE 



ing the typical Populist as a wild-eyed, long- 

 bearded, and unkempt maniac formed in the 

 public mind a distinct, indelible picture 

 answerable to this weird conception. There 

 was nothing in the Populist platform pro- 

 gram that to-day any reasoning man would 

 regard as extravagant or more than the 

 moderate expression of a sane conviction; 

 but the movement was largely laughed 

 out of court. The East, having before i'; 

 always the cartoons and the merry quips of 

 the paragrapher, would have none of it and 

 the reflex of all the ridicule worked in time 

 its full effect even in the West. We might 

 well pause to remark this, for the enemies of 

 the movement that thus compassed its down- 

 fall were the Interests that it threatened, and 

 the way it threatened them was that it prom- 

 ised to unseat them from the enjoyment of 

 illegitimate privilege. Hence the cartoons; 

 hence the funny paragraphs; hence the pur- 

 chased ridicule. There was nothing really 

 funny about a man that sweated from sunrise 

 to sunset at the hardest of all labor and saw 

 the fruits of his work snatched from his grasp 

 by those that worked not nor contributed to 

 mankind anything more than their gracious 

 presence, but the genius of hired humor could 

 clothe even this pathos in a comic garb. 



After the collapse of the Populist move- 

 ment in North Dakota the old political 



