nor of Illinois, John P. Altgeld, did not suppress. He held the
militia in readiness, but had not intervened when Cleveland sent federal
troops to Chicago to remove obstructions to the carriage of the mails.

This federal intervention offended those who still adhered to the
doctrine of state rights, and angered the strikers and organized labor
as a whole. They believed the President was a tool of the railroads, and
believed the same of the courts when a federal judge issued an
injunction to Debs forbidding him to interfere in the strike. In the end
the strikers lost, leaving Cleveland's conduct in maintaining the peace
in sharp contrast with that of the Populist Governor of Colorado, who
intervened in a great miners' strike at Cripple Creek to arrest, not the
strikers who had seized control of the mines, but the sheriff and his
posse who wished to dislodge them. "It is better, infinitely better,"
Governor Waite had declared, "that the blood should flow to the horses'
bridles than that our national liberties should be destroyed." Congress
made Labor Day a legal holiday in 1894, but failed to placate the
unions.

By the summer of 1894 Cleveland's party was split beyond repair, and his
friends were mostly among the Republicans. Consistent in his belief in
sound money, tariff revision, and law and order, he had been forced by
events to alienate the West, the East, and organized labor. His course
had aided the Populist party by widening the belief that the Democrats
had no interest in their welfare. The panic had aided it yet more, by
multiplying the discontented who might be converted to the new faith.
Every month the Populist party increased in strength, the East watching
it with mingled fear and contempt and ignorance. The comic papers
pictured as the typical Populist the raw-boned, booted, unkempt farmer,
in shirt-sleeves and with flowing beard. It could not see the foundation
of real reforms on which the movement stood. A satirist pictured the
Populist as "The Kansas Bandit," declaiming

"The People's Party, to
Which me native instinct draws me because it
Loves the rule of mediocrity, is now on top. I
Love the rule of Ignorance."

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

F.J. Turner discussed "The Problems of the West," in the _Atlantic
Monthly_ for September, 1896, and C. Becker has interpreted a similar
point of view under the title "Kansas" in the _Turner Essays_ (1910).
Wildman and McVey are valuabl