as finally
adopted. After castigating the Democrats for producing the panic and
renewing the pledge for protection, the party denounced the debasement
of currency or credit. It opposed the free coinage of silver, asserted
that all money must be kept at a "parity with gold," and pledged itself
to work for an international agreement for bimetallism.

The fight for free silver was carried by the silver state delegations to
the floor of the convention, where it was defeated by a vote of 818-1/2
to 105-1/2. At this point, led by Senators from Colorado and Utah,
thirty-four members withdrew from the convention in protest. Even the
Prohibition party had already been broken by the new issue. The humorous
weekly, _Life_, spoke seriously when it declared that "The two great
parties in the country at this writing are the Gold party and the Silver
party. The old parties are in temporary eclipse." Few were satisfied
with the Republican result, for while the platform pointed one way and
the candidate's career pointed the other on free silver, the real
interest of the party, protection, aroused no enthusiasm.

No Democrat was the predetermined candidate of his party when it met at
Chicago in July, 1896. Cleveland, least of all, was not given even the
scanty notice of a commendatory plank. He stood alone as no other
President had done, at issue with the Republicans on their major policy,
yet without followers in his own organization. Slow, patient,
courageous, stubborn, he had twice held his party to its promise, and he
had refused to be carried away by the transitory demand of the West for
dangerous finance. He had guided the National Administration through
eight years of expansion and reorganization, and had been a devoted
servant of civil service reform. In May, 1896, he had aggravated his
offenses in the eyes of the politicians by issuing new rules that
extended the classified service to include some 31,000 new employees,
making a total of 86,000 out of 178,000 federal employees. He passed out
of party politics at least two years before his term expired, and in
1897 he took up his final abode in Princeton. From Princeton he wrote
and spoke for eleven years, and before he died in 1908 the animosities
of 1896 were forgotten, and he looked large in the American mind as a
statesman whose independence and sincerity were beyond reproach.

Forces beyond the control of politicians carried the Democrats toward an
alliance with Populism an