es, and even a revolt on behalf of local liberties,
and should distrust the huge machine of centralised power called the
Union. In short, something very near the truth was said by a suicidally
silly Republican orator, who was running Blaine for the Presidency, when
he denounced the Democratic party as supported by 'Rome, rum, and
rebellion.' They seem to me to be three excellent things in their place;
and that is why I suspect that I should have belonged to the Democratic
party, if I had been born in America when there was a Democratic party.
But I fancy that by this time even this general distinction has become
very dim. If I had been an American twenty years ago, in the time of the
great Free Silver campaign, I should certainly never have hesitated for
an instant about my sympathies or my side. My feelings would have been
exactly those that are nobly expressed by Mr. Vachell Lindsay, in a poem
bearing the characteristic title of 'Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan.' And,
by the way, nobody can begin to sympathise with America whose soul does
not to some extent begin to swing and dance to the drums and gongs of
Mr. Vachell Lindsay's great orchestra; which has the note of his whole
nation in this: that a refined person can revile it a hundred times over
as violent and brazen and barbarous and absurd, but not as insincere;
there is something in it, and that something is the soul of many million
men. But the poet himself, in the political poem referred to, speaks of
Bryan's fall over Free Silver as 'defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my
dream'; and it is only too probable that the cause has fallen as well as
the candidate. The William Jennings Bryan of later years is not the man
whom I should have seen in my youth, with the visionary eyes of Mr.
Vachell Lindsay. He has become a commonplace Pacifist, which is in its
nature the very opposite of a revolutionist; for if men will fight
rather than sacrifice humanity on a golden cross, it cannot be wrong for
them to resist its being sacrificed to an iron cross. I came into very
indirect contact with Mr. Bryan when I was in America, in a fashion that
made me realise how hard it has become to recover the illusions of a
Bryanite. I believe that my lecture agent was anxious to arrange a
debate, and I threw out a sort of loose challenge to the effect that
woman's suffrage had weakened the position of woman; and while I was
away in the wilds of Oklahoma my lecture agent (a man of blood-curdling
c