ery form, ranging from mere incoherent personal abuse to threats of
assassination. Hundreds of them were entirely insane: many hundred more
the work, on the face of them, of anarchists pure and simple. A large
proportion of them were written in red ink, and in many--very
many--cases the passions of the writers had got so far beyond their
control that you could see where they had broken their pens in the
futile effort to make written words curse harder than they would. The
receptacle in which they were placed was officially known in the office
as the Chamber of Horrors, but it was, I think, universally spoken of
among the staff as the "Hell-box." Before the end of the campaign,
capacious though it was, it was crowded to overflowing, and hardly a
document that was not as venomous as human wrath could make it.
Incidentally I wish to say that never was a campaign--at least as far as
my colleagues in our particular department were concerned--more purely
in the interest of public morality, without any sort of selfish aims,
and less deserving of abuse. What the correspondence of a presidential
candidate himself must be in like circumstances, it is horrible to
think.[281:1]

The intense feverishness of the campaign is of course increased by the
vastness of the country, the tremendous distances over which the
national organisation has to endeavour to exercise control, and the
immense diversity in the conditions of the people and communities to
whom appeal has to be made. The voting takes place all over the country
on the same day; and it must be remembered that the area of the United
States (not counting Alaska or any external dependencies) is so great
that it reaches from west to east about as far as from London to
Teheran, and north and south from London to below the southern boundary
of Morocco. The difficulty of organisation over such an area can,
perhaps, be imagined. In the course of the campaign there came in one
day in my mail a letter written on a torn half of a railway time-card.
It ran:

"DEAR SIR--There is sixty-five of us here working in a gravel
pit and we was going to vote solid for Bryan and Free Silver.
Some of your books [_i. e._, campaign leaflets, etc.] was
thrown to us out of a passing train. We have organised a Club
and will cast sixty-five votes for William McKinley.--Yours,
etc."

So far as those sixty-five were concerned our chief interest thereafter
lay in seeing that t