o
thousand years) writes and unwrites Acts of Parliament, removes
mountains, models the World like soft clay? Also how the beginning of
all Thought worth the name is Love."

The truth which he uttered is still truth, and no matter who uttered
it, the thought is the thought of Him who spake as never man spake;
who was described in prophecy as the Prince of Peace; whose coming was
greeted with the song of "Peace on earth; good-will to men," and whose
teachings, when applied, will usher in the enduring peace of a
universal brotherhood.

W.J. BRYAN.

Bryan, Idealist and Average Man

By Charles Willis Thompson

The subjoined estimate of William J. Bryan's character and
public career, which appeared in THE NEW YORK TIMES of June
9, 1915, is by the hand of one of its staff writers who has
specialized in American national politics.

The plain man of the prairie became Secretary of State when William J.
Bryan did; the prairie then entered diplomacy, international
controversy. The secret of all that has puzzled the land in his
behavior lies in that fact. His hold on the West lies in the fact that
he is in himself the average man of that country, with that man's
ideals, aspirations, defects, and drawbacks. There seems nothing
strange or funny in a Secretary of State who goes to New York and
signs temperance pledges, or holds Billy Sunday's platform in
Philadelphia, when you get a few miles away from the cities; and if it
seems a little queer to New York to find the Secretary of State
undertaking to demolish the Darwinian theory, there are plenty of
regions where the Darwinian theory is regarded as a device of the
devil to upset the Mosaic cosmogony. Chesterton says that Dickens
never wrote down to the mob, because he was himself the mob; and Bryan
never talked down to the men of the prairie for the same reason.

He is not a man of culture, nor of reading. He has been around the
world, but when he came back the books and articles he wrote were such
as might have been published as guide books or in encyclopedias; he
could have written them without leaving home. Travel had no
broadening or polishing effect upon his mind.

The vast influence he still has is due to the fact that the common
man, with all his mistakes and gaucheries, speaks in him, and that
when the common man hears his own thoughts spoken in Bryan's voice he
knows that the accent is sincere. Bryan may have taken up this or that
pa