le-dee." The last Democratic President was a product of the long
successes of the Republican party and its mistakes, chief among which
was the covert act demonetizing silver in 1873. It brought its train
of wrong and disaster to our nation; while the people were unconscious
of the cause, yet they could feel the pangs, and results ripened in
1884 in the election of the Buffalo mayor. As President and as
ex-President he is the natural party leader, but he has endorsed the
monstrous act of 1873 in regard to silver, the very mistake that
chiefly made him President, and now should that bar forever the door
of the White House to his re-entry therein, the result would not be
one of the seven wonders of the world.

These happenings, so fresh and patent, remind one of the sworn
testimony of an eminent general of the late war before the Senatorial
Committee in describing the battle of Gettysburg: "After the lines are
formed and fighting commences all is confusion and hap-hazard."
Apparently there is no science in statesmanship, and our politics are
but a ruthless trampling on the simple maxims of political economy.
These were the forces that secretly working through the patient years
of misrule and folly caused to bloom and fruit in a night, this
stalwart tribe of rural statesmen who so remorselessly struck down the
Republican party in its State of largest majority, and so disfigured
the fortunes of the master polytechnic orator. A hayseed sprouted and
grown in a night like unto Jack's beanstalk, and without leaders--all
concert action mere incidents, the people marched to the polls in
Kansas and amazed the world and themselves. The leaderless mobs met
other leaderless mobs--that proved to be mere skeletons of
organizations led and composed chiefly of wrangling, quarrelling,
purposeless, and nearly idealess politicians. The leaderless mob was
in profound earnest while the "statesmen" as usual were merely
masquerading, with no other weapons of defence against attacks save
that of Samson's when he fought the Philistines--all jaw.

Politicians discuss with amazing brilliancy their beautiful issue of a
little higher tariffs or a little lower tariffs, while the people
bluntly talk of protection to the full, or absolute free trade.
Politicians really enjoy having made gold the only money, and then
talk learnedly about the government buying so much metal monthly and
coining it, so that silver will be both money and not money, while the