is in Wyoming, not far from the
Montana line, you will hear the people proclaim the greatness of the
town in which they live. You expect this sort of thing in the Far West,
and you are prepared for it, but you will be surprised at the nature of
the Philipsburg boast. Its proud inhabitants will not tell you that it
is bound to be the largest city between the Missouri and the coast, they
will not assert that since the horizon touches the earth at an equal
distance on all sides of the town, it is, therefore, the natural centre
of the world; but they will tell you stories of the Great Philipsburg
Conference, and some of them will not be far from the truth.

Philipsburg is but a hamlet, fed by an irrigation ditch that leads the
life-giving waters down from a distant mountain, and it has neither the
beauty of nature nor that given by the hand of man, but the people will
point importantly to the square wooden hotel of only two stories, and
tell you that there occurred the great crisis in the most famous and
picturesque Presidential campaign ever waged in the United States; they
will even lead you to the very room in which the big talk occurred, and
say, in lowered voices, that the furniture is exactly the same, and
arranged just as it was on that momentous night when the history of the
world might have been changed. In this room the people of Philipsburg
have a reverential air, and there is cause for it.

The affair did not begin at Philipsburg--it merely had its climax
there--but far away on the dusty plains of eastern Washington, where the
wheat grows so tall, and it bubbled and seethed as the candidate and his
party travelled eastward, stopping and speaking many times by the way.
It was all about the tariff, a dry subject in itself, but, as tall oaks
from little acorns grow, so a dry subject often can make interesting
people do interesting things.

At the convention that nominated Mr. Grayson for the Presidency the
subject of the tariff had been left somewhat vague in the platform, not
from deliberate purpose, but merely through the drift of events; the
question had not interested the people greatly in some time; other
things connected with both the foreign and internal policy of the
government, particularly the continued occupation of the Philippines and
a projected new banking system, were more to the fore; but as the
campaign proceeded certain events caused the tariff also to be brought
into issue and to receive a larg