Theodore Roosevelt's History of the United States by Daniel Ruddy

Author:Daniel Ruddy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Beneath the Social Crust

The Bryanites do not depend and cannot depend only upon the cry for cheap money. Dishonest finance is only one of their rallying cries. They wish also a debased judiciary and an executive pledge not to interfere with violent mobs. What they appeal to is the spirit of social unrest, the spirit of discontent. It is not a nice thing to wish to pay one’s debts in coins worth fifty cents on the dollar, but it is a much less nice thing to wish to plunge one’s country into anarchy by providing that the law shall only protect the lawless and frown scornfully on the law-abiding.

Savages do not like an independent and upright judiciary. They want the judge to decide their way, and if he does not, they want to behead him. The Populists experience much the same emotions when they realize that the judiciary stands between them and plunder. The men who object to what they style “government by injunction” are, as regards the essential principles of government, in hearty sympathy with their remote skin-clad ancestors who lived in caves, fought one another with stone-headed axes, and ate the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros.

Bryan is a personally honest and rather attractive man, a real orator, and a born demagogue, who has every crank, fool, and putative criminal in the country behind him, and a large portion of the ignorant honest class. His utterances are as criminal as they are wildly silly. All the ugly forces that seethe beneath the social crust are behind him. The appeal for him is frankly based on class and sectional hatred. The combination of all the lunatics, all the idiots, all the knaves, all the cowards, and all the honest people who are hopelessly slow-witted is a formidable one to overcome when backed by the solid South.

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