The Mankato free press. [volume] (Mankato, Blue Earth County, Minn.) 1879-1924, 1900-11-02
Mr.. BRYANs CONFESSION OF DEFEAT.


cratic candidate for the presidency
realizes the futility of his quest, and
has practically given up the fight.
We cannot imagine that any Ameri-
can citizen having the dignity of the
presidential Office in mind, and being
himself an aspirant for its honors,
could descend to the depths of dema-
gogy reached by Mr.. Bryan in his
Wisconsin and Indiana speech making
tours during the past fortnight and
still consider himself presidential
possibility.
Mr.. Bryan knows as well as any one
else that the American people want
statesman to exercise the functions of
the executive Office, not an incendi-
airy; he knows quite as we'll as he
knows his alphabet that the kind of
fire the people wish to have emanate
from the white house is that which
inspires men to undertake and to per-
form worthy deeds, not that which
leads to pillage, rapine, and murder.
If he has studied the temper of the
people, solicitude for whose welfare
has given him so many sleepless
nights, he must know that fundamen-
tally they are lovers of truth; that
they will not tolerate reckless mis-
statement of conditions or wiTlful per-
version of facts or absolute and un-
mitigated falsehood in the man who
stands before the world as the out
ward and visible sign of their ma
tional being.
Falsehood cannot represent the truth |;
incendiarism cannot ever become the
embodiment of patriotism demagogy
can never pass for craftsmanship and
the political agitator who incites the
masses into a reckless defiance of
authority can never become the
guardian of law, order, and public
decency.
1t is only proper, therefore, in view
of Mr.. Bryan's wild appeals to class
hatred and to the evil passions of the
discontinued, in view of the essential
incendiary character of the bulk of
his recent utterances, in view of his
purposes of his political opponents,
Salem, address, which would be
amusing if it were not humilitating,
to assume that he at last realizes how
far beyond his reach is the seat of
Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln,
and to attribute his rawlings to the de-
spair which naturally follows the people
wrecking of his ambition is only
charity.
1t takes a stronger man than Mr..
Bryan to accept so deeply stirring dis
pointment as is his with dignifed
and philosophical bearing. There must
be greater depths of character than
can ever be attributed to the Populist
candidate within which to his the
bitterness and the gall of overthrown
ambition from the eyes of man.
1t was too much for the great soul
of Greeley, and even so strenuously a
fibre as that of Tilden weakened per-
ceptibly in the face of it. but no man
has ever gone down under similar
disappointment in such utter democrat
ization as has the unhappy candidate
from Nebraska.
Of course, that he should make no
obvious confession of his failure to
commend himself to the electorate is
not without compensating features to
those who have consistently and from
the first moment of his appearance as
a figure of national interest opposed
his pretensions but there is none the
less touch of pathos in the situation
which moves one rather to grief than
to unalloyed satisfaction. It is never
a pleasing spectacle to see a human
being suffer, and the vast majority of
men, even the most morbidly inclined,
shudder at the outward manifestations
of the inward madness of an indivi-
dual whose hopes have been shattered
and before whom lies nothing but
humiliation and disappointment.
There is also to be considered in the
case of Mr.. Bryan's fall the distress of
innumerable good people, who like
Mr.. Schurz and Mr.. Olney have be-
lieved that the discipline of defeat in
1896 and a growth of four years in
intellectual vigor had made the Bryan
of 1900 very different person from
the man they had branded as an anar-
chist and an advocate of national dis
honor in 1896. These persons, who
had hoped for development of
strength and real character in Mr..
Bryan, of which, indeed, in the earlier
days of the campaign he showed some
signs, must now stand appalled, at the
reckless demagogy Of his recent ut
terances, with his wicked assertions of
the real purpose of imperialism, which
they have dignified with their support,
and saturated through and through
with passionate appeals to violence and
Indictment to rebellion against the
authorities, which in other days would
have brought about his seauestration
as an enemy to the public welfare.
Saddest of all is the fact that this
man today stands before the world as
the flower of a once great party, its
standard bearer, its mouth-piece, the
idol of its hopes, the material express
sion of it's principles.
Truly it will be a glad day for this
republic when the humiliating cam
paign of 1900 has become thing of
the past, and the disgraceful scenes
and utterances of its closing days are
but memories.