The Montgomery advertiser., 1903-05-31

taxes 10 snow that under Robespierre
 1t was no very great shakes of a Terro,
 after all. The book Is well worth tho l reading and will be we'll thunbed age,
 after it's author is gathered to his fath CTS.
 France is the greatest historical sub 5ect. history of France from the be.
 ginning of The Hundred Years War
 to the battle of Waterloo would be the 1 story of centuries of modern civiliza ton
 and written by one who combined the lit.
 erary excellencies of Swift. Hume Rob.
 the greatest literary blessing after the
 English Bible and Shakespeare.
 william V. Allen was as much the first
 fopuIist or the Senate as Watson was oi the House. No Senator was fonder oi soionizing, none more indefa tisable. Many senators have specialties. For example
 Morgan had the Isthman Canal. Lodge
 nad foreign affairs. Hale was the naval appropriations. Aldrich has the tarifY
 But no pent-up Utica contracted the DOW. CTS of the Honorable Allen. The whole boundless and exhaustive gamut of leg
 lslation, constitutional and unconstitu-
 tional, was his.
 Turn him to any cause of policy. The Gordian knot he will unloose
 Familiar as his garter.
 His genius for legislation was simply
 universal. his judgment infallible. his self confidence sublime There was no more
 faeile orator in the Senate. not even chandler; no more intrepid statesman in the country. not even Tillman, than Will liam V. Allen. All that the Hon. Allen l had to do to raise the wind was to glide Into section of his fifteen-hour speech. It was an argument that composed all | Aa l could repeat that inexhaustible produc- tfon backward or forward with equal To- opacity and equal f1uency. He loved to | instruct the President of the United States touching hi5 powers and duties and shortcomings. Frequently he let the Sen ate know that it was prone to do things 1t ought not to do and leave undone things 1t ought to do.
 | When Allen was on his legs and in eruption. and that was about half the time the Senate was sitting, and got into a groove of his fifteen-hour speech, some | Senators were amused and others en-
 ragged. It was a treat to hear him ex- claim, Why. MT. President, if this pol icy is to continue. then there is an end l of free institutions in this fair land of
 ours" It was problem was the ex- pression of the stern countenance of old Father Gear when Allen came over that
 You read thereon rage, disdain, contempt scorn One day, Senator Galiinger cited
 a report of the Interstate Commerce Com.
 mission, containing statement of fact that was not only at variance, but was inconsistent and irreconciiable with an assumption put forth with imperious con- fidence and delightful dogmatism by AL len. All the consideration Allen gave it was to insinuate that the Commission 1 lied.
 Allen was the strongest man of the 1 Western Populists. But for him fusion would have been a failure in 1896. He did not exactly keep the peace between Tom Watson and Bryan, but he prevented open war on fusion by the Georgian. He was
 the best organizer in the Bryan ranks,
 and to him is due the fact that Bryan
 was not beaten a great deal worse than he was.
 There ,is another great Populist leader. | Gen. James A. Weaver. He is in Bryan S class. having been twice defeated for President of the United States. General
 Weaver was Republican and soldier
 of the war of lsei-1s65. He was a ready
 and pleasing public speaker and got into C -ngress. The panic of 1873 came and Viewers plan was to meet it with an un- limited issue of irredeemable greenbacks. He attracted a great deal of attention and in 1880 he was the candidate of his party | for President
 But Weaver had some Republicanism left in his political composition. He knew that he could not be elected, and he pre- ferred Garfield to Hancock. He was on | the stump during the campaign, but he saw fit to corfine his tour to those com munities where his party had been re- cruited mostly from Democratic ranks. and 1t was complained that he made no effort to prevent the antecedents to the Republican Party. This aspect of affair ,
 was revealed in the election returns, and the Democrats were violently angry. When Congress convened in December, | 1SS0 there was a personal encounter be- | tween General Weaver and Mir. Sparks of Illinois. which grew out of the charge that Weaver had assisted the Republican ticket during the campaign. There was a Greenbacker from Texas in that Con gress=-Long Jones. When the excitement was greatest on the floor, and Speaker Randall and John G. Thompson were do | ing all they could to keep the peace Jones marched down the main aisle and announced that if any fighting was to be done he could be depended on to do his I share.
 But if Weaver aided the Republicans in 1SSO, his candidature was of great ben eft to the Democrats in 1893. Had the election been very close. the twenty-three | votes he got in the college might have thrown upon the House She duty of mak- | ing a selection, and even in that event the Democrats would have prevailed. No doubt Weaver was a Democratic annex | in 1892.
 In a speech delivered by Mir. Bryan at Des Moines some days ago he remarked: Reorganization means retreat and re- treat means demoralization and disaster. From the low standpoint of expedience. retreat could not be justified. The party boiled nearly 100000 more votes in sup port of the Chicago and Kansas City plat forms than were boiled by Mfr. Cleveland even before his political crimes were ex- posed.''
 There is nothing new in that statement and nothing true in the sense that he de- | signed to convey. As a mere matter of | arithmetic, Bryan did get 6.5O2. 925 votes in 1896. as against 5556.91S votes cast for Cleveland in 1892. but Bryan got the combined regular" Democratic and Pop ulist vote. whereas. in 1892. Weaver. the Populist. received 1,041, OPS votes. making more votes than Bryan got. It is mis- leading and untrue to say that Bryan ever polled within 100000 of the number of Democratic votes boiled by Mir. Cleve- land.
 Mir. Bryan has simplifed things There he stands, the Bryan of 1S96-the Bourbon who does not forget and who cannot learn. The Democratic Party must make