The Montgomery advertiser., 1904-07-07

not by the Republican party, but by
 the logged persistency and indomftable will of Grover Cleveland, aided. 1t fi | true. by Republican legislators, who
 thought they saw in 1t the final disrup- ton of the Democratic party. That
 was in the main their motive. Now they would "steal his thunder and this Republican platform boasts that 1t was the Republican party which ses-
 abolished the gold basis. Moreover
 they would now eat their words and
 their votes of 1893 and tell us that the
 panic was not brought about, as they then said, by Tack of confidence in our
 money and too much silver" but, for sooth. by tariff act which was not
 passed until more than a year after. to wit 1894. when the panic that is the acute and fright stage of depression
 was virtually over. Do not misunder- stand me. A panic of course is not succeeded all at once by the golden hues of prosperity. Industrial depres- sion must follow 1t for a while. as de- pression must precede It.. So depres- sion continued unti1 as --I have said, when the boil bursts and the poison Is eliminated from the body commercial the flesh begins to heal. It cannot be- gin one minute earlier. The process of recovery was aided by many. for us, Ifortuitous circumstances. The first of these was famine in India--no Indian wheat to compete In the European markets with ours. Simultaneously with an immense American crop of wheat and small crops elsewhere, wheat rose from about 4S to about 70 cents in a few weeks during the Bryan-McKin ley campaign while Cleveland was still President. There is not a man within the sound of my voice that does not remember that. With 70 cent wheat farmers could pay the retailers the debts due them and the retailers could buy more goods; the retailers. with empty shelves or shelves becoming empty by sales. could order from the 1obbers. the tobbers, who had been over stocked, were enabled then to or der from the factories. When the fac tories got orders then they had Q req son for making goods and they pro- ceeded to make them. and then the wheels of industry went round. The farmer in the wheat country with 70 cent wheat could pay the baker. the butcher and the candlestick maker" and then they could pay others and they In turn could buy more goods.
 This endless chain of human relation ship in the world of commerce is no mysterious thing to anybody except to plat1Orm- making politician. But wheat going up had another effect. When wheat went up during the cam paign. while silver bullion went down there was thereby furnished a seeming object lesson of the inaccuracy of the contention of MT. Bryan and his fol- lowers, of whom I was one, that there was necessarily q connection in the price of the two. Western and border State farmers in the wheat belt. who had originally been Republican anyhow and who had gone of, from the Repub
 lican party because of their belief in
 this very theory. began to leave the Bryan column and join the Mckinley column, first by the dozen, then by the score, then by hundreds and then in shoals. Thus it came about that MT.
 Mckinley was elected, because wheat went up and because the going up of wheat and the consequent increased de-