Democratic Convention was bright as the morning and full of vitality from the start. There was no doubt about the genuine Americanism of its spirit. There was no South and no North and no East and no West about it. It was voiced at once in the crashing notes of the first selection by the band and of the song that rang through the steel rafters of the vast structure-" America is ready, that's all." And the spirit of it never left the Convention.

A man of another party, I nevertheless value highly the reflections and the experience of these days at St. Louis. I shall go on in the proper place and in my own way as a citizen to criticise the methods and the fitness or lack of fitness to rule, to guide, and to inspire possessed and exercised by the Democratic party; but I shall never doubt that Democratic patriotism, South and North, is as genuine as mine. I have said before in The Outlook, and I repeat it now, that one great triumph of the Wilson Administration is its breaking up in the South of the deeps of National feeling and National conviction. The South still has anagonistic prejudices and doctrines to overcome, but, to an extent not equaled in that section since the Civil War and for many years before, the South is for America. And in the Convention at St. Louis the Democrat from Kentucky or from Alabama was as devoted in his Americanism, as he understood it, as the Democrat from Massachusetts or New York.

A word about the personnel of the delegates. That was one of the surprises of the Convention.

Over at Baltimore four years ago there was a mixture of men who were there, like some of the big financiers in the New York delegation, to watch and work hopefully for a candidate and a platform best suited to the needs of their own particular interests; together with a crude and coarse element of political henchmen, intermingled with plain, contented patriotic citizens as well as other groups of the discontented and the unprosperous. At St. Louis this year the whole Convention was of an excellent and uniform

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week, but they would have been jostled unpleasantly in the Jefferson at St. Louis. There were prosperous office-holders in this Democratic gathering. but they were not in the majority, by any means. Places had been made for hundreds of respectable and able Democratic citizens from all over the Nation. And, for the most part, they were all there for the Democratic party and for the country, and not for any particular interest and not for any particular section.

The Tammany delegation from New York is worthy of a friendly and a kindly word. The sort of delegates who have often discredited it in the past, the coarse rough-neck and the clever corporation representative, were well weeded out and were conspicuous by their absence. The Tammany men were good-looking, straightforward Democrats and American citizens, and they behaved like men who at bottom loved their country. Whatever their irritation or resentment may have been when they arrived at St. Louis because of what they regarded as the President's unkind treatment of them in the matter of patronage, they forgot it all in the enthusiasm of their Democracy and their Americanism. And therein is disclosed the human trait of Tammany. I saw it first in the State Senate at Albany. The milk of human kindness flows a good deal nearer the surface in the average Tammany man than in any temperamental, college-bred Bourbon that you ever looked at. Tammany behaved ill at Baltimore. Tammany behaved well at St. Louis. If I am not mistaken, the spirit of the times is at work in that organization. Tammany has learned. The Bourbon never learns and never forgets. The hatreds of a Bourbon become his obsessions. It was worth while to go to St. Louis to see Charles F. Murphy and the men who were with him rise to the spirit of party service and patriotic inspiration and the leadership of the human idea which was evident in that Convention.

And this brings me to the heart of the whole proceeding. It was the speech of ex-Governor Glynn, the temporary chairman. Senator Ollie James followed it, as permanent chairman, with a masterly address, but this only accentuated what Mr. Glynn said. There is no doubt about what is going to be the issue of the campaign in the mind of anybody who heard that speech or witnessed the response to it. It fearlessly recited the record of the Wilson Administration. It was strong for a sound military preparation. Like Gov

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ernor Bradford, of Massachusetts, if anybody sends us the skin of a rattlesnake, we are to be ready to send it back stuffed with powder and bullets. But these were not the parts which enthralled and captured the great throng. Mr. Glynn had been reciting how the Wilson policy of negotiation had availed in international relations, and how, as he alleged, it was in line with the spirit and the acts of our great Presidents from Washington down to Lincoln. As he took up illustration after illustration, the throng became tense and eager and exultant. Each time that the orator would finish the statement of the facts in a particular case, perhaps in Washington's time or Lincoln's time, up from the throats of the more overwrought of his ten thousand hearers would come the shout, "What did he do? What did he do?" He didn't go to war," answered Mr. Glynn at each interruption; "he settled it by negotiation, just as the President of the United States has done and is trying to do to-day." And then came the glad climax of exaltation. "This policy," Mr. Glynn continued, "may not satisfy those who revel in destruction and find pleasure in despair. It may not satisfy the fire-eater or the swashbuckler. But it does satisfy those who worship at the altar of the God of Peace. It does satisfy the mothers of the land, at whose hearth and fireside no jingoistic warfare has placed the empty chair. It does satisfy the daughters of the land, from whom brag and bluster have sent no loving brother to the dissolution of the grave. It does satisfy the fathers of the land and the sons of the land, who will fight for the flag and die for the flag when reason primes the rifle, when honor draws the sword, when justice breathes a blessing on the standards they uphold."

For many minutes he could not go on. It was the note from the American fireside, the issue of home and love and happiness and yearning humanity against the measureless brutality and carnage of the present world. All at once, in the midst of the emotional upheaval, there came from that vast throng a weird cry up from the very depths of the human soul: "Say it again, say it again!" And in response the orator repeated the passage. Once more the long emotional upheaval, and once more the cry: "Say it again, say it again !" And again the orator repeated the words.

It was one of the most notable events that ever happened in a political convention in

the United States-not because of the emotion, not because of the eloquence, but because the response seemed to be from out of the very depths of the aspiration of human souls. And when the unwieldy frame, but powerful personality, of Senator Ollie James, of Kentucky, held sway over them, the great response was not to the eloquence but to the single dominant idea which the throng itself selected from among the many which James and Glynn discussed before them. When James, of Kentucky, arose to speak on the day after Glynn, the storm of exaltation had altogether passed, and the orator was greeted gayly to the strain of "The Sun Shines Bright in My Old Kentucky Home." The prayer of the archbishop had just ceased as he invoked the Divine Father to drive from our hearts the blood-lust and barbarism of the jungle. But there was as yet no sign that the demonstration of the day before would once more recur. James went on in his own ponderous and powerful way to frame the "ishuh." The Administration, said he, has proclaimed two amendments, one taxing the wealth of the country and making it bear its just share of the burden, the other liberating the United States Senate from the control of vested interests. It has, said he, driven the lobby out of the Capitol at Washington, and turned the American people in. It has overturned the iniquitous Payne-Aldrich Bill, against which, he said, the Bull Moose cast four million votes, when the stand-patters could only muster something over three millions in the entire Nation. The dinner-pail is full and full to overflowing. ""At a boy!" shouted a fervent Democratic disciple. And the Federal Reserve Act-the great Republican leaders in Congress, said James, declared that it was an invitation to the mightiest panic that ever swept across a great Republic. What is the fact? said the orator. In 1907 four men on Manhattan Island, under the Republican system, precipitated a panic. Under the Democratic system a world war cannot precipitate a panic. And, finally, he came to Wilson. "He acts, he doesn't rant; he builds, he doesn't bluster." Once he was a professor in a college at Princeton. Now he is a world teacher. His class is made up of kings, kaisers, princes, and potentates. And then the Wilson method of negotiation and patience in the midst of the German crisis. "Without orphaning a single American child, without widowing a single American mother, without firing a single gun

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or shedding a drop of blood, Woodrow Wilson wrung from the most militant spirit that ever brooded over a battlefield a recognition of American rights and a concession to American demands." And once more the tremendous response. Once more the cry of the previous day Say it again, say it again!" And James said it again. And while everybody was on his feet in the midst of the great upheaval, I saw James smile sweetly and wave his hand at Bryan on the press platform.

It began to dawn on the vast throng that, in spite of the shortcomings and blunderings. which, for the time being, have sterilized his influence in Democratic councils, it was really the spirit of Bryan which had laid the emphasis and interpreted the issue for the Democratic party. Bryan's qualities are those of the seer and evangelist and not of the statesman. For the time being at least, he has lost all control over National Democratic politics. And he appears to have lost permanent standing with the Democratic party of his own State. The causes for this in Nebraska are plain. The Populist party, organized in 1890, was the real Bryan party in Nebraska. The original Democratic party in Nebraska was a liquor and corporation party. Early in his career Bryan carried the Populist party of his State over into the Democratic camp. Thus for a time he made a majority. Oldline Democrats got into office, and in the presence of the spoils the liquor and conservative Democrats burned incense to Bryan. But in 1908 Bryan started out to fight the "liquor power," as he had previously fought the money power." He bolted the Democratic State ticket in 1910 when Mayor Dahlman, of Omaha, an out-and-out liquor candidate, was named for Governor. He openly advocated prohibition and woman suffrage. The Democratic coalition between liquor and Populism broke into pieces, and Bryan lost control, probably permanently, of his State. The task of making a "dry," woman suffrage party out of the Democracy of Nebraska within his lifetime is probably too great. And so he has lost home rootage in his political organization.

Of course, also, his whole party has come to look upon the resignation from Wilson's Cabinet at a critical time as unnecessary and short-sighted, even from his own standpoint of pushing the issue of peace. When he arrived in St. Louis a day or two before the Convention began, very little open homage was paid to him, although the footway to his

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suite in the Jefferson was trodden secretly and tenderly by many a devoted adherent of other years.

The speeches of Glynn and James and the sounding of the keynote of peace brought Bryan back into the hearts of the Convention. No sooner had James finished than the call for Bryan rang across the convention hall from hundreds of throats and would not be stayed until the chairman announced that Mr. Bryan had gone out to speak at a noon meeting of the City Club of St. Louis, and that there would be full opportunity to hear him before the day was done. The whole Convention seemed glad, although there were doubters who privately expressed the view that the re-entrance of Bryan into the discussions of Democracy would do nothing but harm in those States where, above all, Democracy needs help. But this made no difference to the Convention, which in the keynote issue was following the promptings of its heart and not of its head.

At the night session Bryan came back. His speech was imbued with religion, with the spirit and purpose and a little of the phraseology of his address on "The Prince of Peace." And the Convention again rose to it with the echo of the race-old and age-long cry for rest and peace and happiness and home and love. There was this difference in the case of Bryan. With Glynn and James the great throng spontaneously selected the idea and rose in exaltation to it. When Bryan proclaimed the idea, the Convention rang with shouts of his name " Bryan! Bryan! Bryan!" Here is the man, said they, who incarnates the issue.

This was the real climax of the Convention. Senator Jim Ham Lewis, of Illinois, and Senator Reed, of Missouri, afterward added strength, but not quality, to the key that had been sounded by the trio of orators, Glynn, James, and Bryan. Nothing else counted for much until near the end, and I will describe that in a moment. The speech of Wescott, of New Jersey, nominating Wilson, fell dead upon the field. It was in a legal and academic form, not in the style of the home folks. The Convention was restless. Then they broke out into shouts"Cut it down," "Name him," and when Wescott at last referred to Wilson as the peacemaker of the world-" That is a good place to tell who you are for," rang through the humid air. They had nothing against Wilson. They were for him strongly. But