it was a Convention dominated overwhelmingly by an idea and not a man.

And therein lies its menace-in its emphasis. From the Democratic Administration, as well as from the Democratic Convention, we have heard much about peace--not yet very much about duty. Peace or duty? Is not the issue now plain before the American people? The determined and efficient moral enthusiasm of '76 and '61 must be invoked against the deep but sentimental and dangerous spirit of peace at almost any cost. And it is only by invoking once more this profound and patriotic sense of National duty— to our own citizens everywhere, to our weaker neighbors, to the world-that the Republicans will have either an issue or the victory.

You

It was not all tenseness at the Democratic gathering. There was a lighter side. should have heard the donkey in the alley bray loudly through the open window again and again in the very midst of the Glynn peroration. Whether it was the woman suffrage donkey that had appeared in the preliminary parade or whether it was a genuinely Democratic donkey illustrating the inherent fallacy in the argument of the speaker, I really could not say! There was also another awful moment. Out of deference to the solidly Democratic South, the tune of Marching Through Georgia" is not yet regarded as courteous or tactful in a Democratic National Convention. When the band started suddenly to play it at one of the high points of fervor, the temperature fell below zero in a quarter of a second. It froze the band, who stopped in the middle of a bar and left the tune in midair. The delegates were loyal party devotees. There was nothing else there. "I never scratched the Democratic ticket in my life, and I never will. I want to go to heaven," I heard one delegate say to another, and he probably voiced the universal habit, if not the universal yearning, of the Convention.

I have spoken of the great high point of the Convention. At the end there was one lesser but extremely significant climax. It came during the reading of the platform. Mirabile dictu. Senator Hollis, of New Hampshire, read the second part upon social justice. And the Convention rose to that with eagerness and emotion. A living wage --applause and cheers. An eight-hour day and one day's rest in seven-" Read it again!"--and Hollis had to read it again. Easing up on the labor of women and

of diplomatic victories—some emotion. The heavy hand of the National Government to be laid against child labor-a tumult of cheers. And they came from the South as genuinely as from the North. Finally, the woman suffrage resolution and the confirmation of all the planks, and then adjournment. And out of the Coliseum they poured for the last time, with the band playing and the Convention singing "Onward, Christian Soldiers." It was a combination of spontaneity and strategy, but taken in connection with the legislative achievements of the last four years in Washington and the several States it invites a final reflection.

There is one dynamic American personality whose influence-directly or indirectly-permeated all three conventions this year, as in 1912. In 1912 the battle of Roosevelt at Chicago opened the way for the Bryan attack at Baltimore, and made Wilson first the nominee of necessity and then the President at Washington. In 1916 the deep-seated hostility of the Republican delegates toward Roosevelt could find no channel of expression which would at once fulfill the demands of resentment and patriotism, except in the adoption of the Roosevelt ideas and the nomination of the man who, among all the party Republicans, can best organize and lead to victory what was essential in those ideas. And back in the mind of the Democratic delegates at St. Louis, as they whole-heartedly flung themselves out into the fight for social justice, was the very practical conviction that the road to success at the polls lies in the appeal to the great independent Progressive four millions who in 1912 threw off the weight of mere political tradition and subterranean political tyranny and have this year forced the unwilling board of control of both parties into the normal course of National liberalism. The longevident break-up of the Progressive political machinery is no injury to the Nation or to the cause of political freedom. For purposes of practical administration and resolute political advance this is a two-party country, and third-party movements are justified only when nothing else will avail to open the eyes of unwise party leaders. Unwilling eyes have been forced open. That is the story of the great National conventions so recently adjourned. It is Bourbonism which has lost the fight in America.

St. Louis, June 17, 1916.