him from the first will say, I think, that if the majority turns against him he will not rebel but will conform. For even Mr. Bryan's imperious will, audacious aggressiveness, and apparent unyielding radicalism are threaded on traditional Democratic conservatism and respect for the majority.

Mr. Bryan's natural followers since the election will be confined to the ultimate or logical Jeffersonian radicals. To accommodate himself to this following he should consistently, and at once, stand for postal savings banks, public ownership of telegraphs and all means of transportation, and perhaps of all deposits of coal and other staple minerals. This he will not do, because his tendency is to build for the present and not to wait for development or slow party growth. He can win nothing practical on opportunist or temporary issues, because he is too widely distrusted by conservative classes — whether on good grounds or not is not material.

A German writer tells, in a current story, of a Hebrew family that was in need of the indispensable unleavened bread for the approaching feast of Pesach. The improvident husband persisted day after day in spending his slim earnings in unnecessary notions and luxuries, always quieting his wife's remonstrances and fears about the still-wanting bread with the answer, "What must be, must be." He insisted that because he must have the bread for an all-important and sacred purpose it would be forthcoming. In his case his fatalistic faith sustained him. While he squandered the resources by which he might have secured the bread, at the very last the neighbors chipped in the money and bought it for the distressed wife. Mr. Bryan has had a fatalistic confidence that his Democratic ideals would surely be realized because to him they seemed indispensable. But here the parallel to the Hebrew story ends. The unappreciative public refused to chip in the votes which Mr. Bryan's improvidence had failed to secure by practical means; and his followers, who are wedded to him by the close ties of faith and dependence, go hungry.

From the beginning he has sought ostentatiously to win a following of "plain people." This foible I always believed would have a disastrous culmination; and it contributed very largely to the great majorities against him which distinguished the late election. At the very beginning of his career, before men of conservative, ripe judgment in his home community had acknowledged his capacity or stability, the plain people adored him and pronounced him a great man. Old party leaders of his district shrewdly, as they thought, made use of this fact

to win a Democratic member of Congress by nominating Mr. Bryan. This was before the dazzling opportunities of free silver had burst upon him as a heavenly vision. His promoters, of course, expected simply to use him. When he began to provide for reëlection, however, he at once used them, and in a characteristic way. The votes of the free-silver Populists, who were becoming numerous in the district, were needed to overcome the large Republican plurality. Mr. Bryan reasoned that the oldtimers would vote for him any way, for the sake of tariff reform, then the leading party issue, which they did under protest, while he gathered the plain Populists about his free-silver banner.

In his speeches in that campaign, he would publicly list those Democrats who were against free silver, and who also had any appearance of being financially prosperous or solvent, as "bankers" and emissaries of the "money power." This clever device was successful in a remote rural district; but when the whole country came to be his battlefield, fear of the untrustworthiness of so large a part of his forces enlisted in such a way frightened away countless numbers of those who were natural opponents of the Republican party. Those who naturally became his lieutenants, under this ultra-plain-people programme, were found wanting in capacity and influence when the greater test came. Of course, also, thousands and, perhaps, millions of the plain people whom he had rallied proved unreliable and surrendered to the "belly" argument. This original and persistent characteristic of Mr. Bryan illustrates why he has always been, in fact, the leader of the Populists, without subscribing to their specific principles.

If the rank and file of those who are naturally Democrats were permitted to drift together, they would stand for economy of public expenditure; they would revive the question of tariff reform, with, perhaps, especial relation to its effect upon trusts; they would seek to rescue the Cullom bill from the Senate committee pigeon-hole, where Republicans have kept it for several years, in spite of public sentiment, and with it endeavor to give vitality to the principle of railway control; they would revive the abandoned principle of civil-service reform; and they would treat the Philippine question in a rational manner, which may be best ascertained after the decision of the pending cases relating thereto in the Supreme Court. They would adopt the principle of an income tax. Besides undertaking to remove the main props of the trusts, discriminating tariffs, both customs and railway, they would seek to regulate these combinations of capital so as to prevent their abuses, but in a rational and progressive spirit. They would constitute, in general, an anti

monopoly party, being in opposition to Republicanism, but not a revolutionary or destructive party. As a progressive measure they should advocate a postal-telegraph system. This would be an introduction to other progressive measures, which it seems to be the destiny of the Democratic party to adopt in due season.

As for the lion that lay in the Democratic line of march in the campaigns of 1896 and 1900, it will doubtless be easy to evade him in 1904. For unless the Republicans do something very unusual or unexpected, such as adopting the measure for making silver dollars redeemable in gold, Democrats may well assume a Napoleonic attitude and say, "There shall be no money question." It is possible that the breath-taking rate at which industrial consolidation is now going on may upset ordinary calculations and seem to call for "fast" leadership; and yet it is hardly likely that political view-points will be much changed in the next three or four years.

Wholesome progressiveness involves party idealism. Bryanism has idealism in good measure, but it smacks too much of the past; Republicanism has none. Both parties should perceive that the gulf widens between our ideals, which are the measure of our intelligence, and our performance, as exhibited in our institutions; that through fear or other incapacity we fail, almost ludicrously, to practise up to our conceptions. Meanwhile, the impatient reformer may acquire patience, and the conservative, who stands always trembling in overweening fear of radicals and radicalism, may achieve equanimity by reflecting that political change in countries of the conservative or English type is, after all, both a slow and a sure process; that though its movement lags, it is yet constant. And both reformer and conservative should be mindful of this bit of philosophy which has lately emanated from a well-known scholar within the conservative precincts of Oxford University:

"It has never been denied that the process of gradual remoulding is a part of living, and all admit that the state (which lives like any other thing) must suffer such a process as a condition of health. . . . There is in every branch of social effort a necessity for constant reform and check; it is the business of a politician continually to apply such correction. . . . What test can be applied by which we may know whether a reform is working toward this rectification or not? None, except the general conviction of a whole generation that this or that survival obstructs the way of right living — the mere instinct of justice expressed in concrete terms on a particular point. To observe it is to keep the state sane, to neglect it is to bring about revolution."

24

ALBERT WATKINS.

ART AS THE HANDMAID OF LITERATURE.

THE English man of letters who seems now to hold the centre of the stage has complained of a lack of artistic and literary ideals in the American people. "They measure progress," he has said, "by the snarling together of telegraph wires, the heaving up of houses, and the making of money." It is possible that Mr. Kipling is not exempt from those prejudices concerning America which are the heritage of English men of letters, but he is nevertheless the poet-laureate of the Empire "by the grace of God;" and Sir Walter Besant is no doubt correct in saying, that "never in the history of literature has story-teller, in his own lifetime, faced such an audience." Unless, therefore, Americans are content to rest under the imputation of great inferiority in respect to the finer attributes of mind and soul, they should inquire whether there is evidence which could justify so sweeping an assertion.

In making such an inquiry, it would soon be discovered that others than Mr. Kipling, and of their number many Americans, have not hesitated to deplore the inferior position which has long been held by American art. That we have had no national school of art and have produced but few really great men of letters has been freely enough admitted; but to most of us this will doubtless appear to be a natural and, in fact, almost an inevitable consequence of the peculiar conditions under which the Republic has been evolved. The growth of the United States, while an eminently healthy one, has nevertheless been accomplished through a constant struggle, amid dangers which have threatened its very existence. These conditions have produced a powerful organism, fitted to survive in the battle of life. Appreciation of opportunity, quickness of resolve, fertility of resource, magnificent courage, tireless energy, and dogged determination to succeed, have become national characteristics; but there has been small opportunity for development of the imagination, or for a contemplation of those beauties of thought and style, of form and of color, which make up the world of literature and art. The rich development of the finer sensibilities in nations, as in men, comes only after the body has attained to maturity. Geographical and political isolation

are, moreover, responsible for a certain selfishness of spirit and a narrowness of view—a provincialism, in short but little calculated to produce great results in the realm of art. It may, indeed, be true, as has been more than once expressed, that the "white man's burden" of carrying the Western civilization to the benighted portions of the globe, fraught as it is with so much of sacrifice, of patience under disappointments, and of unrequited toil, may bring with it the possibility of moulding a nation in a nobler form, with greater and broader development of the mental and spiritual life.

There are indications, however, that the American nation is now entering upon a new stage of its development, and that the tendency to look outward, which has been so marked a characteristic of the end of the century, has not been confined solely to commercial and governmental affairs. With a rapidity which is the more remarkable because it is so often unperceived, transformations in many fields of endeavor are bringing about a new discovery of America to the world. A better time seems even to be dawning for American art, when perhaps the best literary painting of the year is Mr. Edwin A. Abbey's "The Trial of Queen Catherine," and when Anders Zorn, the distinguished Swedish painter and etcher, fresh from the Paris Exposition, is reported as saying:

"Without prejudice or national feeling, and simply from the point of view of an art critic, I consider the exhibits of American and Swedish artists at the Paris Exposition the most praiseworthy of all. American art is showing a freshness and a strength due to a vigorous nationality, and it is making most marked progress. In commerce and in industry America has produced a race of giants, and slowly and surely she is producing giants in art as well."

Nor is it alone in painting that American art shows signs of progress. The "White City," whose palaces and temples rose in classic beauty from the shores of Lake Michigan, did not fade away until its image had been reflected in the minds of those who thronged to see it, and who thus for the first time became aware of what American architects could achieve if freed from the usual restraints.

If painting and architecture have acquired in America a new importance, it is nevertheless in a widely different field that American art has made its most remarkable advance. I cannot say how generally it is known that the work of American illustrators is the envy of their European confrères, or that the world's Bohemia of illustration is centred in the city of New York, just as truly as that of painting centres in Paris. The most notable growth of this department of American art has been very largely confined to the last fifteen years, and it has attained its full