arena his tactics proved to be ineffective, and his recent popularity of small avail.  He cut no figure at all in the convention, and a very insignificant one outside.  Neither was there any reason to be surprised at this result.  In municipal politics he stood for an ideal and a method of agitation which was both individual and of great value.  In state and national politics he stood for nothing individual, for nothing of peculiar value, for no specific group of ideas or scheme of policy.  The announcement that a candidate’s platform consists of his oath of office doubtless has a full persuasive sound to many Americans; but it was none the less on Mr. Jerome’s part an inept and meaningless performance.  He was bidding for support merely on the ground that he was an honest man who proposed to keep his word; but honesty and good faith are qualities which the public have a right to take for granted in their officials, and no candidate can lay peculiar claim to them without becoming politically sanctimonious.  Mr. Hearst’s strength consisted in the fact that he had for years stood for a particular group of ideas and a particular attitude of mind towards the problems of state and national politics, while Mr. Jerome’s weakness consisted in the fact that he had never really tried to lead public opinion in relation to state and national political problems, and that he was obliged to claim support on the score of personal moral superiority to his opponent.  The moral superiority may be admitted; but alone it never would and never should contribute to his election.  In times like these a reformer must identify a particular group of remedial measures with his public personality.  The public has a right to know in what definite ways a reformer’s righteousness is to be made effective; and Mr. Jerome has never taken any vigorous and novel line in relation to the problems of state and national politics.  When he speaks on those subjects, he loses his vivacity, and betrays in his thinking a tendency to old-fashioned Democracy far beyond that of Mr. Bryan.  He becomes in his opinions eminently respectable and tolerably dull, which is, as the late Mr. Alfred Hodder could have told him, quite out of keeping with the part of a “New American.”

Mr. Jerome has never given the smallest evidence of having taken serious independent thought on our fundamental political problems.  In certain points of detail respecting general political questions he has shown a refreshing freedom from conventional illusions; but, so far as I know, no public word has ever escaped him, which indicates that he has applied his “ideal of intellectual veracity,” “his Gallic instinct for consistency,” to the creed of his own party.  When confronted by the fabric of traditional Jeffersonian Democracy, his mind, like that of so many other Democrats, is immediately lulled into repose.  In one of his speeches, for instance, he has referred to his party as essentially the party of “liberal