He always detests the unpopular word.  He approves expansion, but abhors imperialism.  He welcomes any opportunity for war, but execrates militarism.  He wants the Federal government to crush the trusts by the most drastic legislation, but he is opposed to centralization.  The institutional reforms which he favors all of them look in the direction of destroying what remains of judicial, executive, or legislative independence.  The whole programme is as incoherent as is that of Mr. Bryan; but incoherence is the least of his faults.  Mr. Bryan’s inconsistencies are partly redeemed by his genuine patriotism.  The distracting effect of Hearst’s inconsistencies is intensified by his factiousness.  He is more and less than a radical.  He is in temper a revolutionist.  The disgust and distrust which he excites is the issue of a wholesome political and social instinct, for the political instincts of the American people are often much sounder than their ideas.  Hearst and Hearstism is a living menace to the orderly process of reform and to American national integrity.

Hearst is revolutionary in spirit, because the principle of equal rights itself, in the hand either of a fanatic or a demagogue, can be converted into a revolutionary principle.  He considers, as do all reformers, the prevalent inequalities of economic and political power to be violations of that principle.  He also believes in the truth of American political individualism, and in the adequacy, except in certain minor respects, of our systems of inherited institutions.  How, then, did these inequalities come about?  How did the Democratic political system of Jefferson and Jackson issue in undemocratic inequalities?  The answer is obviously (and it is an answer drawn by other reformers) that these inequalities are the work of wicked and unscrupulous men.  Financial or political pirates of one kind or another have been preying on the guileless public, and by means of their aggressions have perversely violated the supreme law of equal rights.  These men must be exposed; they must be denounced as enemies of the people; they must be held up to public execration and scorn; they must become the objects of a righteous popular vengeance.  Such are the feelings and ideas which possess the followers of Hearst, and on the basis of which Hearst himself acts and talks.  An apparent justification is reached for a systematic vilification of the trusts, the “predatory” millionaires and their supporters; and such vilification has become Hearst’s peculiar stock in trade.  In effect he treats his opponents very much as the French revolutionary leaders treated their opponents, so that in case the conflict should become still more embittered, his “reformed” democracy may resemble the purified republic of which Robespierre and St. Just dreamed when they sent Desmoulins and Danton to the guillotine.  When he embodies such ideas and betrays such a spirit, the disputed point as to Hearst’s sincerity sinks into insignificance.  A fanatic sincerely possessed by these ideas is a more dangerous menace to American national integrity and the Promise of American democracy than the sheerest demagogue.