We have told how, in 1888, Cleveland was defeated for the presidency by Benjamin Harrison.  Harrison was a grandson of the old warrior of Tippecanoe, William Henry Harrison, the successful candidate of the Whig party forty-eight years before.  He was an able but not brilliant man, had served through the Civil War, and was afterwards elected senator from Indiana, to which state he had removed from Ohio at an early age.  The platform on which he was elected pledged the party to the protective tariff principle, and a high tariff measure, known as the McKinley Bill, was passed, raising duties to a point higher than had ever before been known in the history of the United States.

The Dependent Pension Bill, which Cleveland had vetoed, and which gave a pension to every Union soldier who was from any cause unable to earn a living, was also passed.  But these policies did not appeal to the public; besides which, Harrison, although a man of integrity and ability, was popular with neither the rank nor file of his party, through a total lack of personal magnetism, and though he received the nomination, Cleveland easily defeated him.  The remainder of his life was passed quietly at his Indiana home.

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We have seen how Cleveland’s independence and want of tact estranged him from his party, and the party itself was soon to run upon virtual shipwreck, under the guidance of strange leaders.  A word must be said, in this place, of the extraordinary man who led it three times to defeat.

When the Democratic national convention met in Chicago in 1896, one of the delegates from Nebraska was a brilliant and eloquent lawyer named William Jennings Bryan.  He had gained some prominence in his state, and had served in Congress for four years, but he was practically unknown when he arose before the convention and made a free-silver speech which fairly carried the delegates off their feet.  Good oratory is rare at any time; its power can hardly be overestimated, especially in swaying a crowd; and Bryan was one of the greatest orators that ever addressed a convention.

His nomination for the Presidency followed, and the result was the practical dismemberment of the Democratic party.  For Bryan was a Populist, as far as possible removed from the fundamental principles of Democracy, advocating strange socialistic measures; and the conservative element of the party regarded him and his theories with such distrust that it put another ticket in the field, and he was badly beaten.  Twice more he led the party in presidential campaigns, each time being defeated more decisively than the last.  His engaging personality, his ready oratory, and his supreme gifts as a politician won for him a vast number of devoted friends, who believed, and who still believe, in him absolutely; but the country at large, apparently, will have none of him.

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