An im

reception car for the Committees and a baggage car. mense territory was covered in a short time because the train was given the right of way over all other trains.

Senator Frye had prepared two speeches, one of which took over an hour to deliver and the other about forty-five minutes. Mr. Dolliver also had brought two speeches in his grip, one of which was very short for breathless stops and the other an elastic harangue which could be stretched from fifteen to thirty minutes. Wherever they spoke they made one of their two speeches, and after the first day the correspondents ceased to report them. Mr. Hanna made seventy-two speeches, varying between five minutes and an hour in length, and no two of them were alike.

Throughout the tour Mr. Hanna was extraordinarily and continuously successful in exciting popular interest. Two years before President McKinley had visited South Dakota, in order to welcome some soldiers returning from the Philippines. He had drawn the biggest crowds in the history of the state. Mr. Hanna's crowds were anywhere from about one and one-half times to twice as large as Mr. McKinley's. They were larger also than those which had greeted Mr. Roosevelt in the same district a few weeks earlier. At seven o'clock in the morning the train would stop at a station where one could see no more than half a dozen houses, yet there would be a congregation of three hundred people to hear Mr. Hanna speak. Farmers in the neighborhood had started at midnight and had driven many miles, in order to be at the station when the train arrived. At Sioux Falls, as well as at the larger places, a crowd three times as large as the population of the town gathered at the meeting.

They were all practically out-of-door meetings, except those held during the evenings in the big towns. In South Dakota the Populist Legislature had passed a law a few years before prohibiting political gatherings which were addressed from the tail-end of railway cars. Nor could such assemblies be held within two hundred feet of the railway track. The object of this discriminating use of the police power was to enable the Populist party to campaign on even terms with the Democrats and Republicans. The Populists could not afford the political luxury of special trains. The consequence was that the way

side meetings in South Dakota were all held at some distance from the tracks. The Committee would have a carriage at the station and would drive the Senator to a platform, situated at a strictly legal distance from the tracks, where a local spellbinder would be holding the crowd together. Mr. Hanna would speak for a few moments, the whistle would blow, cutting short his eloquence, and he would be hurried back to the train. The crowds were not only large, they were almost always respectful and attentive, and they were often enthusiastic. Of course he was interrupted and heckled, but such interruptions usually helped him with the audience. A public speaker with a bold, familiar and winning personality like Mr. Hanna's can always get the better of a heckler - provided he is not irritated and disconcerted by the interruption and can make a ready and plausible retort. Mr. Hanna always gave his annoyers a fair chance, and he was never disconcerted, because he was never making a set speech. He had at his disposal a fund of rough pleasantry which, while it often reads clumsy and even coarse, was received with gusto by his boisterous audiences.

A few instances may be given of the way he met these emergencies. In one small town he was introduced by an abject chairman as a "Joshua, who, if he wanted to, could command the sun to stand still." To allow such a silly adulation to stand unnoticed might be dangerous. Mr. Hanna in opening his speech said that the only suns he would like to command would be the sons of guns of Populists and honest Democrats to vote for McKinley. Its author is not to be congratulated on the deftness of this sally. It is given not because it was happy, but because it was clumsy yet effective. It at once set him right before the audience as, not a strange or remote animal, but as one of themselves. All the correspondents agree that he thereby captured the crowd and kept it with him. He was in a little better form at another place, when in beginning his speech, he said that he was not a politician. "Mark Hanna not a politician!" shouted a scornful voice in the audience. "No, I am not a politician, because I don't know how to tell you what is not so" -a retort which also proved to be a success and enabled him to go ahead with the sympathy of his audience.

At Auburn in Nebraska, about 2500 people had assembled

around a platform, from which Mr. Hanna was speaking. The platform was a flimsy structure, and it broke down under the weight of the men and boys who were trying to clamber on it. It looked like a serious business, for some fifty people had fallen about six feet and were struggling to free themselves from one another and from the débris. "Is Hanna hurt?" "How is Hanna?" shouted the spectators; and there was danger of a panic. Just then his body emerged from the confused mass; there was a twinkle in his eye and his smile was broader than usual. Holding up his hand to command silence, he cried: "It's all right. No one is hurt. We were just giving you a demonstration of what is going to happen to the Democratic party. This must have been a Democratic platform"-at which the crowd cheered vociferously.

Another incident which proved to be popular in the newspapers also occurred in Nebraska. Just outside Weeping Water a stop was made by the engineer for the purpose of permitting Mr. Hanna to shave before his night meeting in Omaha. The photographer of the Omaha Bee took advantage of the opportunity to secure a picture of Senator Hanna and his party. Just as the Senator was about to be photographed alone, the engineer, grimy with coal and grease, sauntered up to see what was going on. "Here, you are just the man I want," said Mr. Hanna, grasping the engineer by the arm and drawing him into the field of the lens. "We are both engineers, I run the Republican party and you run me." "Well! I guess I've got you faded then, Senator," said the engineer, with a grin, as the camera clicked. The picture of the "two engineers" was reproduced extensively at the time and certainly enabled a good many people to understand one of them somewhat better.

Throughout the whole of the tour he never once mentioned Senator Pettigrew's name in public. But although he was discreet enough to avoid a personal attack on the man against whom he had a personal grudge, he was far from avoiding all personalities. He could not do so, because his own personality was being made an issue, and because the object of the trip was to convert precisely that personal issue into a source of strength to the ticket. That he succeeded is indicated by the following curious fact. One of the peculiarities of the tour was the large

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number of school children who turned out to see and hear him. At Winside in Nebraska this was especially the case, in spite of an immense placard nailed to a telegraph pole, which screamed an awful warning:

POPULIST FARMERS,

BEWARE!!!

CHAIN YOUR CHILDREN TO YOURSELVES

OR

PUT THEM UNDER THE BED.

MARK HANNA IS IN TOWN

In his speech at Lincoln, Nebraska, he turned on Mr. Bryan. The Democratic candidate had recently declared that the Republicans were raising an enormous corruption fund, with which they were going to intimidate laboring men, bribe election judges and purchase votes. This is the way in which Mr. He said:

Hanna dealt with the charge.

"In regard to that statement, which I have just read, I want to hurl it back in his teeth and tell him it is as false as hell. [Applause.] When it comes to personalities I am willing to stand before the American people on my record as a business man. I have been in business forty years. I employ 6000 men, pay the highest wages, treat the men like men and they all respect me. [Great applause.] When Bryan or any other man charges me in that way and I am willing to appropriate it all as Chairman of the board of managers of the Republican campaign I promise as I said to hurl it back and denounce him as a demagog in his own town. [Great applause.] [Continued cheering.] [Voice: 'Hit him again."]"

He went on to say:

"In 1897, when I had a little singing school down in Ohio, Bryan came down there to help Johnnie McLean defeat me for the Senate. He went across the state, back and forth from one end to the other and through the mining districts, and he told the people of Ohio what a bad man I was. He told the men working in the mines that Hanna was a labor crusher. He forgot that they knew that I was born and always lived in that state, and that my record with organized labor was better than any other man's in that state [applause], because I was the first employer that I know of in the state of Ohio that ever recognized and treated with organized labor. I have done it from that day to this. [Applause.]

"Now I am entitled to tell another story of justification in Mr. Bryan's town. [Voice: 'Tell it to them.'] At the close of that campaign I was at Cincinnati. The meeting was in the great music hall as full as this theatre from top to bottom,

a very intelligent and appreciative audience, I thought, right under the shadow of the Cincinnati Inquirer, who had lied like a thief about me every day in the week and kept that Davenport cartoon on the front page of its paper. I was pictured as a bogie man. That was intended to frighten the workingmen away from supporting the members of the legislature that they knew would vote to send me back to the Senate. Bryan had done his work and left the state, and that was the last night in the campaign, and I thought I would make a little statement there for the benefit of those fellows. So I said: 'Now, gentlemen, this campaign is over. As far as my appearance before the public is concerned it is closed, but I want to make one proposition not only to the people of Ohio, but to the people of the United States. Mr. Bryan, who once aspired to be President of the United States, came to Ohio this fall to tell the people in my own state, who had known me since I was a boy, that I was a bad, wicked man, and that I was a labor crusher, which was worse than all. Now I want to make this proposition. If any man who ever worked for me in any capacity can truthfully say that I have ever knowingly done him a wrong or an injustice; that I have failed to pay the highest rate of wages; that I have ever refused to receive in my presence either individually or by committee any man in my employ, whether members of the union or not; that I have ever questioned a man when employing him whether he belonged to a union or not, or discharged him because he belonged to an organization or union; if that can be brought to me and proved, I will resign as Senator tomorrow.' [Applause.]"

The speeches made by Mr. Hanna during this Northwestern trip constituted a serious and an honest contribution to a discussion of the issues of the campaign. Taken as a whole they contain the best and most comprehensive statement which he ever made of his own personal attitude towards the political and economic problems of the day. He addressed his audiences in a tone of earnest conviction, and he argued his case before them candidly and instructively. He had none of the tricks of the ordinary stump speaker, and none of the insincerity and obliquity of the ordinary partisan advocate. He reasoned with his hearers and tried to persuade them to vote the Republican