As January wore away and February, slipping by, brought Bryan’s Inauguration nearer and nearer, the groups melted into groups, and it was only too apparent that from a dozen different points in the South and North West “Coxey Armies” were forming for an advance on Washington. In some instances they were well clad and well provisioned; in others, they were little better than great bands of hungry and restless men, demoralized by idleness and wrought up to a strange degree of mental excitement by the extravagant harangues of their leaders, who were animated with but one thought, namely, to make use of these vast crowds of Silver Pilgrims, as they called themselves, to back up their claims for public office. These crowds of deluded people were well named “Silver Pilgrims,” for hundreds of them carried in hempen bags, pieces of silverware, in ninety-nine cases of a hundred, plated stuff of little value, which unscrupulous dealers and peddlers had palmed off upon them as sterling, with the promises that once in Washington, the United States Mint would coin their metal into “Bryan Dollars” giving “two for one” in payment for it. While these motley “armies” marched upon the capitol of the Republic, the railway trains night and day brought vast crowds of “new men,” politicians of low degree, men out of employment, drunken and disgruntled mechanics, farmer’s sons, to seek their fortunes under the Reign of the People, heelers and hangers-on of ward bosses, old men who had not tasted office for thirty years and more, all inspired by Mr. Bryan’s declaration that “The American people are not in favor of life tenure in the Civil Service, that a permanent office holding class is not in harmony with our institutions, that a fixed term in appointive offices would open the public service to a larger number of citizens, without impairing its efficiency,” all bearing new besoms in their hands or across their shoulders, each and every one of them supremely confident that in the distribution of the spoils something would surely fall to his share, since they were the “Common People” who were so dear to Mr. Bryan, and who had made him President in the very face of the prodigious opposition of the rich men, whose coffers had been thrown wide open all to no purpose, and in spite too of the satanic and truly devilish power of that hell upon earth known as Wall Street, which had sweated gold in vain in its desperate efforts to fasten the chains of trusts and the claws of soulless monsters known as corporations upon these very “Common People,” soon to march in triumph before the silver chariot of the young Conqueror from the West. CHAPTER IV.