Had they lived in the days of Sparta they would have believed in free iron, iron coin being at that time the cheapest circulating medium, the adoption of which would give the greatest expansion of the currency. But they have been dragged on by the slow procession of the centuries, and now they only believe in free silver. It is a belief which is compatible with all the domestic virtues, and even occasionally with very good capacities as a public servant. Mr. Sewall doubtless stands as one of these men. He can hardly be happy, planted firmly as he is, on the Chicago platform. In the minds of most thrifty, hard-working men, who are given to thinking at all about public questions, the free-silver plank is very far from being the most rotten of the many rotten planks put together with such perverted skill by the Chicago architects. A platform which declares in favor of free and unlimited rioting and which has the same strenuous objection to the exercise of the police power by the general government that is felt in the circles presided over by Herr Most, Eugene V. Debs, and all the people whose pictures appear in the detective bureaus of our great cities, cannot appeal to persons who have gone beyond the unpolished-stone period of civilization. The men who object to what they style “government by injunction” are, as regards the essential principles of government, in hearty sympathy with their remote skin-clad ancestors who lived in caves, fought one another with stone-headed axes, and ate the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros. They are interesting as representing a geological survival, but they are dangerous whenever there is the least chance of their making the principles of this ages-buried past living factors in our present life. They are not in sympathy with men of good minds and sound civic morality. It is not a nice thing to wish to pay one’s debts in coins worth fifty cents on the dollar, but it is a much less nice thing to wish to plunge one’s country into anarchy by providing that the law shall only protect the lawless and frown scornfully on the law-abiding. There is a good deal of mushy sentiment in the world, and there are always a certain number of people whose minds are weak and whose emotions are strong and who effervesce with sympathy toward any man who does wrong, and with indignation against any man who chastises the criminal for having done wrong. These emotionalists, moreover, are always reinforced by that large body of men who themselves wish to do wrong, and who are not sentimental at all, but, on the contrary, very practical. It is rarely that these two classes control a great political party, but at Chicago this became an accomplished fact.