With Mr. Bryan denunciation of the gold bug and the banker is largely a mere form of intellectual entertainment; but with Mr. Watson it represents an almost ferocious conviction. Someone has said that Mr. Watson like Mr. Tillman, is an embodied retribution on the South for having failed to educate the cracker, the poor white who gives him his strength. It would ill beseem any dweller in cities of the North, especially any dweller in the city of Tammany, to reproach the South with having failed to educate anybody. But Mr. Watson is certainly an awkward man for a community to develop. He is infinitely more in earnest than is Mr. Bryan. Mr. Watson’s followers belong to that school of southern Populists who honestly believe that the respectable and commonplace people who own banks, railroads, dry-goods stores, factories, and the like, are persons with many of the mental and social attributes that unpleasantly distinguished Heliogabalus, Nero, Caligula, and other worthies of later Rome. Not only do they believe this, but they say it with appalling frankness. They are very sincere as a rule, or at least the rank and file are. They are also very suspicious. They distrust anything they cannot understand; and as they understand but little this opens a very wide field for distrust. They are apt to be emotionally religious. If not, they are then at least atheists of an archaic type. Refinement and comfort they are apt to consider quite as objectionable as immorality. That a man should change his clothes in the evening, that he should dine at any other hour than noon, impress these good people as being symptoms of depravity instead of merely trivial. A taste for learning and cultivated friends, and a tendency to bathe frequently, cause them the deepest suspicion. A well-to-do man they regard with jealous distrust, and if they cannot be well-to-do themselves, at least they hope to make matters uncomfortable for those that are. They possess many strong, rugged virtues, but they are quite impossible politically, because they always confound the essentials and the non-essentials, and though they often make war on vice, they rather prefer making war upon prosperity and refinement.