In their acceptance speeches, Palmer and Buckner devoted more attention to condemning the Chicago platform than to explaining the principles for which they stood. General Buckner said: "The Chicago Convention would wipe virtually out of existence the Supreme Court which interprets the law, forgetting that our ancestors in England fought for hundreds of years to obtain a tribunal of justice which was free from executive control. They would wipe that out of existence and subject it to the control of party leaders to carry out the dictates of the party--they would paralyze the arm of the general government and forbid the powers to protect the lives and property of its citizens. That convention in terms almost placed a lighted torch in the hands of the incendiary and urged the mob to proceed without restraint to pillage and murder at their discretion." _The Campaign_ The campaign which followed the conventions was the most remarkable in the long history of our quadrennial spectacles. Terror is always a powerful instrument in politics, and it was never used with greater effect than in the summer and autumn of 1896. Some of Mr. Bryan's utterances, particularly on the income tax, frightened the rich into believing, or pretending to believe, that his election would be the beginning of a wholesale confiscation. The Republicans replied to Mr. Bryan's threats by using the greatest of all terrors, the terror of unemployment, with tremendous effect. Everywhere they let the country understand that the defeat of Mr. McKinley would close factories and throw thousands of workingmen out of employment, and manufacturers and railways were accused by Mr. Bryan of exercising coercion on a large scale. To this terror from above, the Democrats responded by creating terror below, by stirring deep-seated class feeling against the Republican candidate and his managers. In a letter given out from the Democratic headquarters in Chicago, on September 12, 1896, Mr. Jones, chairman of the Democratic national committee, said: "Against the people in this campaign are arrayed the consolidated forces of wealth and corporate power. The classes which have grown fat by reason of Federal legislation and the single gold standard have combined to fasten their fetters still more firmly upon the people and are organizing every precinct of every county of every state in the Union with this purpose in view. To meet and defeat this corrupt and unholy alliance the people themselves must organize and be organized.... It will minimize the effect of the millions of dollars that are being used against us, and defeat those influences which wealth and corporate power are endeavoring to use to override the will of the people and corrupt the integrity of free institutions."