Owing to the nature of the conflict enormous campaign funds were secured. The silver miners helped to finance Mr. Bryan, but their contributions were trivial compared with the immense sums raised by Mr. Hanna from protected interests, bankers, and financiers. With this great fund, speakers were employed by the thousands, newspapers were subsidized, party literature circulated by the ton, whole states polled in advance, and workers employed to carry the Republican fight into every important precinct in the country. The God of battles was on the side of the heaviest battalions. With all the most powerful engines for creating public sentiment against him, Mr. Bryan, in spite of his tremendous popular appeal, was doomed to defeat. Undoubtedly, as was said at the time, most of the leading thinkers in finance and politics were against Mr. Bryan, and if there is anything in the verdict of history, the silver issue could not stand the test of logic and understanding. But it must not be presumed that it was merely a battle of wits, and that demagogic appeals to passions which were supposed to be associated with Mr. Bryan's campaign were confined to his partisans. On the contrary, the Republicans employed all of the forms of personal vituperation. For example, that staid journal of Republicanism, the _New York Tribune_, attributed the growth of Bryanism to the "assiduous culture of the basest passions of the least worthy member of the community.... Its nominal head was worthy of the cause. Nominal because the wretched, rattle-pated boy, posing in vapid vanity and mouthing resounding rottenness, was not the real leader of that league of hell. He was only a puppet in the blood-imbued hands of Altgeld, the anarchist, and Debs, the revolutionist, and other desperadoes of that stripe. But he was a willing puppet, Bryan was,--willing and eager. None of his masters was more apt than he at lies and forgeries and blasphemies and all the nameless iniquities of that campaign against the Ten Commandments." That such high talk by those who constituted themselves the guardians of public credit, patriotism, and the Ten Commandments was not calculated to sooth the angry passions of their opponents needs no demonstration here. * * * * * Argument, party organization and machinery, the lavish use of money, and terror won the day for the Republicans. The solid East and Middle West overwhelmed Mr. Bryan, giving Mr. McKinley 271 electoral votes and 7,111,607 popular votes, as against 176 electoral and 6,509,052 popular votes cast for the Democratic candidate.