The Democratic party, to be sure, redeemed itself later under the splendid leadership of President Wilson, but at that time, while we recognized the evil of the theory, we seemed to have sunk into a sordid acquiescence in the fact; everybody thought the tariff wrong, but nobody wished to have it done away with so long as there was a chance, to speak in modern American, for him to get in on the graft. The word “graft” was unknown in those days, by all save those thieves in whose argot it was found and devoted to its present general use in the vocabulary. I suppose it is in the dictionary by this time. In any event, it is not strange that the word should have become so current, since for a while we made a national institution of the very thing it connotes. There was, however, then and always, the labor question, and we were beginning to discover that that is fundamental, perhaps the one great fundamental,--aside from the complication of evil and good that is inherent and implicit in humanity itself,--since the burning question is and always will be how the work of the world is to be got done, and, what is a much more embarrassing problem, who is to do it. Many of the men who had been doing that work, or the heaviest of it, were striking in Illinois in those years. The shots the Pinkertons had fired at Homestead echoed in the state; Senator Palmer had made a great speech about it in the Senate; and perhaps the tariff had something to do with that, since tariffs on steel have not been unknown. But there were shots fired nearer home, first in the strike among the men who were digging the drainage canal, then among the miners in the soft coal fields of the state, then the strike in the model town of Pullman, and the great railroad strike that grew out of it.