The Republican campaign watchword was "Protection." Press and platform dilated on the fat years of McKinley's administration as amply vindicating the Dingley Act. "The full dinner pail," said they, "is the paramount issue." Trusts and monopolies they denounced, as their opponents did, but they declared that these "had nothing to do with the tariff." There was wide and intense hostility toward monopolistic organizations. They were decried on all hands as depressing wages, crushing small producers, raising the prices of their own products and lowering those of what they bought, depriving business officials and business travellers of positions, and working a world of other mischief politically, economically, and socially. They had rapidly multiplied since the Republicans last came into power, and nothing had been done to check the formation of them or to control them. Why, then, was not Democracy triumphant in the campaign of 1900? When the lines were first drawn a majority of the people probably disapproved the Administration's departure into fields of conquest, colonialism, and empire. Republicans themselves denied that a "full dinner pail" was the most fundamental of considerations. Few Republican anti-imperialists were saved to the party by the venerable Senator Hoar's faith that after a while it would surely retrieve the one mistake marring its record. Nor was it that men like Andrew Carnegie could never stomach the Kansas City and Chicago heresies, or that the Republicans had ample money, or yet that votes were attracted to the Administration because of its war record and its martial face. Agriculture had, to be sure, been remunerative. Also, before election, the strike in the Pennsylvania hard coal regions had, at the earnest instance of Republican leaders, been settled favorably to the miners, thus enlisting extensive labor forces in support of the status quo; but these causes also, whether by themselves or in conjunction with the others named, were wholly insufficient to explain why the election went as it did. A partial cause of Mr. Bryan's defeat in 1900 was the incipient waning of anti-imperialism, the conviction growing, even among such as had doubted this long and seriously, that the Administration painfully faulty as were some of its measures in the new lands, was pursuing there absolutely the only honorable or benevolent course open to it under the wholly novel and very peculiar circumstances.