Now the answer to all these arguments is that they are the merest mirage. It makes no difference which of the two evils, Platt or Croker, has the name of ruling the State. At present they divide the rule between them. They can do no more. There is no argument that can be used against Tammany Hall which is powerful enough to make the Republican Ring trustworthy. There is no argument against Expansion so excessively convincing that it changes the moral character of the Democratic Party. These learned arguments are useless, ludicrous, pathetic, irrational, impotent, contemptible. They do but distract us from the real issue--which is personal corruption. Where shall a man cast his vote against it? If I turn out McKinley because he bleeds the natives, I put in a Democrat to bleed the natives. If the whitewashing of Alger arouses public indignation, Tammany Hall feeds at the trough. If Croker’s control of the judiciary arouses popular indignation, Platt’s pigs feed at the trough. As for sound money, we have already elected one Congress on the issue in 1895, just as in 1892 we elected a Congress on the tariff issue. What was done? Why, in each case that was done which the ring wanted done,--nothing. Which national party stands for an idea to-day? The only shadow of reason for believing that either does, is that the Republicans cried sound money and won. They have done nothing. Had Bryan won, he would have done nothing, could have done nothing. There are no issues in American politics save this one issue of common honesty. You cannot throw an issue into this whirlpool of vice, for your issue turns to cash by the contact. We need not waste our time reading the platforms drawn by Platt and Croker. We must not vote for any man who does not go into public life as their enemy, because we know that in so far as he is not their enemy he is ours. As for these dreadful consequences that are always about to follow from a refusal to support one end of the iniquity, they do not follow. We have the evils now. We are at the worst. The powers of darkness may conspire and heap all in ruins, but they must not prevent us from beginning upon a constructive line to draw together and build up the powers of light. Nor is there the smallest distinction either in the evil or its cure, between the case of a village, of a State, or of the whole nation. Say you live in a town; you can only get a clean school-board by running men against both the regular parties. There is no other way of getting rid of Hanna and the Presidential Syndicate than by running an independent candidate for the Presidency. No form of Bryanism will oust it,--no rump Democracy nor any kind of Democracy. Democracy is finished. Republicanism is finished.