But the aspect of this banquet as a piece of ill-conceived political strategy that never was formidable, or as a rite in the ceremonial of a hero-worship that is as inexplicable as inopportune, does not now so much concern me as does its office as a dispenser of misinformation and unsound philosophy, which are always dangerous. Many who condemn the folly of it as a move in practical politics nevertheless loudly commend the economic doctrines it contributed to spread. But inasmuch as, in my opinion, the science it taught is as bad as the politics it practised, I propose to call attention to a few of the arrogant assumptions and mischievous theories that found emphatic and repeated expression at this feast. Did the purpose of this article permit, it would be interesting to make Mr. Cleveland's speech the text of some examination into the ex-President's peculiarities of style. It was Clevelandesque to the core. All his protuberant characteristics are there: the leviathanic egotism, the profound and tenebrous ponderosity, the labored intricacy of the commonplace, the pedagogic moralizing, the oracular inconsequence. How absurdly obvious it all is now, and how inexplicable that the glamour of high place should ever have clothed such matter as his with the seeming of philosophy and statesmanship! 'Tis the very frippery and trumpery of the stage after the lights are out and the audience has departed. In his opening Mr. Cleveland says: "On every side we are confronted with popular depression and complaint." This language stirs an echo of the long ago. In his special message to the extra session of the Fifty-third Congress in August, 1893, he thus announced a similar condition: "Suddenly financial distrust and fear have sprung up on every side." But he accounts differently for these two identical phenomena. The situation to-day he largely attributes to "the work of agitators and demagogues." In 1893 he declared: "I believe these things are principally chargeable to Congressional legislation touching the purchase and coinage of silver by the general government."