This disease was not confined to the horny-handed sons of toil; the heart in the hovel was not the only one that ached. It was not confined to the follower of the plow; but its pestilential breath pervaded every home in the land, leaving everyone below the multi-millionaire unhappy. The clerk of the dry-goods store was hurt because the floor walker assumed a superiority; the floor walker, because the proprietor assumed it; the proprietor, because the importer from whom he purchased goods assumed a distinction; and so it continued, from the longshoreman up, until it reached our millionaire would-be princes, who ape and mimic English life and manners, leaving, as it arose, a sting of increasing bitterness; but each man felt too proud to give utterance to what he thought it shamed him even to recognize as a sensation. Hence the apathy on the surface, the sentiment confessed only to themselves and in the closet of the voting booth. Because the people had identified the Republican party with the class of men who were striving to create this class distinction, and because of the very charm of the word Democracy to their aching hearts, they voted the Democratic ticket--not Democrats alone in a political sense, but men who believe in democracy in the broad sense that St. Paul preached on Mars Hill at Athens, in the broad sense that Christ’s life demonstrated. It was useless, against this first overmastering, powerful emotion in the American breast, to call upon the old veterans of the Civil War, to whom the Republican party had given increased pensions. It was useless to cry even to the negro, to whom the Republican party had given freedom. He, too, had become imbued with the spirit of equality. The wealthy could not purchase the birthright of the veteran by appealing to his pocketbook, any more than they could that of the laborer. He had shed his blood in the cause of equality, resisting then the assumed superiority of blood and birth so often flaunted in his face by gentlemen from the South. In 1861, the “mudsills” of the North and West, the tillers of the soil, had shouldered their muskets at the call of that great man of the people, Abraham Lincoln, leaving home and loved ones to face unknown dangers and diseases in the cause of EQUALITY. Down in their hearts then was a sentiment which is revived in 1892. That thing which had been the hardest to bear, for the laboring settler of the West and the workman of the North, was the existence of “caste” in the South, and the supposed superiority of the Southerners in the halls of Congress. Love of the Union was the outspoken, pronounced cause of their coming at Lincoln’s call; but there was something behind and beneath all of that, that had been growing for years; it was resentment, because of the South’s assumption of “caste” in our country.