On the train from Washington to New York I found men continually wrangling in fierce heat about money, tariff and Coxeyism. I was surprised to hear Wall Street attacked by well dressed, apparently prosperous men, in the very phrases with which the Coxeyites had filled my ears. Nobody by any chance ever stood in defense of Wall Street, but there were those who denounced the Coxeyites and Populists intemperately. Everybody denounced something; nobody was _for_ anything. National morale was in a very low state. In the smoking compartment two men, behaving as old acquaintances, quarreled interminably and with so much dialectical skill that an audience gathered to listen in respectful silence. One was a neat, clerical-looking person whose anxieties were unrelieved by any glimpse of humor or fancy. The other was carelessly dressed, spilt cigar ashes over his clothes unawares, and had a way of putting out his tongue and laughing at himself dryly if the argument went momentarily against him or when he had adroitly delivered himself from a tight place. He was the elder of the two. He was saying: “Because men are out of work they do not lose their rights as citizens to petition Congress in _any_ peaceable manner. Your low tariff is the cause of unemployment. There is the evidence,--those cold smoke stacks.” He pointed to them. We were passing through Wilmington. “The importation of cheap foreign goods has shut our factories up. You retort by calling the unemployed tramps.” “It was the high Republican tariff that made the people soft and helpless,” said the other. “For years you taught them that good times resulted not from industry and self-reliance but from laws,--that prosperity was created by law. Now you reap the fruit. You put money into the pockets of the manufacturers by high tariffs. The people know this. Now they say, ‘Fill our pockets, too.’ It’s quite consistent. But it’s Socialism. That’s what all this Coxeyism is,--a filthy eruption of Socialism, and the Republican party is responsible.” “You forget to tell what has become of the jobs,” the other said. “All they want is work to do. Where is the work?” “These Coxeyites,” the other retorted, “are a lot of strolling beggars. They refuse work. They enjoy marching through the country in mobs, living without work, doing in groups what as individuals they would not dare to do for fear of police and dogs. And the Republican party encourages them in this criminality because it needs a high tariff argument.” At this point an impulse injected me into the discussion. “You are wrong about the Coxeyites,” I said. “At least as to those from Massillon. I marched with them all the way. A few were tramps. There were no criminals. A great majority of them were men willing to work and honestly unemployed.”