We came to the election of 1900 on the crest of a prosperity wave; but prosperity too takes its time to be realised, and so Hanna took the precaution to raise four million dollars and buy the election again.[6] And then came 1904, which, I think, was the most interesting election of them all. With the politicians the prosperity boom still held sway. Mark Hanna had Roosevelt all ready for the shelf; and the old-time “state-rights” Democrats arose and buried Mr. Bryan in the deepest vault of their party catacombs. But then came the people—with the country trembling on the verge of another “hard times.” They gave President Roosevelt the most tremendous majority ever recorded in America; and incidentally, as if this were not enough to show how they felt, they gave nearly half a million votes to Eugene V. Debs! Footnote 6: Figures quoted, evidently upon inside information, by the Washington _Post_, in 1906. This election, according to my schedule, corresponds with the election of 1852 in the Civil War crisis. The “safe and sane” Democracy, which received its death-blow in 1904, corresponds with the old Whig party. It will probably make independent nominations in 1908 and 1912, exactly as did the Whigs, and will receive the votes of all those who believe in dealing with new conditions according to old formulas. In the meantime, the real contestants of the coming crisis are forming their lines. Under ordinary circumstances the Republican party would have been the party of disguised but unrelenting conservatism; and our Presidents in 1904 and 1908 would have been either figureheads like Fairbanks and Shaw, or shrewd beguilers of the people like Cannon and Root. As it is, it looks now if President Roosevelt were to remain the master of his party, in which case we shall have in 1908 a mild reformer like Taft, or possibly even Governor Hughes. The one thing certain is that whoever receives the Republican nomination will be the next President. If it is a Roosevelt man, the President’s prestige will elect him; or if the “System” concludes to have its own way, he will be put in by bribery. In any case, he will go in, and it is best that he should go in. So long as we are to have Capitalism, it is proper that the capitalist should have a free hand. Personally I should consider the election of a radical in 1908 a calamity; for “hard times” will be just about to break, and I greatly desire to see Cannon and Aldrich and the rest of them “caught with the goods on.” Who will be the Democratic candidate? Will it be the champion of the Western farmers, or of the proletariat of our Eastern cities? I do not know, but I am inclined to think that it will be Mr. Bryan; and I am sorry, in a way, because that will put him out of the race in 1912. I conceived an intense admiration for Mr. Bryan after his last speech in New York City.