Thereupon ensued a scene more worthy of Russia than of the American Republic. Foiled in the attempt to carry the primaries; foiled again in the effort to force their own tools upon the convention as governing officers, the gold men and the street railway managers who were present on the floor of the convention, played their last card in the game to defeat the candidate pledged to make them pay their taxes, and ordered their servant, Devoy, to do by force what he had failed to do by fraud. A Board of Police Commissioners lent themselves to this shameful assault upon American liberty, and ordered three hundred armed police to drive from the hall the delegates opposed to Mr. Harrison. Sterling P. Bond, John J. Fitzwilliam and W. A. Brandenburger, the duly elected chairman and secretaries of the convention, were brutally assaulted by the police. Mr. Bond was carted away to jail in a patrol wagon. Mr. Meriwether, who had been called on to address the convention after his nomination for Mayor, was thrown from the platform by two policemen, and, in company with a majority of the delegates, was forcibly expelled from the hall. Since the 9th of November, 1799, when Napoleon's grenadiers drove the French deputies out of their convention hall at the point of the bayonet, history affords no parallel to this outrage by the St. Louis boltocratic politicians. That in claiming a convention has no right to elect its own presiding officers the gold boltocrats were utterly wrong in custom as well as equity, will be seen by recalling the manner in which last year the Chicago Convention refused to accept Senator Hill, the National Democratic Committee's suggestion for chairman, and instead elected Daniel, a silver Senator from Virginia. Although the St. Louis papers subsequently supported Mr. Harrison, whose nomination was only accomplished by the illegal use of three hundred police, those same papers did not hesitate to say, the morning after the convention, that the action of the machine was illegal and tyrannical:[2] [2] Witness the following extracts: Police Commissioner Bannerman in Globe-Democrat, March 22, 1897: "The trouble was all started by Ed. Devoy refusing to allow Bond's name to go before the convention as chairman. The whole thing was a scheme on his (Devoy's) part to split the convention. Of course it was wrong to send Judge Bond to the Four Courts in a patrol wagon." Republic editorial, March 21, 1897: "Committee Chairman Devoy made a mistake in surrendering the gave before the delegates had elected a temporary chairman. A convention holds within itself the right to choose its temporary officers." Post-Dispatch editorial, March 31, 1897: