When the votes were counted the extent of the reaction was realized. The last Congress had contained a safe majority of Republicans in each house. The new Congress, the Fifty-second, chosen in 1890, had lost the high-tariff majority in the lower body. Only 88 Republicans were elected, against 236 Democrats and 8 of the Alliance. The Republicans retained the Senate partly because of the "rotten borough" States, Idaho and Wyoming, which they had just admitted. The greatest factor in the landslide was the tariff, but this was, largely, only the occasion for an outburst of discontent that had been piling up for a decade. The dominant party was punished because things went wrong, because the trusts throve and labor was uneasy, because prices declined, because there were scandals in the Public Lands and Pension Bureaus, and because the rainfall had diminished on the plains. The new House elected a Georgian, Crisp, as Speaker, and the second half of Harrison's term passed quietly. Among the people, however, there was much conjecture upon the future of the Farmers' Alliance. A convention at Cincinnati, six months after the election, tried to unite the new element and form a third party of importance. [Illustration] [Illustration] Union between the Knights of Labor and the Farmers' Alliance for political purposes was the aim of the promoters of the People's Party, a party that was to right all the wrongs from which the plain people suffered and restore the Government to their hands. Until the next presidential election they had time to organize for the crusade. The United States, by 1890, had begun to feel the influence of the agencies of communication in breaking down sectionalism and letting in the light of comparative experience. Men who survived from the generation that flourished before the war found their cherished ideas undermined or shattered. In public life, administration, literature, and religion the old order was being swept away. The United States had become a nation because it could not avoid it. Even the Congregational churches, with whom parish autonomy was vital, had seen fit to erect a National Council. Every important activity of trade had become national, and the only agency that retained its old localism was the law, which must cope with the new order. In many ways the trust problem was the result of an inadequate legal system which left a wide "twilight zone" between the local capacity of the State and the activity of the Nation. Yet the Nation was unfolding and expanding its powers. Railroad control, immigration and labor control, agricultural experiment, irrigation, and reclamation were only samples of the new lines of activity that created new administrative machinery and advanced abreast of the new idea of appointment because of merit and tenure during good behavior. Men who continued to see the center of political gravity in the State Governments were behind the times.