The fight for free silver was carried by the silver state delegations to the floor of the convention, where it was defeated by a vote of 818-1/2 to 105-1/2. At this point, led by Senators from Colorado and Utah, thirty-four members withdrew from the convention in protest. Even the Prohibition party had already been broken by the new issue. The humorous weekly, _Life_, spoke seriously when it declared that "The two great parties in the country at this writing are the Gold party and the Silver party. The old parties are in temporary eclipse." Few were satisfied with the Republican result, for while the platform pointed one way and the candidate's career pointed the other on free silver, the real interest of the party, protection, aroused no enthusiasm. No Democrat was the predetermined candidate of his party when it met at Chicago in July, 1896. Cleveland, least of all, was not given even the scanty notice of a commendatory plank. He stood alone as no other President had done, at issue with the Republicans on their major policy, yet without followers in his own organization. Slow, patient, courageous, stubborn, he had twice held his party to its promise, and he had refused to be carried away by the transitory demand of the West for dangerous finance. He had guided the National Administration through eight years of expansion and reorganization, and had been a devoted servant of civil service reform. In May, 1896, he had aggravated his offenses in the eyes of the politicians by issuing new rules that extended the classified service to include some 31,000 new employees, making a total of 86,000 out of 178,000 federal employees. He passed out of party politics at least two years before his term expired, and in 1897 he took up his final abode in Princeton. From Princeton he wrote and spoke for eleven years, and before he died in 1908 the animosities of 1896 were forgotten, and he looked large in the American mind as a statesman whose independence and sincerity were beyond reproach.