sincerity of the early crusaders, the people assembled in ten thousand schoolhouses to debate the absorbing subject of the currency. Indeed the South and West had become convinced that the miseries inflicted upon mankind by war, pestilence and famine had been less "cruel, unpitying, and unrelenting than the persistent and remorseless exaction" which the contraction of the volume of the currency had made upon society. Low prices, the stagnation of industry, empty and idle stores, workshops and factories, the increase of crime and bankruptcy--all were laid at the door of the gold standard. The East looked upon the rising in the West at first with amusement, and was quite ready to accept the diagnosis of a western newspaper man, quoted by Peck in his _Twenty Years of the Republic_: What's the matter with Kansas? We all know; yet here we are at it again. We have an old moss-back Jacksonian who snorts and howls because there is a bath-tub in the State House. We are running that old jay for Governor.... We have raked the ash-heap of failure in the State and found an old human hoop-skirt who has failed as a business man, who has failed as an editor, who has failed as a preacher, and we are going to run him for Congressman-at-large.... Then we have discovered a kid without a law practice and have decided to run him for Attorney-General. Later the East looked upon tendencies in the West with more concern: Roosevelt, although admitting the honesty of the Populists, characterized their ignorance as "abysmal"; others were more inclined to doubt their sincerity; their conventions were supposed to be made up of cranks and unsexed women; and their principles were looked upon as "wild and crazy notions."