_The public always knows when the watering is done!_ It was so with the Steel Combine; it has been so with every railroad reorganization which Morgan has managed; it was so with Amalgamated Copper. * * * * * “_Publicity is the remedy!_” says Woodrow, the Sage. How can that be? Does the knowledge that we are being robbed stop the robbery? There is no secrecy about the Beef Trust. Publicity there has run riot. We know all about the Refrigerator car, the rebate, the discriminations, the Big Stick methods, the colossal, un-Godly profits. We know how the cattle owner is robbed when the Trust buys, and how the consumer of dressed meat is robbed when he buys. What good does the Publicity do us? None at all. It makes us rage and rant, but the Trust gets our money just the same. Have not Lawson and Russell and Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens and a dozen others put the flashlight upon all these monstrous piratical combinations until the very children are familiar with the details? _Publicity?_ Why, if there is anything that we have got a lavish supply of, just now, _it is Publicity_. What we haven’t got is RELIEF. If _Publicity_ were a cure for the disease, we’d have been well long ago. As it is, the evil grows worse, day by day, in spite of all the _Publicity_. Go back to thy gerund-grinding, Woodrow—thou insufferable, impractical prig. Among the dead Greeks and the extinct Romans thy labors may, haply, be useful; but when thou comest among the practical men of today seeking to master actual conditions and to take part in the great battle of thought, motive and purpose which rages around us, thou art but “a babby, and a gal babby at that.” * * * * * Mr. Bryan says, in his _Commoner_, that “the movement begun in 1896 would have succeeded in 1900 had it not been for the Spanish War and the increase of the gold supply.” What a superficial view! First of all, the “movement” did not begin in 1896. It began when the West and South were brought together by the Farmers’ Alliance in 1890. It was in full swing when it gave General Weaver 1,200,000 votes in 1892. It was running like a millrace when it polled 1,800,000 in the local elections of 1894. It would have scored a triumph in 1896 had the Democratic leaders acted honestly with the Populists. After 1896 the “movement” lost strength every day. In 1900 it was doomed to defeat before the campaign opened. * * * * * Yes; the reform “movement” was in full swing in 1890, and one of the good things it did was to float into Congress a promising young lawyer named Bryan. To the Populist movement W. J. B. owes his rise, for there were then no Democrats to speak of in Nebraska. Populist votes carried his home State for him in 1896, when he ran for President against McKinley. In 1900 Nebraska went Republican, although the same Bryan was running against the same McKinley.