"Before the next national convention of either party meets I'll have tramped over three or four states, and I'll be ready to wager my life ag'in a nickel that I can name the victorious candidate. I'll wager that I can predict it far closer than any newspaper in the land. If you want to know what this country is thinking about, my boy, don't box yourself up in a sanctum and read a few exchanges. Get out and rub elbows with the people. It isn't the few big cities that settle the great political questions. It's the farmer and the villager, and they come pretty near being dead right every time. When I had tramped across seven counties of New York state I shouted for Hughes. A politician in Syracuse who heard me had me thrown out of a meeting and wanted the police to arrest me. I heard that he had a bet of $5,000 on another candidate and was predicting Hughes' defeat by 50,000. But enough of this. I'll switch off and tell you something that has hurt me for the last three or four years. BARNS NOW LOCKED. "Do you know that a few men, comparatively, have almost changed the nature of the country and village population? No, you don't, but you'll learn of it some day through some magazine writer who gathers up his points in the way I have. Time was when not one farmer in ten in the land locked his house or barn at night. Now ninety out of a hundred do it. When a stranger came along they welcomed him. When a man talked with them they accepted his statement. What they saw in the newspapers they believed without cavil. Well, they have got over all this. The patent medicine faker, the mine exploiter, the bucketshop man and the hundreds of other swindlers have destroyed the confidence of the farmer and villager in human nature. They have been bitten so often and so hard that they come to doubt if such a thing as honesty exists. They won't take a stranger's word for anything. They have got through believing that there is an honest advertiser. They have even become distrustful of each other. It has become the hardest kind of work to sell a windmill, piano or other articles direct. VICTIMS OF FAKERS. "You can't get out into the country and walk five miles without finding a victim of the fakers. The farmer has invested in bogus mines, bogus oil wells, bogus stock and bogus other things, and not only lost his money, but come to know that he was as good as robbed of it. The villager has been trapped the same way. It has hardened their hearts and given them the worst view of mankind. You can know nothing of this by telling, nor of the ruin wrought until you get among the people.