Then he fell in love with the Initiative and Referendum. Mightily in favor of giving Direct Legislation to the people was Bryan. But again the Bourbons raised their hands in holy horror, and again Bryan flunked. “Willing to teach the children that the earth is flat, or that it is round, whichever a majority of the School Board prefer”;—that’s the kind of pedagogue partisan politics has made out of W. J. B. Then we heard him endorse Roosevelt, and agree with the President that Congress ought to pay the campaign expenses of the two old twins,—Chang and Eng,—and that honest bankers should be punished for crimes _they_ didn’t commit, and that the Government should not establish Postal savings banks but should perpetuate the National banks! Then we saw him dictate the Denver platform which is more Hamiltonian than the Parker platform of 1904, and less favorable to the masses than the platform of Mr. Taft. We saw him choose a Standard Oil tool for the Chairmanship of his Finance Committee; we saw the Tobacco represented on the same Committee; we saw him courting David B. Hill, Judge Parker, Charles Murphy, Pat McCarren and “Fingy” Conners; we saw him yoke up with the liquor interests in Maine, Indiana and Ohio; we saw him change his whole political creed until Ryan, Belmont, Harriman and Rockefeller had nothing to fear from him, and we saw him conduct a campaign in which he stood for no distinct vital _democratic principle_, whatever. Then we saw him dodge when the President asked him, through the newspapers, how he stood on the Pearre bill which seeks to have Congress declare that a man’s business is not entitled to the same protection as his property. Impaled on that point, Bryan could do nothing but squirm. Then indeed, he lost out with level-headed men of all parties. II. Burdened with the record of his own instability, Bryan this year lost, practically, everything excepting the South. True, he got Nevada (two electoral votes,) and Colorado (five votes,) and Nebraska, (eight votes,) but this state he carried by making a piteous, tearful personal appeal,—and even then he got only a plurality, not a majority, and ran far behind the Democratic State ticket; but the West has repudiated him, just as the South and East have done. It would not be worth while to dwell upon the humiliation of that political serfdom which kept the South in the Bryan column. The South voted for Bryan, _and is glad he wasn’t elected_. Everybody, who knows anything, knows _that_. The fact ought to be able to penetrate the conceit of Bryan himself. But is the fact important? It _is_, for its first consequence will be the elimination of Bryan, and its second will be the restoration of the South to her historic position in the Republic. It is the beginning of Southern self-assertion; the end of her political nullity. Never again can Mr. Bryan hope to secure the support of the South. His record makes it impossible for her delegates to acquiesce in his nomination.