=Bryan Nominated.=—­In all the history of national conventions never had an orator so completely swayed a multitude; not even Yancey in his memorable plea in the Charleston convention of 1860 when, with grave and moving eloquence, he espoused the Southern cause against the impending fates.  The delegates, after cheering Mr. Bryan until they could cheer no more, tore the standards from the floor and gathered around the Nebraska delegation to renew the deafening applause.  The platform as reported was carried by a vote of two to one and the young orator from the West, hailed as America’s Tiberius Gracchus, was nominated as the Democratic candidate for President.  The South and West had triumphed over the East.  The division was sectional, admittedly sectional—­the old combination of power which Calhoun had so anxiously labored to build up a century earlier.  The Gold Democrats were repudiated in terms which were clear to all.  A few, unable to endure the thought of voting the Republican ticket, held a convention at Indianapolis where, with the sanction of Cleveland, they nominated candidates of their own and endorsed the gold standard in a forlorn hope.

=The Democratic Platform.=—­It was to the call from Chicago that the Democrats gave heed and the Republicans made answer.  The platform on which Mr. Bryan stood, unlike most party manifestoes, was explicit in its language and its appeal.  It denounced the practice of allowing national banks to issue notes intended to circulate as money on the ground that it was “in derogation of the Constitution,” recalling Jackson’s famous attack on the Bank in 1832.  It declared that tariff duties should be laid “for the purpose of revenue”—­Calhoun’s doctrine.  In demanding the free coinage of silver, it recurred to the practice abandoned in 1873.  The income tax came next on the program.  The platform alleged that the law of 1894, passed by a Democratic Congress, was “in strict pursuance of the uniform decisions of the Supreme Court for nearly a hundred years,” and then hinted that the decision annulling the law might be reversed by the same body “as it may hereafter be constituted.”

The appeal to labor voiced by Mr. Bryan in his “crown of thorns” speech was reinforced in the platform.  “As labor creates the wealth of the country,” ran one plank, “we demand the passage of such laws as may be necessary to protect it in all its rights.”  Referring to the recent Pullman strike, the passions of which had not yet died away, the platform denounced “arbitrary interference by federal authorities in local affairs as a violation of the Constitution of the United States and a crime against free institutions.”  A special objection was lodged against “government by injunction as a new and highly dangerous form of oppression by which federal judges, in contempt of the laws of states and rights of citizens, become at once legislators, judges, and executioners.”  The remedy advanced was a federal law assuring trial by jury in all cases of contempt in labor disputes.  Having made this declaration of faith, the Democrats, with Mr. Bryan at the head, raised their standard of battle.