“This last item is the deduction of optimism from the foregoing. The heavy popular vote for the Populist electors in some of the Southern States serves principally to show that under the conditions existing in 1892, the solid South would have been broken and its solid electoral vote lost to the democracy had not the Force Bill issue been put at the front. The twenty-three electoral votes credited to Weaver in the West and Northwest separate themselves, on analysis, into elements in which the Omaha platform and the specially characteristic features of the Alliance movement sustain a subordinate part. Colorado and Nevada went for Weaver because they were for silver, not because they were for Weaver. Kansas, Idaho, North Dakota, and the one vote in Oregon were gained by the acquiescence of the Democratic managers in a scheme of fusion obviously to the advantage of the Democratic national ticket. Weaver’s proportion of the vote, either popular or electoral, cannot be accepted as a trustworthy measure of the growth of public sentiment in the West in favor of the general programme drawn up at Omaha.
“The first solid and effective achievement in the list is the direct gain of the Populists in their representation in the Congress of the United States. This means something. They must have Senators and Representatives if they are ever going to shape the legislation of the country; and until they can legislate, or muster sufficient strength at the Capitol to force legislation agreeable to their ideas of public policy, they have accomplished nothing. Now they turn up with five Senators, as they believe, and with at least ten Representatives, as they have reason to be certain. It is a respectable showing for a new party, even if we do not count the silver Senators as Populists out and out. But, as an indication of the probable strength of the Populists in the Fifty-fourth Congress, or in the Fifty-fifth, as a reasonable assurance of future progressive development, it is worthless. We need only remind the Populists that their predecessor, the so-called National party, representing the greenback craze, and, in a measure, the dissatisfaction with political conditions that marked the period after the counting in of Hayes, went into the Forty-sixth House with fourteen Congressmen. The Greenbackers and Readjusters went into the Forty-seventh House with eleven Congressmen. In the Forty-eighth, their strength dropped to two. The Greenback wave had swept off and away; the two old parties confronted each other as before, and the phenomenon of a third party in Congress, mustering more than a dozen lawgivers, had disappeared as utterly as if it had never been.