They looked aghast at the result of the counting of votes in Indiana. That much-talked-of, recently-discovered Gas belt, in which had sprung up innumerable manufactories, whose workshops were filled with “Common People,” had failed to find an all-obscuring attraction in the glittering gold that the magnates of wealth had held out to them as an inducement to perpetuate the power of the rich and to increase those privileges and class distinctions that they fondly hoped would be accorded to them by the American people. Verily, like DeFarge, in Dickens’ “Tale of Two Cities,” the workman of the manufacturers in Indiana had presumed to hurl the magical Louis piece back into the carriages of the wealthy, rejecting with indignation the attempt to bribe their honor, and their sense of the equality of man.
The negro of Alabama, Georgia, and Virginia, upon whom these bondholders thought they had a mortgage, by their claimed procurement of his emancipation, had, even in spite of his color, previous condition, and gratitude, joined with his fellow-citizens, the “Common People,” taking as the representative of those who had most benefited him and his race, the immortal Abraham Lincoln, a man of the “Common People”; and, by the negro’s vote, was added strength to the blow, struck by the white Democracy of the Union, at this arrogant assumption of that thing which the negro, along with the white man, had learned to hate and resent--the assumption of “caste” upon the part of any set of citizens in the United States of America.
The wool-grower of Ohio, the home of the popular McKinley, added sorrow to the cup held to the lips of the would-be aristocrats. He no longer felt bound to bow his head before the advantages held out by the party of wealth. He preferred to take a little less for his wool, and a little more respect for himself, his wife, and children in the social world, where every landmark of equality was being washed away by the tide of aristocratic tendencies. The bewildered Republican leaders gazed with terror upon the transmogrified weapons with which they had waged war. The sword of steel, when held by the hand clad in a golden gauntlet, had become a weapon of straw. They murmured to one another: “If these weapons have failed us, in what shall we seek safety?”