The inter-state railroads constitute such an enormous percentage of the total mileage of the country that if centralized governmental control was dangerous for all the railroads of the country, it would be almost equally dangerous for that proportion of the railway mileage operated as part of inter-state systems.

In the one and the same speech, that is, Mr.Bryan placed himself on record as a radical centralizer of economic and political power and as a man who was on general principles afraid of centralization and opposed to it.

No wonder public opinion did not take his proposal seriously, and no wonder he himself has gradually dropped it out of his practical programme.
The confusion and inconsistency of Mr.Bryan's own thinking is merely the reflection of the confusion and inconsistency resident in the creed of his party.

It is particularly conspicuous in his case, because he is, as I have intimated, a sincere and within limits a candid thinker; but Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democrats alike have always distrusted and condemned the means whereby alone the underlying purposes of democracy can be fulfilled.

Mr.Bryan is in no respect more genuinely Democratic than in his incoherence.