The moral superiority may be admitted; but alone it never would and never should contribute to his election.

In times like these a reformer must identify a particular group of remedial measures with his public personality.

The public has a right to know in what definite ways a reformer's righteousness is to be made effective; and Mr.Jerome has never taken any vigorous and novel line in relation to the problems of state and national politics.

When he speaks on those subjects, he loses his vivacity, and betrays in his thinking a tendency to old-fashioned Democracy far beyond that of Mr.Bryan.He becomes in his opinions eminently respectable and tolerably dull, which is, as the late Mr.Alfred Hodder could have told him, quite out of keeping with the part of a "New American." Mr.Jerome has never given the smallest evidence of having taken serious independent thought on our fundamental political problems.

In certain points of detail respecting general political questions he has shown a refreshing freedom from conventional illusions; but, so far as I know, no public word has ever escaped him, which indicates that he has applied his "ideal of intellectual veracity," "his Gallic instinct for consistency," to the creed of his own party.