Every Southern Senator, with one ex
ception, voted his endorsement of the
President’s course. Every Southern au
dience which has been tested on the sub
ject, has leaped to its feet to wildly cheer
Mr. Roosevelt.
And now, Mr. Bryan, who never had
the manhood to open his lips about
Brownsville at the time when the whole
country rang with it, sees an opportunity
to play politics with it, and he grovels in
the dust to do it.
He tells the negro delegation that he
condemns the President’s course. He
makes his bid, and gets what he sought, —
the promise of the negro vote in the
doubtful states of the North and West.
But, for once, the cunning of Mr.
Bryan has led him too far. When he told
the negro delegation that he condemned
President Roosevelt’s dismissal of these
riotous and murderous brutes who had
disgraced the uniforms they wore,
AND WHO HAD SPLASHED THE
STREETS OF A SOUTHERN TOWN
WITH SOUTHERN BLOOD, he made
a fatal play in his unscrupulous game.
He should have remembered the ugly
trait of character he exposed when he
said, in 1891, that he could not vote for a
Confederate soldier.
He should have known that his going
over to the side of Foraker, the notorious
South-hater, in that Brownsville matter,
would revive the recollection that he,
Bryan —a native of Illinois —had refused
to cast his vote for Crisp for speaker of
the House of Representatives, when all
opposition to him and the Democratic
side had melted away. “CAN’T AF
FORD TO VOTE FOR AN EX-CON
FEDERATE SOLDIER” declared the
calculating Mr. Bryan. He did not dream
that the time would ever come when his
very life, politically, would depend upon.
