Of course they are all for the People
and against the Octopus, but beyond this precise and comprehensive
statement of the issue, the reformers have endlessly different views
about the nature of the disease and the severity of the necessary
remedy.
If reform is an ambiguous and many-headed thing, the leading reformers
are as far as possible from being a body of men capable of mutual
cooeperation. They differ almost as widely among themselves as they do
from the beneficiaries or supporters of the existing abuses. William R.
Hearst, William Travers Jerome, Seth Low, and George B. McClellan are
all in their different ways reformers; but they would not constitute
precisely a happy family. Indeed, Mr. Hearst, who in his own opinion is
the only immaculate reformer, is, in the eyes of his fellow-reformers,
as dangerous a public enemy as the most corrupt politician or the most
unscrupulous millionaire. Any reformer who, like Mr. William Jennings
Bryan, proclaims views which are in some respects more than usually
radical, comes in for heartier denunciation from his brothers in reform
than he does from the conservatives.
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