TOPICS OF THE TIME.

Hastings Standard, Issue 47, 20 June 1896, Page 2

TOPICS OF THE TIME.

As the conn try grows richer and larger, writes the American correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald, the national conventions become increasingly dangerous assemblies in numbers ;uid enthusiasm, and perhaps in time they will be, a little more orderly than the medieval elections of a King of Poland. The Republican Convention of St. Louis, will as the phrase runs, " break the record." Sleeping room lias already been provided for 50,000 M'Kinley men. Their principal barracks will be the Exposition Hall, a building covering several acres, whose theatres and showrooms Avill be mapped off into tiny chambers and furnished with cotbeds and washbasins. Each of the other candidates will send on as many thousands of " shouters " as the fac-tion-treasury will support; and at least 100,000 men, aflame with party heat, will for days fill the streets of the city, by night as well as by day, with tumult. Op course the usual machinery of order is powerless in the presence of a crowd such as this ; if the peace were disturbed seriously it would take a dozen regiments of militia and as many (billing rapid-firing guns to restore quiet. Fortunately, Americans are not naturally impatient at trifles; and when a fight breaks out, even the friends of the fighters are more likely than not to confine their sympathy to seeing that their own side gets fair play. Still these enormous gatherings are, at the best, pregnant with peril. The last day of a great convention is something that no one who has ever seen it—especially from behind the scenes—is likely to forget. As the final crisis arrives, the overwrought nerves of the contesting parties till the atmosphere with a magnetism almost pathetic in its significance, and as the vote is announced the eyes of the winners fill with tears of gladness, while the other set of faces sink into a sort of blank dismay. Yet the prize is merely a short four years of power and patronage, and in rare cases perhaps also a lasting place in historv.