When Watson led the people out,
They marched thro' flood and flame;
Old Livingston tried to turn them back,
But they got there all the same. ¹

SPECULATING UPON THE APPROACHING STRUGGLE for reëlection,
Watson wondered whether the people understood the nature
of the conflict before them. It was, he believed, the same
struggle that in the past had been fought "upon the field of
battle, behind barricades, in the streets of cities, about the scaf-
fold and guillotine . . . but never at the ballot box, as it will next
October and November." It was, in his terms, the struggle be-
tween "Democracy and Plutocracy":

We wonder if the people generally understand the full significance
of this fact? Do our friends understand it? Do our enemies appreciate
its meaning? If so, then the coming contest will be sharp indeed.
There will be neither asking nor giving of quarter, for upon both sides
there will be the consciousness that the contending forces are not un-
equally matched, and that as they represent totally different and op-
posing ideas and theories, there can be but one settlement of the matter
at issue, and that it must come through the utter overthrow of the
one or the other of the parties to the contest.2

-216-