ABSTRACT
William Gladstone emerged as the great popular leader of British Liberalism in the 1860’s, and he pursued his spectacular course through the next thirty years. During this period, two men served as the principal figures in the Democratic Party in the United States, Samuel Tilden and Grover Cleveland. Tilden helped lead the Democratic Party back to unity after the shattering experiences of the Civil War, shaped much of its economic thought, and almost captured the White House in 1876. Tilden was a social scientist concerned with quantifiable facts and rationalized institutional arrangements. The sense of outrage against economic privilege was prominent in his mind, but it was set in a forbiddingly cold outlook on the world. Tilden’s scientism was typical of attitudes widespread among academicians and reformers in the northeastern United States. They were expressed in 1865 in the founding of what became the American Social Science Association, a body consciously modeled after a similar group in Britain.
