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THE TARIFF IN OUR TIMES

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO

SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited

LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA

MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.

TORONTO

THE TARIFF IN OUR TIMES

BY

IDA M. TARBELL

AUTHOR OF

“THE LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN,” “THE HISTORY OF THE STANDARD OIL COMPANY,” “MADAME ROLAND,” ETC.

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1911

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1906, 1907, 1909, 1910, 1911,

By THE PHILLIPS PUBLISHING CO.

Copyright, 1911,

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1911.

Norwood Press

J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

TO

W. W. T.

PREFACE

It takes no extended examination of any period in the last fifty years—the term covered by the phrase “Our Times” in the title of this book—to convince an unprejudiced student that as far as the tariff is concerned public opinion has never been fairly embodied in the bills adopted. If the popular understanding of protection as expressed in our elections had been conscientiously followed, there would be to-day no duties on iron and steel products, on cheap cottons and cotton mixtures, and, certainly none on a great variety of raw materials probably including raw wool. That is, in these cases and in multitudes of similar ones, the purposes of protection had been realized, or it had been proved that they never could be realized; and in either case the dogma required the duty to be withdrawn. This volume is an attempt to tell in narrative form the story of this defeat of the popular will.

The major part of the material in the volume has appeared at intervals in the last five years in the American Magazine. So many persons concerned in the making of our tariffs in the period covered have aided me directly or indirectly by documents, personal reminiscences, and explanations of points of view that I find it out of the question to attempt to enumerate them. In one case, however, my debt is so great that I must acknowledge it specifically, and that is to Mr. Horace White, who has read, either in manuscript or proofs, the bulk of this volume and who has been generous in his suggestions and criticisms.

CONTENTS

THE TARIFF IN OUR TIMES

CHAPTER I
THE TARIFF AS A WAR TAX

If there was any public question on which the minds of the people of the United States were made up fifty years ago, it was that of the tariff. They had not been made up in a day. On the contrary, it had taken nearly seventy years of experimenting to bring them where they were—seventy years in which all forms of taxation on imported goods had been tried, from the supposed 8½ per cent of the first Congress to the 43 per cent of the “tariff of abominations” in 1828. Some of their experiments had been good and some bad, but out of them all they had struck a mean which was something like this: As a nation we intend to raise money to carry on our business by putting a duty on certain raw and manufactured goods brought from foreign countries. If we find we are getting too large a revenue we will cut down the duty, if too small we will raise it. In placing these duties we will do as Alexander Hamilton advised—that is, if there is a young industry in the country trying to produce something which is essential to war or on which our daily living depends, we will protect it from foreign competition until it is established—but no longer.

For ten years the country had been working on this tariff platform, and so satisfied were they with it that when they found in 1857 they were taking in more money than they needed for expenses, they promptly passed a bill cutting the duties down to an average of 20 per cent—the lowest they had been since 1816. The duty on many articles they removed entirely—thus, cheap raw wool was allowed to come in free. Nobody, except the Pennsylvanians, and a few New Englanders, objected strongly to the bill; even the majority of manufacturers and old Henry Clay tariff men agreed. Henry Clay had told them that protective duties were never meant to be perpetual, and they looked upon this lowering of taxes as a natural step in the process of gradual extinction which they had been taught to expect.

Not only was the mind of the country satisfied with lower duties and an increasing list of free goods, but it had accepted the idea that a Christian nation should establish as rapidly as possible reciprocal trade relations with its neighbors. For three years a reciprocity treaty between ourselves and Canada had been working. It was not as good a treaty as might be, and the Canadians were getting greater advantages from it than we; but it could be improved, and there was much pride in the country over the advance it was felt this treaty showed in national broad-mindedness and generosity.

That was fifty years ago. To-day the average tax on dutiable goods imported into the United States is nearer 50 per cent than 20. Instead of reciprocity with Canada we have had for fifty years in many cases prohibitive protection. Why is this? What has become of the theories and practices of fifty years ago?

The answer lies in a curious story—a story of a panic and a war and the natural penalties which panics and wars impose. The panic came first—in 1857, just after Congress had lowered duties to prevent the collection of more money than we needed for actual expenses. It was a logical enough panic—panics always are logical. For several years the country had been making money. It had lost its head over its growing wealth—had speculated, had built railroads faster than they were needed, had spent lavishly. Its expenses finally outran its income and a crash naturally came.

The tariff had nothing whatever to do with the disturbance, but the effect of the panic on the national income was soon evident; straitened for money the country bought less abroad, buying less the revenue was less. In 1857 it had been $64,000,000, but the year after it was but 42 millions, and the year after that (1859) but 48 millions. Instead of too much money, Congress saw itself with too little. Its credit was sadly disturbed, not only or chiefly because of this falling revenue, but because of the agitation of the slavery question and the increasing contention between North and South.

It was natural enough, of course, that when the revenues from imports continued to be too little to pay the government’s bills, there should be a demand for higher duties. This demand was headed by a member of the House of Representatives from Vermont, Mr. Justin S. Morrill.

Mr. Morrill was an able and honest man, who had been sent to Congress by the “Conscience Whigs” of his district—not because he had sought the office, but purely because they believed from what they had seen of him as a merchant in their community, they could trust him to represent them on the slavery question. Now, Mr. Morrill was one of the Whigs who had not been satisfied to see duties lowered in 1857, and who strenuously objected to letting in raw products free of duty. He wanted all wool protected. He wanted his Vermont marble protected. He wanted maple sugar protected. He was one of the few New England representatives who had spoken, as well as voted, against the bill of 1857, and his speech at that time had been very able. Indeed it made him the acknowledged head of the active protectionist sentiment left in the country, for he made no bones about declaring his faith. “Such articles of primary necessity,” he said, “as there is any hope of successfully producing should be waked into life, nursed into perennial vigor by moderate and steady discrimination in their favor, so long as their condition makes it proper, so long as there is a probable chance of ultimate success.”

Mr. Morrill saw the opportunity for reviving protection in 1858 when the revenues were insufficient, and he determined to prepare a new bill which should represent his views. But the interest in the subject at that moment was so little that he could not get a hearing from the House. The next session, however, gave him a rare chance. In the fall of 1859 a Congress largely Republican took its seat. After a fierce fight this Congress elected a Republican speaker, and this speaker put a young man destined to play a large part in National finances at the head of the Ways and Means Committee—John Sherman of Ohio. Mr. Sherman was just 37 years old, and as shrewd, as active, and as experienced a politician as the Republicans had in the House. He had begun his political life when about 21 years old with but two political tenets—hatred of the Democratic party and belief in protection of American industries. Political conscience had been unstirred within him until the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. That turned him into a Crusader. Sherman had been fighting solely against slavery extension for six years, when his appointment to the head of the Ways and Means Committee suddenly made it his duty to consider finances. At once his old faith in protection asserted itself, and he gave full support to Mr. Morrill, who was instructed by the Committee of Ways and Means to prepare a new tariff bill.

Mr. Morrill worked out his bill with great care and patience, and when it came out of committee early in 1860 it represented very nearly what he believed. Mr. Sherman, who from this time on had much to do with tariff bills, says in his autobiography that the Morrill Bill at the start was nearer meeting the double requirement of revenue and protection than any bill he was ever familiar with.

But good as the bill may have been when it came from the committee, it was soon assaulted right and left by those who had something to protect or those who were affected by what it protected. Much of the pressure, Mr. Morrill found, was impossible to resist. What can you do when a Senator of the United States, one so famous as Charles Sumner, “calls your attention” to letting cocoa in free (though according to the principle on which you are working it should pay a slight duty) because his friend, the head of an “eminent house” (the friend was Henry L. Pierce and the “eminent house” was his chocolate factory), wants his cocoa free? What are you to do when Pennsylvania iron men and Rhode Island manufacturers, who according to your theory of protection are established and whose duties should gradually be lowered, come down on you for higher rates, and your party colleagues tell you that if you refuse their requests the election may be lost and the cause of human freedom be retarded? Amendment after amendment was tacked on the bill, many of them in direct contradiction of Mr. Morrill’s principles. They destroyed the justice and the consistency of the measure, and he became so disgusted that he was ready to abandon it. Inconsistency was less troublesome to Mr. Sherman, however. He was a “practical politician,” something Mr. Morrill never was. He believed more revenue to be necessary; he believed in protection; he believed in winning votes for the party wherever and however he could. This bill contributed to all these ends, and he himself undertook to engineer it through the House. Mr. Sherman’s task was made the easier because in May, when the Republicans had met in Chicago to nominate their candidate for president, they had put into their platform a plank which pledged the party to support protection, though they did not have the courage to use the word. This plank was plainly a bid for the vote of communities which could be held to the party only by protection, preëminently the state of Pennsylvania. The great leaders of the party, Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Chase, and Mr. Seward, did not believe that the tariff should be taken up at all at this time. Indeed, only a few days before he was nominated as president Mr. Lincoln wrote to a correspondent that “the tariff question ought not to be agitated in the Chicago Convention.” Mr. Chase had always stood with the Democrats on the matter, and Seward had expressed his view in the Senate in 1857 when the tariff bill was up: “It is not wise, it is not just, to draw from the pockets of the people into the Treasury of the country an amount of money greater than the current expenses of the Treasury require.”

The Morrill Bill passed the House in May, 1860, but the Senate would have none of it. That body was still Democratic and the South still led. Not only was the South strongly free trade in its opinions, but at that moment no bill originating with the Republicans had a ghost of a chance, such was the bitterness of the feeling. The bill went over to the next session, and the next session brought a tragic change in the Senate. By the time Mr. Morrill’s bill had a hearing six states had withdrawn from the Union, and their Senators had left Washington. The withdrawal of the Southern Senators left the control to the Republicans, and it soon became evident that the bill would probably pass. The result was a fierce onslaught by all sorts of interests. Almost everybody got what he wanted. Some of the items which went into the schedule were long subjects of mirth and scandal to the opposition. Such was the protection of 20 per cent accorded to wood-screws. At that time there was but one small factory for wood-screws in the country. It was situated in Providence, Rhode Island, and Senator Simmons, who secured its protection, and who was popularly supposed to be interested in the concern, was long known as “Wood-Screw” Simmons. The bill also carried a generous basket clause into which all raw materials and all manufactured articles “not otherwise provided for” were dumped.

It was little wonder that jobbery found an easy way into the bill. The country was in an uproar over secession and in a state of doubt and unrest about Mr. Lincoln—what would he do? Was he the man for a crisis? A poor time indeed to consider deliberately so serious a matter as new tariff schedules! There was an imperative need of money and it looked as if this bill would give it, so the Morrill Bill finally went through, and 48 hours before his term ended President Buchanan gave it his signature.

The immediate effect of the Morrill Bill was something quite unlooked for. The increased tariffs made Europe deeply indignant. England and France were particularly hard hit; for instance, the duties on cheap clothes, of which they sent us great quantities, were largely raised. Besides the growing free trade sentiment abroad, the sentiment of the liberal party everywhere was shocked that the new Republican party, which had arisen against human slavery, should take the narrower view of commerce. To make the matter worse for the Republicans, the seceders, in session at Montgomery, adopted a tariff for revenue only. Thus, before Sumter was fired on, Europe had turned to the Confederacy as the more liberal in commercial policy. It is probable that if the Morrill Bill had been simply a revenue measure the cause of the North would have met a very different reception in Europe from what it did.

The London Times clearly stated the foreign point of view:

“It will not be our fault if the inopportune legislation of the North combined with the reciprocity of wants between ourselves and the South should bring about considerable modification in our relations with America. No one after the recent debate on the slave trade can doubt that England is still in earnest on this point, and will never buy commercial advantage at the cost of her honor. We should infinitely prefer dealing with a single responsible government to maintaining two embassies and running the risk of misunderstandings with two highly sensitive democracies. But the tendencies of trade are inexorable, and our manufactures will infallibly find their way to the best market with the regularity of a mechanical law.... It may be the Southern population will become our best customers.... Granted that a permanent secession can be effected by a ‘peaceful appeal to the ballot-box,’ and that the moral and economical evils of slavery do not prove fatal to a society based on it, material prosperity will not fail to follow unrestricted intercourse, and the free States will long repent an act which brings needless discredit on the intrinsic merits of their cause.”

This “discredit” to the cause grew in Europe as the days went on. Not only did the bill hurt Northern trade and alienate European sympathy, it was the chief reason the Confederates had for thinking their new government would succeed. It was driving trade to their ports, thus giving them money. It was making Europe their friend, thus giving them position. And nothing could be done. On all sides the Morrill tariff was denounced as a stupidity, a blunder, an outrage. There were even many demands for an extra session to repeal it. Too late the Republicans saw that their first measure as a party had been a mistake. And then suddenly the whole situation of the unhappy bill was changed by the breaking out of war between the North and South.

The first and most imperative necessity in war is money, for money means everything else—men, guns, ammunition. Mr. Lincoln and his cabinet when they found in the spring of 1861 that they were in for a war of more than 90 days, at once called an extra session of Congress to provide the means for carrying it on. It fell to Mr. Chase, the new Secretary of the Treasury, to suggest what could be done. Practically our whole income came at that time from duties on imported goods. How could they be made to yield more? What other sources of revenue could be tapped? Mr. Chase had various suggestions to make, but it is with only one of them that we have to do here—the raising of the tariff on imported goods.

Under other circumstances it would not have been agreeable for Mr. Chase to suggest increased duties. All his life he had been what the Whigs called a free trader—that is, he had preached Democratic doctrines on the tariff. He was one of a large number of leaders in the Republican party who had originally been Democrats and who had joined the new organization solely because of its anti-slavery sentiments, and who had reluctantly swallowed the new party’s leanings towards protection, hoping always, no doubt, to uproot them finally. Mr. Chase had probably been the less inclined to make any show of objection to the protectionist program of the new organization because he had hoped to be its choice for president. But Mr. Chase had not been his party’s choice for president. On the contrary, he had been obliged to accept from his successful rival a portfolio for which he had no love and no training—that of Secretary of the Treasury. Disappointed as he was, badly used as he felt himself to be, he undertook manfully the hard task of raising money for the war. From the first his determination and confidence were the firmest. The money was in the country. It must come into the National Treasury, if not by one means, then by another. “The war must go on,” he told the bankers who hesitated to take his loans, in July, 1861, “until this rebellion is put down, if we have to put out paper until it takes a thousand dollars to buy a breakfast.” And when they gave him their terms with a “this-is-our-ultimatum,” he replied, “It is for me to make ultimatums; not you.” Higher tariffs then instead of lower Mr. Chase naturally advised, and he asked Congress to amend the Morrill Bill to this end. Many of its duties he raised, articles which it placed on the free list he took off. On many articles he arranged for a double duty, that is, duty on both value and quantity, and he tacked to the bill a direct tax of $20,000,000 to be divided among the states and a tax on all incomes of over $800. Mr. Chase expected from this measure as amended to get something like $80,000,000 of the $318,000,000 he calculated he would need in the next year (ending June 30, 1862).

There was no delay in the adoption of the bill. Its worst enemies were for it. Even the New York Evening Post, which had fought the Morrill Bill with teeth and claws, which had called it a “booby of a bill,” the “blunder of the age,” now said resignedly that in the situation the best thing to do was to “patch it up.” “The great object we have in view during the continuance of the war by financial regulations,” said the Post, “is to raise, in the easiest and least burdensome manner, the largest possible amount of revenue. To further this object, free traders can readily work with protectionists. War is an exceptional state and demands extraordinary measures. For this reason we are prepared to support a scale of duties at present which we should oppose if the nation were at peace.”

Thus, in less than five months after its passage the Morrill Bill, a protectionist measure, framed when there was but little protectionist sentiment in the country and made a law by the signature of a Democratic president elected on a platform of free trade throughout the world, a bill so changed from its first condition that its author had been inclined to abandon it, loaded with jobs, the cause of serious business disturbances in the North, of the alienation of European sympathy, of great gain and satisfaction to the South, had been accepted with resignation by its most intelligent enemies. Almost without knowing it the country had returned to a policy which nearly 20 years before it had abandoned. It is not too much to call the measure the foundation of a revolution in our commercial life. Henry C. Cary, the economist, did not greatly exaggerate its importance when he wrote Mr. Morrill: “You have connected your name with what is destined, I think, to prove the most important measure ever adopted”; nor did Mr. Blaine when he said, in his Recollections, that if the Morrill Bill had been passed under other circumstances, it would have been regarded as an “era in the history of the government.”

Mr. Chase had calculated that the receipts from the amended Morrill Bill would amount to about $80,000,000 a year, but they fell far short—only about 51 millions, of which the customs yielded 49 millions. The expenses of the war increased at a frightful rate, and it was soon evident that the struggle was to be longer than had been expected. Early in 1862 new schemes of taxation began to be considered. The result was that the Ways and Means Committee decided to ask Congress to pass an internal revenue bill, and still further to add to the duties provided for in the Morrill Bill. It was in June when the two new measures came from the committee. Taken together they were calculated to make the country gasp. The tax bill touched almost every article of daily life. It provided for licenses on a man’s business whatever it was—running a bowling alley, a hotel, or an attorney’s office; for taxes on his income and his inheritances, on his carriages, his gold watch, his silver plate; for revenue stamps on the documents he signed, the telegrams he sent, the matches he struck; nothing that he ate or drank or made escaped. The direct taxation on manufactured articles was so high that in many cases it would have acted as a bonus to foreigners to bring in their goods if the Ways and Means Committee had not foreseen this, and aimed to amend the tariff law so that increased duties would compensate for the internal taxes. As might have been expected from the hurried way in which the bill had been prepared, the duties intended as compensations were not always exact. Sometimes, as in the case of books and umbrellas, they were insufficient, and the foreigner could bring over his wares and undersell the overtaxed domestic producer. Again, the duties were in excess of the direct taxes and served only to protect the home manufacturer in extortionate prices. Thaddeus Stevens, the chairman of the Committee, and Mr. Morrill both explained to the House with great care that the whole scheme of the changes was to make the additional duty cover as nearly as possible the internal taxes. “If we bleed manufacturers we must see that the proper tonic is administered at the same time,” said Mr. Morrill. Any duty not compensatory was placed purely for revenue reasons. In no case, they said, were the new duties for protective purposes—the whole change must be regarded as “temporary”—a war measure, and nothing else.

It was a foregone conclusion that the bills whatever their provisions would pass, for the people were actually demanding taxation, that the war might be properly waged. Nevertheless, there was much bitter remonstrance at the duplication of taxes, which in certain cases was excessive and unjust. Take the newspaper business, for instance. Almost everything a printing house used was taxed—paper paid 3 per cent; a duty was put also on rags imported for paper making, which still further raised the price; the advertising income was taxed. Revenue stamps were required on every telegram a member of the staff sent, on every check made out, on every official paper signed. When the bill was under consideration, the New York Herald computed that it would add from thirty to forty thousand dollars a year to its expenses. The Herald got great joy out of the situation. It could afford the expense, but in its judgment no other New York newspaper could, and in a long and interesting editorial (July 1, 1862) it said, jubilantly: “Many papers will be killed, but the Tribune and the Evening Post will die first. They have no advertising patronage and but very little circulation, and so by a just retribution of Providence they will be the first victims of the taxation which they have brought upon us by causing our Civil War.” The comforting assurance of the destruction of his two hated contemporaries, combined with the disgust and anger of England over the increased duties, gave Mr. Bennett such satisfaction at this time that he became almost benevolent towards the Lincoln administration.

Mr. Greeley did not share Mr. Bennett’s conviction that the Tribune would be destroyed by the new taxes, for he wrote Mr. Morrill:

“If newspapers are to be taxed at all, their advertising can bear it best, as it is a source of profit which circulation is not. We can stand 2 mills per pound on paper—though that will be a pretty productive tax. I think that item alone will cost the Tribune establishment $7000 per annum, all to come out of profits that can’t be made in these times. Still taxes must be put on—only do give us some substantial retrenchment—especially of mileage—to go to the people on.”

The House passed the new bill promptly. Even if it had felt more seriously than it did the objections to it there would have been little chance of delay, for the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, was a dictator who tolerated little interference with any measure he approved. Mr. Stevens at this time was a man of 70, sombre and gaunt, with rugged features, deep-set eyes, and a splendid brow. He was lame, a club foot, and his health was permanently broken. But never had his wit been keener, his sarcasm more biting, his eloquence greater, his will more indomitable. He understood Congressional tactics as few men ever have, and he was a filibuster of first order. He was frequently unscrupulous in getting what he wanted. If he wanted it, it must be right and the means were a secondary consideration. Stevens always stood by his own, right or wrong, not that he entertained illusions about his Republican colleagues. “Which one is our d——d rascal?” he asked one day when called upon to vote in a contested election case, and “our d——d rascal” got his vote. The last thing Stevens would allow was delay over revenue bills. If a member took to questions he considered immaterial in the debate he hauled him back sharply to his muttons, and it was a rash man indeed who offended a second time. Only one thing would send him off on a tangent, and that was an effort to secure some advantage over a man of another race or color. In the debate on the present bill, for instance, he broke out in a fiery denunciation of California because the representatives were trying to secure a high duty on cleaned rice, which the Chinese used almost exclusively. The Californians frankly avowed that the duty was intended as a discrimination against the Chinaman. Stevens was at them in an instant, the engineering of the bill quite forgotten, in a hot speech against the injustice of their attitude.

That there was discrimination possible against your white fellow-man in applying a protective tariff, Stevens seems never to have understood. Duties were never too high for him, particularly on iron, for he was an iron manufacturer as well as a lawyer, and it was often said in Pennsylvania that the duties he advocated in no way represented the large iron interests of the state, but were hoisted to cover the needs of his own small and badly managed works. He was as unsound on all financial matters as he was on protection. He wanted to pay the war debt in greenbacks, had a horror of gold going out of the country, and once proposed a law forbidding it to be bought and sold. But taken all in all, Thaddeus Stevens was probably what the House needed in the crisis, a prejudiced, violent dictator, with a holy passion for the Union cause. Such men get things done if the after-cost of their work is heavy. Stevens soon sent the tax and tariff bills to the Senate, where, if not greatly improved, they were passed with promptness. Considerable suspicion was popularly attached to many of the Senate changes in the excise bill, particularly because of the close connection with it of Senator Simmons of Rhode Island. The Senator’s connection with the Morrill Bill which had won him the sobriquet of “Wood-Screw” Simmons has been referred to above. It was fresh in public mind then. He still further distinguished himself at the time he was engineering the tax bill by a gun contract so unsavory that it had to be investigated. It was shown beyond quibble that he had been promised $50,000 for getting a contract for one of his constituents and that he had already received some thousands of the money. The Senator did not pretend to deny the fact, but he declared his transaction to be “strictly legal.” The committee was severe on him. He had no more right to sell his influence, they said, than his vote, both were “the property of the country”; but they intimated that as he was really no worse than many of his colleagues, it was better to let him off, and let off he was, though he soon resigned. The affair did not raise the tax bill in the estimation of the public, nor increase public confidence in the merits of the compensating tariffs which accompanied it.

The passing of the bill went almost unnoticed by the press, so engrossed were the people in war. (It was the summer of McClellan’s Virginia campaign.) A few newspapers of free-trade principles tried to make an issue of it, but without success. Mr. Greeley came out in the Tribune declaring that he would not be drawn into a discussion on protection as long as the war lasted. Indeed there was room for little on the wonderful editorial page of the Tribune, where Horace Greeley stripped bare his agonized heart, but the war and the emancipation of the slave. Greeley, too, was satisfied enough to let protection reëstablish itself through a revenue bill, for if there was anything which he held almost as sacred as human liberty, it was the doctrine of protection to American industries. Greeley saw protection as an actual wealthproducer, and when the Morrill Bill was up in 1860, he declared: “We have as undoubting faith that this bill if passed would add at least $100,000,000 per annum to the earnings and wages of labor throughout the country as we have that the sun will rise to-morrow.” He was one of a very few men in public life whose belief was something more than an inheritance from Henry Clay. In one of his Institute talks he once told how he became a protectionist:

“From early boyhood I had sat at the feet of Hezekiah Niles, Henry Clay and Walter Forward and Rollin C. Mallary, and other champions of this doctrine, and I had attained from a perusal of theirs and kindred writings and speeches a most undoubting conviction that the policy they commended was eminently calculated to impel our country swiftly and surely onward through activity and prosperity to greatness and well-assured well-being. I had studied the question dispassionately, for the journals accessible to my boyhood were mainly those of Boston, then almost if not quite unanimously hostile to protection; but the arguments they combated seemed to me far stronger than those they advanced, and I early became an earnest and ardent disciple of the schools of Niles and Carey, and could not doubt that the policy they commended was that best calculated to lead a country of vast and undeveloped resources like ours up from rude poverty and dependence to skilled efficiency, wealth, and power.”

It is undoubtedly true that the mantle of the early protectionist advocates Niles and Carey fell on Horace Greeley, and that what the one did in the “Register” and the other in his pamphlets, Greeley continued in the Tribune.

There was much calculating on all sides of the amount the new tax bills would yield. Harper’s Weekly at the start estimated that it would be $185,000,000, and in November (1862) it said the amount would be nearer $275,000,000, but it was far too sanguine. At the end of the year (June, 1863) it was found that the customs had yielded less than $64,000,000 and the excise only about $41,000,000, and the country had been spending in the last two years an average of over one and one-half millions a day. The funds raised by taxation were a bagatelle beside the enormous loans which had to be made, the legal tender which had to be issued. By the beginning of 1864 it became evident to Mr. Lincoln and his cabinet that more money must be raised by taxation. It was not a popular thing to do, for the slow progress of the war, the awful cost in life and money, had raised a strong party against Lincoln. It looked as if he might not be reëlected. The opportunists around him advised against any measures which would increase dissatisfaction, but Mr. Lincoln wanted no misunderstanding about his intentions in regard to the war. It had got to be finished at all cost, and he wanted the people to understand what his reëlection meant. He asked them for more men and more money, another draft, higher taxes, higher tariffs. The raising of the tariff was as a method much less disturbing to Lincoln than imposing direct taxes. He had the old Whig’s horror of the tax-collector, and indeed had pictured effectively in his early campaigning “assessors and collectors going forth like swarms of Egyptian locusts, devouring every blade of grass and other green thing.” In 1859, when there was a general curiosity as to what he believed, a correspondent asked him as to his tariff views, and he replied:

“I was an old Henry Clay-Tariff-Whig in old times, and made more speeches on that subject than any other. I have not since changed my views. I believe yet, if we could have a moderate, carefully-adjusted protective tariff, so far acquiesced in as not to be a perpetual subject of political strife, squabbles, changes and uncertainties, it would be better for us. Still it is my opinion that just now the revival of that question will not advance the cause itself or the man who revives it.... We, the old Whigs, have been entirely beaten out on the tariff question, and we shall not be able to reëstablish the policy until the absence of it shall have demonstrated the necessity for it in the minds of men heretofore opposed to it.”

In May, 1860, he was still of the same opinion on making the tariff an issue. “I now think,” he wrote the same correspondent, “that the tariff question ought not to be agitated in the Chicago Convention, but that all should be satisfied on that point with a presidential candidate whose antecedents give assurance that he would neither seek to force a tariff law by executive influence nor yet to arrest a reasonable one by a veto or otherwise.” After his nomination and election he steadily refused to say anything on the question. It was not, in fact, until February 15 (1861), when he reached Pittsburg on his way to his inauguration, that he uttered a word. In Pennsylvania, however, some expression was unavoidable. The tariff had played a greater part in that state in electing Mr. Lincoln than had slavery and unionism. Indeed, Mr. Blaine does not hesitate to say that if Governor Curtin had not spent most of his time in the campaign advocating protection, the state would have gone Democratic, and if Pennsylvania had gone Democratic, Mr. Lincoln would probably have been defeated. An expression of opinion then was unavoidable, and he gave it;—certainly it was moderate enough. After quoting the tariff plank of the party platform he said modestly: “I have by no means a thoroughly matured judgment upon this subject, especially as to details.... I have long thought it would be to our advantage to produce any necessary article at home which can be made of as good quality and with as little labor at home as abroad. At least by the difference of the carrying from abroad. In such cases the carrying is demonstrably a dead loss of labor....” After developing this argument, which was one of his strongest early ones and the only one of which full notes have been saved to us, he added: “The condition of the Treasury would seem to render an early revision of the tariff indispensable,” and he went on to advise “every gentleman who knows he is to be a member of the next Congress to take an enlarged view and post himself thoroughly so as to contribute his part to such an adjustment of the tariff as shall produce a sufficient revenue, and in its other bearings, so far as possible, be just and equal to all sections of the country and classes of the people.”

There is nothing to show that after he reached Washington Mr. Lincoln ever considered the tariff other than as one of the several methods by which money could be raised. If he saw, as he probably did, that there were many injustices in the measures passed, that some duties were too high for revenue and beneficial only to the special interests which had fought for them, that others were trades outright, he still knew that, all things considered, the bills were as good as could be expected. It is probable indeed that none of the important legislation of the war received less attention from the president than the tariff bills.

Congress was with the president in 1864 in his insistence on means for finishing the war, and in June a new tariff bill went to the Senate. It had been out of committee just eight days when it was adopted by the House and the debate on it lasted less than two days. The Senate was even more expeditious, for it was reported there on the 14th, taken up on the 16th, and passed on the 17th. That it was possible so to push the bill through was due to the wonderful generalship of the chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, a man whom Charles Sumner once declared to have been in the financial field what all our best generals were in arms. Fessenden was at this time about 58 years old, and he had been in the Senate for nearly ten years. Before the slavery question called him into public life, he had stood at the head of the Maine bar, a position his father had occupied for forty years before him. He was an untiring student, a clear thinker, and a forcible and convincing speaker. He had great dignity—“the dignity of a Cato,” one of his acquaintances has said, but he combined with it “the bitterness of a Junius.” Certain things were sure to arouse him—buncombe, misrepresentation, jobbery, and—Charles Sumner. His propensity to quarrel with Sumner was chronic. He seemed to take as a personal insult Sumner’s untiring fight in war times to keep a tariff off books, rags for paper making, magazines, philosophical apparatus for schools and works of art. Sumner never lost a chance to declare these tariffs “barbaric,” “taxes on knowledge.” “Why should not knowledge pay as well as everything else?” Fessenden would ask. This is war, and these tariffs are justified by the circumstances. Why should not rags pay? and he intimated that he knew well the gentleman in Boston who made paper and who had stirred Sumner up to make an attack on the rag duty. Besides, why should not American ragpickers be protected as well as American wool-growers? It was an industry to be cultivated.

But while Fessenden’s antagonism to Sumner coupled with his dyspepsia might make him often irascible, it never interfered with getting things done. The bill in question was put through with only two days’ debate, purely from his ability to whip the members into prompt action—to his quick wit, his fine tact in steering them away from unprofitable side issues and from subjects which precipitated heated and time-taking discussion. For instance, in the present bill the higher duty proposed on railroad iron caused great anxiety to railroad interests, especially in the West, where much building was going on. The duty on railroad iron in the bill of 1861 had been $12.00 per ton; it was proposed now to make it 70 cents per 100 pounds. The whole West rose in arms. Kansas and Minnesota were particularly disturbed, since they were laying track as rapidly as possible. It cost from two to three thousand dollars a mile for rails now, and nobody knew what it would cost if duties were raised. It looked very much as if railroad building would be stopped. “The development of the country was something even in war times,” urged the Senator from Minnesota. This tariff meant less revenue, Senator Pomeroy of Kansas declared, for importation would cease. It simply meant that the iron men who were demanding it would put up their prices. They were paying 50 per cent dividends now and watering their stock. The entire iron business was rapidly becoming a monopoly. We could better afford to import all our iron from England than let this happen. But the suggestion of importing anything from England at that moment was like fire to powder. An explosion always followed. Mr. Pomeroy’s suggestion brought Zach Chandler of Michigan roaring to his feet. “If I had my way,” he shouted, “I would raise a wall of fire between this nation and Great Britain. I would not only not allow her iron to come here, but I would not let a single pound of any article she manufactured come here during this war.... Let the railroad interest suffer and any other interest suffer. It is nothing to me, I am for the tax and the highest tax.” Mr. Fessenden well understood the danger in allowing an outbreak against England to start, and he quietly and firmly insisted that the discussion be confined to the duty on rails.

The new bill was signed on June 30, and went into effect at once. Under it duties rose from the 37 per cent of the bill of 1862 to over 47 per cent. The effect on prices was appalling. The cost of living, already enormous, increased, until it looked as if the “thousand-dollar breakfast” Secretary Chase had threatened was to come; even goods unembarrassed by taxes or tariffs, like butter and eggs, rose with the rest—sympathy and speculation the causes. In some cases the hoisting of prices almost caused riot. In New York and Brooklyn there was great excitement over the attempts of the gas companies and the street railroads to take their taxes out of the public, although it had been expressly stipulated that they were to pay them themselves. In August after the bill went into force, the Manhattan Gas Company notified customers that they must pay $3.25 per thousand instead of $2.50; the Brooklyn Gas Light Company and several others did the same. Higher fares on the street car lines were announced. There was a great uproar in the press and on the street, for it was well known that the companies were already making enormous profits. The Manhattan Gas stock at this time was quoted at $1.90 (50 being par) and New York Gas Light at $2.85¼ (50 par). Confiscation of franchises and the establishment of municipal plants were advocated generally. In Philadelphia there was an agitation at the same time in favor of coöperative coal companies, the price of coal, which it was estimated cost $6.00 per ton delivered, being put at $10.00. If the indignant cities had carried out their threats they would probably by this time have been free of their most arrogant task-masters.

Hard as the situation was made for common folks, they endured it patiently, grimly, convinced that there was no other way to end the war. There has never been seen, indeed, in the world’s history, a more splendid courage in bearing burdens than the people of the United States—North and South—showed in the Civil War. It is an inspiring thing to study. If it had had no reverse! But it is one of the curious and puzzling phenomena of human nature that the situation which inspires some to their highest endeavor arouses others to their lowest. That the same cause makes martyrs of some men, cormorants of others. If a war for a great cause brings out the nobler qualities of human nature, it brings out at the same time the vicious. If fine fellows march in the line and go bravely into battle, mean ones hang on their flanks and rob the battlefield. If the mass of people pay the cost by the sweat of their brow, a minority trades on their necessity. Never have we had this violent contrast more marked than in the Civil War. Take the attitude of the people towards the taxes and tariff. The mass bore the burdens imposed without a whimper, yet from the first there was a large number whose sole aim was to manipulate taxes and tariff to serve their interests. They ignored the principles the makers of the bills laid down clearly, that everything was to have a duty put on it which could be made to yield revenue. The consumers of raw materials fought fiercely for free wool, free cocoa, free everything, and they fought as hard for increased duties on their products; not satisfied that these duties compensate for internal taxes, they wanted them higher than the taxes. The government was the best patron of importers and manufacturers, and it was a customer not too careful that it got what it bargained for, such was the stress of its situation, and these manufacturers and importers cheated their great patron at every turn. They gave shoddy for wool, adulterated the food they sold, undercounted and underweighed. Frequently what they sold had been smuggled in, for smuggling flourished abundantly under the high duties. All that free traders had ever said of the inducement the protective system gave for cheating the government was more than proved true. An organized system of smuggling from Canada was in operation before the end of 1862, and it grew steadily throughout the war until it was an open secret that the markets of Boston particularly were full of smuggled goods. The closest watch had to be kept for this reason, on every attempt to put a duty on an article hitherto free. Thus in 1864 Mr. Fessenden stopped a proposed tariff on spices. He had discovered, he said, that the gentlemen who imported spices had already on hand in warehouses a great quantity held for the higher prices which the duty would cause, and that full preparations had been made to keep up this supply by smuggling from Canada—an easy thing to do, since anybody could fill his pockets with nutmegs and walk in unnoticed. The cost of guarding the border became enormous, three times the ordinary number of revenue cutters were on the Lakes, and a cordon of officers extended from Maine to the Pacific coast. Besides, the management of the custom houses throughout the war was notoriously bad, the service being sprinkled with the incompetent and dishonest. In New York alone it was estimated that the government lost from 12 to 25 millions annually through fraud—then as now false invoices being the favorite method of cheating.

But the adherents of free trade and direct taxation could not boast that their system gave no opportunity for like abuses. The men who fought for higher duties fought against excise. They made false returns of income and property in the same way that importers made false invoices. If importers brought in great quantities of unprotected goods and then organized a campaign for protection, manufacturers in anticipation of taxes piled up huge stocks; 40 millions of gallons of distilled spirits and nearly 80 millions of cigars were made and stored in anticipation of the tax of 1864. When it was seen that matches were to be taxed, stocks were so piled up that the first year the government collected only a small proportion of its estimate. After the stock was exhausted the return from the tax on matches increased 216 per cent in five months; then the manufacturers devised a new trick; they put 100 instead of 50 matches in a box. The law required only one stamp on a box—thus the tax was cut in two. Factories were transported across the Canadian border; and as the reciprocity treaty let matches in free, it began to look before the close of the war as if the match tax would be null.

On the whole, it is probable that the collection of the direct tax was accompanied by less fraud than the collection of the customs, but the service made up in inefficiency what it may have lacked in dishonesty. The taxed were on the alert to escape, and the collectors were too inexperienced to circumvent them.

There certainly never has been in this country so admirable an opportunity to compare these two systems of raising revenue as we had at this period. The amount each yielded, the expense and difficulty of collection, the effect on the loyalty of the people and the opportunity for greed and dishonesty—all can be placed in parallel columns for comparison. If anything is proven by the comparison it is that no system of organization and administration does away with human selfishness; that whatever the system, the men who have it in their hearts to cheat their fellows, are going to find a way. Regeneration lies deeper than system: it lies in the nature of the men who use the system.

On March 31, 1865, the last tariff bill of the Civil War was passed, an amendment raising many duties, among others that on railroad iron. Nine days after it was passed Lee surrendered, and almost as soon as the news reached Washington orders went forth to stop many of the extraordinary measures which war had made imperative. It had been declared from the first that the high tariff and the direct taxes were simply and only measures for war revenue. In framing the tariff bill of 1862 the committee entitled it a bill to increase duties “temporarily.” Mr. Morrill, Mr. Stevens, and Mr. Fessenden all explained again and again that the increased duties were to compensate for excise taxes. There are repeated passages from their speeches of the same tenor as this from Mr. Fessenden in 1864: “The tariff is adjusted and was adjusted upon the simple principle with reference to the internal tax.” Sumner reiterated the idea whenever he had the chance. “I regard all our present legislation as temporary or provisional in its character,” he said in 1864, when an irate fellow Senator pointed out the growing hardihood of manufacturers in demanding protection and the danger of fastening high duties irrevocably on the country. “It is to meet the exigency of the hour.”

Nothing is clearer indeed than that in the minds of the men who devised them—in the minds of the people who paid them, the tariffs with which the country found itself in 1865 were temporary, just as the army was temporary, the internal taxes temporary, that with the end of the war they would come off. But a war does not “end” with the laying down of the musket. That is but the turning point in the fever. The consequences are left to take care of—tens of thousands of men to detach from army life and reassimilate into civilian life; thousands of maimed and weakened soldiers to find occupation and homes for; thousands of widows and orphans to care for. It is over forty years since Lee surrendered to Grant, but the army of the Civil War is still with us.

Nor does the laying down of the musket put an end to the cost. War means debt. It is fought on a nation’s credit—not wholly on its income—not on its surplus, and the debt remains. When the government at Washington came to consider its financial condition in 1865 after the so-called “end of the war,” it found itself with the colossal debt of over twenty-eight hundred million dollars ($2,808,549,437.55 to be exact). Interest on this must be paid. The principal must be paid. Tariffs and taxes might be “temporary,” but it was evident that they must be adjusted to take care of the war debt. How was it to be done? It was evident that between redeeming its pledge to make the taxes temporary and meeting its obligations the government of the United States had a very pretty financial problem on its hands.

CHAPTER II
AN OUTBREAK OF PROTECTIONISM

The Civil War wrought many changes in the people of the United States, and none more amazing than that in their attitude toward money—the amount they could spend—the methods by which it could be raised. Here was a people who in 1859 had looked with dismay on a debt of $58,000,000 facing confidently one of $2,800,000,000; a people to whom in 1860 raising an income of $62,000,000 had seemed difficult, actually provided in 1866 one of $559,000,000; a people to whom direct taxes had always been abhorrent and who had repudiated high tariffs, submitting patiently to both as one of the dire necessities of war. The war was over, but the debt and the extraordinary expenses remained, and to meet them harsh and sweeping taxation must be continued.

This was plain to everybody, but it was equally plain to those who studied the balance sheet of the treasury that many things could be done to equalize and reduce the taxation. The debt itself could be readjusted to be much less burdensome. As it stood it was made up of some twenty different kinds of paper;—bonds, treasury notes, certificates of indebtedness of all kinds due at nearly twenty different dates, and drawing almost as many different rates of interest. The paper currency which kept the money market in a constant state of unrest could be redeemed. Great economies could be made in the administration of the government. These things done and a careful estimate of essential expenses computed, nobody had any doubt but that the people would consent to the taxation required with as little grumbling as human nature usually meets taxes.

That the revision of the revenue was work for experts, not for politicians, had been realized before Mr. Lincoln’s death, and in March, 1865, a commission had been appointed to look into the whole subject and report. The head of this commission was a man who was to wield a big influence in the country in the next few years, and one to whom we owe more credit than he has ever received, David A. Wells. Mr. Wells was a New England man, who had first attracted attention by planning and constructing in the printing office of the Springfield Republican, where he wrote editorials, the first machine ever made for folding newspapers. He made money from his invention, and used some of it in giving himself a scientific training at Harvard as a special pupil of Louis Agassiz. In 1864 Mr. Wells, who had become interested in economic problems, wrote a pamphlet, called “Our Burden and Our Strength,” which attracted general attention, both here and abroad, and led naturally enough to his choice as one of the revenue commission referred to above. There were two other members on the commission, but from the beginning Mr. Wells dominated it, and his first report, made January 1, 1866, showed in a very clear way what was before the country.

By his calculations the taxes and tariffs then in force ought to yield in the year ending June 30, 1867, $435,000,000. Now the Secretary of the Treasury had estimated that we could get along that year on $284,000,000. Let us say three hundred millions, proposed Mr. Wells, and then let us set aside fifty millions a year for reducing the debt—that still leaves $85,000,000 to be taken off the taxes. Where should it be applied? To the internal taxes or to the custom duties? Mr. Wells knew the feeling of the people. They hated direct taxation, they preferred duties on imports, and he worked out a plan for taking the $85,000,000 off the former, but at the same time he called attention to various inequalities in the tariff which should be corrected. They came mainly from the lack of equalization between the two systems of taxation. The duties on imports were supposed to be arranged so as to compensate for the internal taxation; not infrequently, however, the tariffs were placed without proper consideration, and grave inequalities had resulted. These were of two kinds: either the tariff was less than the taxes, so that the manufacturer could not compete with foreign goods imported, or it was considerably higher than the taxes, so that he could put up his prices until they practically prohibited importation, thus cutting off revenue and heavily burdening the consumer. Certain cases of the first kind became familiar at the time from the fact that they touched everybody, and were explained clearly and in detail in Mr. Wells’s report. There was the matter of book-making. Everything which went to make a book was separately taxed,—paper, cloth, boards, glue, thread, gold-leaf, leather, and type,—and when the book was complete it was taxed 5 per cent on the selling price. It cost 59½ cents to make a book requiring a pound of paper. The same book could be made in England and delivered in New York, including duty (the duty on books was 25% on the value) for 26¼ cents. Little wonder that American book publishers sent their work abroad to be done or that the boys and girls of the time were using Webster’s Spelling Books made in England. The umbrella was another common article over which there was much trouble. Each item which went into the making of the umbrella—sticks, rods, handles, tips, bands, tassels, buttons, cover—was produced by a different establishment, and each paid its own tax. The cover usually was imported, and silk paid a duty of 60 per cent. The finished parasol paid a 6 per cent tax. Now the duty on an imported umbrella was 35 per cent on its value. Naturally umbrellas were imported in quantities and sold at a price lower than they could be made for at home.

But while there were cases where the tariff did not compensate for the tax there were more where it had been forced far beyond it. If these tariffs had increased the revenue, they might, under the circumstances, have been justified, but they did not do that. They limited importation and enabled the home manufacturer to put up his prices, and it was he, not the government, who got the extra money. At the same time it cost the government a great deal to collect the small sums realized on these over-protected articles, often more than the sum itself.

If the government could get on with $85,000,000 less than it could collect, it seemed obvious that it ought to begin cutting down those internal taxes which were so much too high for the tariffs. It seemed obvious, too, that unremunerative tariffs ought to be cut off. But no sooner did the talk of reducing tariffs on any article begin than there came a loud outburst from many manufacturing centres against any reduction. The internal taxes must come off at once—that they demanded, but no tariffs should be lowered. The cry to preserve the tariffs soon turned in many mouths to one to raise them. Copper (in blocks), which under the bill of 1864 had had a duty of 2½ cents a pound, now asked for double that. Iron rails which already were carrying a duty of 70 cents a hundred pounds and selling in New York for over $80 a ton, while they cost only about $32 in Wales, asked a higher duty. The salt miners of Michigan and New York, whose profits at the moment were enormous, demanded still greater protection. As soon as the House Committee of Ways and Means got to work on a tariff bill, which was early in 1866, an army of determined tariff lobbyists poured into Washington, declaring they must have more protection or they would perish.

That there were grave embarrassments in the business of the country could not be denied. Five hundred thousand men, young men at that, had been taken permanently from the ranks of breadwinners by the war—and those dependent upon them were now the country’s wards. Immigration to which the government had looked for reënforcements for labor was falling off. The tremendous demand which a great army makes upon manufactures of all kinds was at an end. Particularly did the iron mills, the woollen factories, the railroads, the produce merchants, feel this sudden cessation of trade. Prices were probably 90 per cent higher than before the war, although wages were not over 60 per cent higher. But these embarrassments were the inevitable results of war—as logical as the debt or the disabled soldier. Somehow the transition from the abnormal condition of war to the normal one of peace had to be made; somehow for the artificial demand and cost the natural must be substituted. It meant economy, curtailment, lower prices, lessened output; hard times, in short, for a period. There was no class in the country from whom patient endurance of the difficulties of the situation could be more fairly asked than the manufacturers. They had for the most part enjoyed four as fat years as ever fell to the lot of man. It is doubtful indeed if any industry at any period of the world’s history had reaped so great rewards in so short a time as that of iron in the Civil War.

The difficulty now was that these manufacturers were not willing to pay their share of the cost of the war. They demanded higher protection that they might make their prices higher, and thus ease as much as possible the necessarily hard transition state. Congress was to do for them what economy and patience should have done.

As it happened the demands for a higher protection were made on a Congress under the dictatorship of a man for whom no tariff could ever be too high—that was Thaddeus Stevens. When the first tariff bill was presented to the House in June, 1866, by Mr. Morrill, everybody knew Stevens was near his end, but emaciated, white, and suffering as he was, his nerve was still superb. Too weak to walk up the Capitol steps, two stalwart negroes carried him. “Who will carry me when you are dead, boys?” he said to them one day with a chuckle. The fight between Congress and President Johnson over Reconstruction had developed, and Johnson had already singled out Stevens as his chief enemy. He was soon to begin to ask as he “swung around the circle,” “Why not hang Thad Stevens?” Johnson was not mistaken in placing the responsibility. Stevens had always disliked him. “Can’t you find a candidate for vice-president of the United States without going down to one of those damned rebel provinces to pick up one?” he had asked Colonel McClure in 1864. His dislike had grown to open opposition, and he was now leading the Congressional fight with spirit, ability, and bitterness. Yet weak as he was, and absorbed as he was in the undoing of the sullen suffering man at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, no measure escaped his dictation, least of all a measure which touched a doctrine so dear to his heart as the protection of American industry.

The bill was not in before it was evident Stevens was dissatisfied with it. It was, he declared vehemently, a free-trade measure. As a matter of fact no bill the United States Congress had seen up to this date had less consolation for the free-trader in it than the one Mr. Morrill now introduced. Although just before the bill was reported $75,000,000 had been taken from the internal revenue taxes, no compensating reduction had been made in the tariff. Not only did it preserve the average of 47 per cent, which the bill of 1864 imposed, but it increased many duties, notably those on copper, iron, steel rails, wool and woollen goods, salt, all articles which touched the mass of consumers. Many purely protective duties which could yield no revenue were added—such were the duties proposed on grindstones and on nickel. So inconsistent was the bill with the former professions of the party, so evident was it that it was going to make the price of many essential articles higher, that Mr. Morrill, candid gentleman that he was, apologized rather pathetically for it. He had hoped, he said in course of debate, that at the close of the war the tariff had reached its maximum, and that the earliest business of Congress after taking off internal taxes on manufactures would be to reduce duties by the full compensating amount. That this could not be done with safety was due in his mind entirely to the failure of Congress to redeem the currency. As long as there was $917,000,000 of paper money in circulation Mr. Morrill thought the tariff could not be lowered, but ought rather to be raised. His argument was not particularly clear or convincing, but it was obvious that he believed what he said, and that he was greatly worried over the situation.

Mr. Morrill’s doleful apology for raising duties was entirely misplaced as far as the dominant factor in Congress was concerned. It was not the higher duties which stirred that body to protest against the bill, it was the lower; it was not the extravagant increases, it was the moderate ones; it was not the articles added, it was those omitted. Thus, among other items in the schedule was one making the duty on Nova Scotia coal 50 cents a ton, although the duty on coal from other points was $1.25 a ton. This discrimination was, of course, for the sake of New England manufacturers, who were cut off from using native coal by the freight charges of the long haul. Again, scrap iron was not protected at all and shoddy had a duty only four times what it had been formerly! These and other similar changes in the bill were not fairly before the House when Stevens broke out in anger at the moderation of the measure. “I look upon this bill as a free trade bill from beginning to end,” he stormed. Nova Scotia coal should pay the full tariff of $1.25, and that was not enough. There was not a word about scrap iron in the bill, shoddy should pay more. “It is a most extraordinary imposition upon the protective tariff of the country.” But Stevens was physically too weak to do justice to his indignation—more than once when he tried to address the House he sank back into his seat, exclaiming, “I am too exhausted,” but if he could not defend his doctrine, he had a Pennsylvania colleague who could, and far more cunningly, with far more knowledge and fairness than Stevens. This was William D. Kelley of Philadelphia. Kelley at once took hold of the debate on the bill, his whole weight being thrown in favor of the highest protection of any article which could be made or grown in the United States. His knowledge of the articles on which he spoke, and his eloquence, clearness, and conviction in presentation, were such as to mark him at once as the probable future leader of the high protectionists.

But bold, able, and determined as the protectionist sentiment in the House showed itself, it was not to go unchallenged. A species of three-cornered fight developed within the party. There was Mr. Morrill defending while deploring the bill, on the ground that paper currency made it necessary,—there were the high protectionists led by Mr. Stevens in spirit and Mr. Kelley in speech, and there was a most interesting body of moderate protectionists, led by three representatives from Iowa, John A. Kasson, James F. Wilson, and William B. Allison. These men were ably seconded by Frederick A. Pike of Maine (“tax-fight-emancipate Pike”) and Henry Raymond of New York. Ridicule, protest, argument, were in turn tried by this group. “It is well understood that there are many very worthy manufacturers of coffee in this country,” Mr. Pike said in disgust one day; “they make it of chicory, beans, peas, rye, wheat, dandelion root, and many other things. So there is reason for retaining a small duty on coffee in order to protect that worthy class of our manufacturers.”

Mr. Raymond, who was indignant over the increased duty on railroad iron—a duty which he declared would increase the annual expenses of the two roads in his state, the Erie and the Central, at least $2,000,000—exclaimed: “If the bill of 1865 is not sufficient protection, what in Heaven’s name will be? We were told at the beginning if we protected this infant industry it would soon stand alone. We have been doing it for thirty or forty years, and yet every session of Congress witnesses new demands for increased protection.”

It was Mr. Kasson who did perhaps the most effective service against the measure. He wished simply “to foster the incipient industries of America until they were able to take care of themselves without help, in fair competition with the industries of foreign countries.” To make the duties so high that foreign competition was removed, was, in Mr. Kasson’s judgment, to encourage monopoly. This was a bill “to prevent the diffused blessings of Providence from being enjoyed by the people of the United States,” he declared. Who were the handful of wool-growers in the country that 34,000,000 consumers should be taxed to support them? Mr. Kasson was especially bitter against the higher prices the bill would undoubtedly make for farmers. “What does this bill do?” he asked. “It raises the tariff on lumber, which is so necessary to the Western prairie farmer; on nails, without which he cannot drive his boards on his house or build his fence; on salt, without which he cannot preserve his beef and pork. There is hardly a thing he consumes which this bill forgets to raise the duty upon. Every prominent necessity of life, food, fuel, shelter, and clothing, is embraced and made more expensive to the consumer throughout the country. Even on boys’ pocket-knives the duty is increased about three times—600 per cent—one member of the committee tells me. And yet it is said this is a tariff for mere protection. Why, sir, you are protecting the American people until they will not be able to buy one solitary thing that is protected if this goes on.” It was unjust to the consumers, and, said Mr. Kasson, “Consumption represents millions, capital only thousands.”

The majority of the Western representatives were with him in the feeling that the bill was unjust to the farmer. “Long John” Wentworth of Illinois, a Republican of Democratic antecedents, did some sensible, pointed arguing against the higher duties on the ground that they were against the very men (the farmers) “who do most of the tax-paying in peace and most of the fighting in war.” He warned emphatically that not only was the bill a discrimination, but that it was certain to encourage interstate combinations—a warning which was repeatedly dropped during the debate, and to which the tendency to combination in the salt, iron, and copper industries gave particular force.

When Wentworth and the Westerners found that there was little chance of defeating the bill they declared that it must be made just all around—there must be protection for the farmer and they asked for 30 per cent on cattle, 50 per cent on fruit, more on grain, duties which raised strong protests from Pennsylvania and other manufacturing centres. This would take the necessaries of life from the reach of “their poor toiling millions.” Yes, said the Westerners, but you are taking the necessaries of labor from our “poor toiling millions.”

That members of the Republican party should dare in his presence to talk such doctrine was gall and wormwood to Mr. Stevens, and he flung at them, and at Mr. Kasson particularly, an epithet which in his mouth was only one degree less opprobrious than that of “slave-holder” and “rebel”—“free trader,” and he could prove it, for here was Mr. Kasson’s name on one of the circulars of the Free Trade League. Mr. Kasson did not deny the charge: “I have the distinguished honor,” he replied, “of being a councillor-elect to it, and I am giving my counsel to it (the League), and to all the people of the United States.”

The bill passed the House by a large majority—the high duties on farm products which the Westerners asked tacked to it. It was evident that Congress, as a whole, had broken with the avowed tariff policy of the past 20 years.

It was the middle of July, 1866, when the bill reached the Senate—too hot for tariffs, the Senators decided. It was several months indeed before it came before them. Along with it came a bill prepared by Mr. Wells, who had been greatly disturbed by the outbreak of high protectionism. A moderate protectionist himself—he appreciated the injustice and the dangers in recklessly and generally increasing duties. He had carefully studied the schedules, and he knew how inevitably disaster must follow to some interests from the sweeping changes proposed. He accordingly prepared a bill much more moderate in its duties, which he claimed would give the necessary revenue and at the same time protect as far as was just. It met the hearty approval of the Senate, where there had been much sarcasm spent on the House bill, principally by the Republicans themselves. “The idea has seemed to prevail of late,” said Mr. Fessenden, “that if anybody choose to start a new manufacture by way of experiment, thinking he can succeed in it, the duty of this country, whatever the effect on commerce, or whatever the taxation on individuals, is to place duties which will prevent the importation of that article if it interferes with the manufacture started.... Is it worth while,” he asked, “to prohibit the importation of all articles and end our relations with foreign countries?”

Mr. Wells’s bill was made an amendment to the revised House bill, and sent back. Mr. Morrill advised its acceptance, and promptly. The time had come when, in his opinion, it was “reasonable to have an unreasonable tariff.” But there were few of the members, particularly of the Western members, who agreed with Mr. Morrill. The bitter feeling that the East was legislating for itself to the injury of the farmer broke out hotly. A genuine struggle of sections followed, to the disgust and alarm of Stevens, who knew that if the Westerners could not or would not accept the “home market” argument, high protection was a lost cause. That his own side should imperil the bill was particularly trying to him. “If the gentlemen who are in favor of a tariff bill hold their tongues and vote,” he snarled, “letting the other side do the talking, they may get a tariff, but they never will if they keep up their debate.” But they would not hold their tongues, and they did not get the bill. In the general dissatisfaction it failed. But high protection did not end with it. The failure to pass the bill was the signal for a move of far-reaching consequences.

The morning after the House dropped the bill Mr. John Sherman asked the Senate to consider a measure for raising revenue by putting up the duties on wool and woollen goods. There was a general outcry. Where did such a bill come from—who had ever heard of it—how could Mr. Sherman expect a measure plainly in the interest of a single industry to be properly considered, when Congress was to expire “day after to-morrow,” and more and more of the same kind, including some caustic remarks about the influence a private industry must have to force such a measure before the Senate at such a time.

As a matter of fact the bill now so suddenly sprung on the Senate had been lying in wait for some seven months for just such a contingency as the failure of the tariff bill—a fine example of business foresight! This was its history: In July, 1866, when the Senate postponed taking up the tariff Judge Bingham of Ohio had brought into the House a bill providing for higher duties on wool and woollens. It was evidently framed to take care of the wool-growers of his state. Certain woollen manufacturers, who had known nothing of his intention, saw the danger of the bill antagonizing both Congress and those manufacturers who were advocating free wool, and persuaded Judge Bingham to allow it to be sidetracked until the fate of the general tariff was decided. This was done, the bill being quietly passed on to the Senate, where nobody but Mr. Sherman seems to have known or remembered anything about it. When the tariff bill dropped, the wool interests immediately asked that their special measure be presented, and Mr. Sherman agreed. Part of the dismay that the Senate showed at the presentation of the measure was no doubt due to its familiarity with the solid organization and effective lobbying of the wool manufacturing interests of that day as well as with their reputation for unsavory lobbying in the past. It was not yet forgotten how in the forties and fifties the wool interests had combined with the Pennsylvania iron men to force Western representatives, who at that time were all working for land grants for railroads, to vote for their tariffs. The scandal of 1857 in the fight for free raw wool was not yet forgotten. The charge of corruption at that time had even forced a Congressional investigation in which it was shown that one Boston wool firm had spent some $87,000 of its own money besides some thousands of other people’s. These sums they charged frankly on their books “to expenses in securing the passage of the tariff of 1857.” The investigation showed that the agent of the manufacturers confiscated most of the money intrusted to him; that none of it, as far as shown, ever reached a Congressman, though a considerable sum did go to editors and “influential persons”—such was $5000 to Mr. Thurlow Weed, for collecting statistics and using arguments!

The insistent demands of the wool men, for years, had been such, that even good Mr. Morrill had grown tired of them. “Their evils somehow never disappear,” he said, querulously, when he presented his bill in ’66, and he went on then to say that never since he had been in Congress had so large a number of petitions for help been received as had been coming from the wool interests East and West. The wool men, as a matter of fact, were organized then as probably no interest in the country had ever been before. The chief organization was the National Association of Wool Manufacturers, having at its head as able a lobbyist and promoter as the country has ever produced—this was John L. Hayes—a New Englander—a graduate of Dartmouth and of the Harvard Law School, a man of wide and varied experience. He had been counsel for Canada when the reciprocity treaty of 1854 was framed. He had founded iron works in Maine and promoted a railroad in Mexico. He had been in politics. He had held office in Washington. He was a natural scientist of no mean order—a man versatile, knowing, engaging, and energetic. Mr. Hayes took charge of the interests of the wool manufactures in 1865, and he carried on a splendid campaign for higher tariffs. The only hitch in it had been the necessity of combining with the wool-growers. The decline in the price of wool after the war had lead the latter to conceive the idea that if all foreign wool could be shut out of the country, the domestic grower would be able to monopolize the market—at his own price. To accomplish this they had organized to fight for a duty which they meant should be prohibitive. The disadvantage at which the manufacturer would find himself, should such a measure pass, was obvious, but to fight for free wool was to antagonize a group of unusual political power. Ohio was the chief centre of this group, but it could count on the support of New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Mr. Hayes realized that if the wool manufacturers should succeed in keeping their raw material free, the wool-growers in retaliation might force low duties on woollens. It seemed to him and to the association he directed better policy to work with rather than against their opponents, and largely through his influence the two conflicting interests were brought together at a convention held in Syracuse, New York, early in 1866. There was an attempt to convince the sheep men that free raw wool would benefit them more than any tariff, but they refused the argument. They must have real protection. The two interests succeeded finally in working out an agreement which satisfied each. The basis of this agreement was, as afterwards stated by Commissioner Wells, “that the duty on raw or unwashed wools and hair, other than wools adapted for carpets, should be fixed at rates varying from ten to twelve cents per pound, and from ten to eleven per cent ad valorem. In order, then, to compensate the manufacturer for such a prospective enhancement of the price of his raw material, it was agreed that, in consideration of the fact that four pounds of the cheapest imported wool (mestiza), paying an aggregate duty of forty-six cents, were sometimes employed in the fabrication of a pound of finished cloth, the duty on cloth should be fifty cents per pound, and on other fabrics of wool of varying weight a duty in like proportion. In order, next, to give the manufacturer protection against his foreign competitors, 25 per cent ad valorem was added; and in order to further compensate for the payment of an internal revenue tax of 6 per cent, which tax was repealed in the succeeding year, 10 per cent more was added, thus making the aggregate duty on shawls, cloths, and woollen goods generally, fifty cents per pound and thirty-five per cent ad valorem. It will thus be seen that if the manufacturers, as is often alleged, did not enter into the arrangement for an increase in duty through their own seeking, they nevertheless managed to secure full compensation for all that was granted to the wool-growers; and in addition to that, through force of subsequent circumstances, an additional protection in excess of what, according to their showing, they considered necessary.”

This was the basis of the wool schedule which had been embodied in Mr. Morrill’s bill and also of the bill which Mr. Sherman had sprung on the Senate. That the Senate did not like the wool bill was evident. On all sides there was strenuous opposition to protecting one industry and not another, and yet the bill went through. It is worth nothing in view of the support of the scandalous wool schedule of 1909 by both the Senators from Massachusetts, that both Senators Summer and Wilson of Massachusetts voted against the wool bill of 1867 and that Senators Morrill and Fessenden absented themselves. A few hours before the end of the session the wool bill was received by the House and passed. But its fate was by no means decided. It still must have the President’s signature, and the President was Andrew Johnson. Johnson was in poor temper to favor any measure sanctioned by “Thad Stevens and his gang.” He had just vetoed one of Stevens’s pet measures, and it was very likely he would veto any bill favoring a special interest, for his traditions and sympathies were all with a liberal commercial policy. Mr. Hayes knew this, and he and his friends collected outside the door of the Capitol chamber, where, as the custom is, the President signs bills on the last night of a session. Late in the evening it was rumored that the bill would be vetoed. Hayes hurriedly summoned aid,—Bingham of Ohio, the framer of the bill, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the Attorney-General. What pressure this force brought to bear on Mr. Johnson is unknown, but at a minute before twelve, according to Mr. Hayes’s story, the President put his name to the wool bill. It was a great triumph for Mr. Hayes. “The wool bill of 1867 and its enactment into law,” says one of the protectionist organs, “were chiefly due to his personal influence with leading members of both branches of Congress.”

The passage of the wool bill proved that an industry, if strongly enough organized and headed by a sufficiently able and respectable lobbyist, could secure from the Congress of the United States protective favors which could not be secured for the whole mass of industries. The lesson had immediate effect. The next year (1868) Congress was asked to pass a similar bill, favoring the Lake Superior copper industry. The rich mines in that section had been in operation for several years, and in the last two or three years their output had been increasing rapidly. As was natural, there had been a great amount of speculation in copper mining stocks. The public had subscribed almost as much to wildcat and bogus copper schemes in this period as to the same kind of oil schemes. Probably something like $20,000,000 had been actually invested in the region, there were forty or fifty thousand persons settled in the district, and there was a considerable fleet on the Lakes in the copper-carrying trade. It was the beginning of a great industry. Now for many years there had been in Maryland, Connecticut, and Massachusetts copper-smelting works which used ores from Chile and Cuba mixed with ores from the Eastern states. Since 1864 the Eastern concerns had paid a duty of 5 per cent on foreign copper ore. The Lake Superior interests had been suffering for several months from decreased prices, due largely to a great increase in the world’s copper output. They had asked relief in 1866, and a higher duty had been accorded them in the bill that failed. They now concluded, as the wool men had, that if they could not get what they wanted in one way they would in another, and in July, 1868, brought in a bill asking for a duty equal to about 25 per cent on copper ore. It was a rate which, if granted, was bound to put the New England and Baltimore works out of commission, put an end to the carrying trade with Chile and Cuba, raise the price of copper so that American-built ships could not get their copper bottoms in our ports, and drive many industries then using copper to cheaper substitutes, like galvanized iron, sheet tin, zinc, or lead, and put still others to an expense which, as they would have no compensating tariffs to protect them, would greatly cripple them. Excited debate followed the bill everywhere, especially in the Senate, where Zach Chandler fought for it. The time had come, he declared, when the manufacturers were not going to have all the protection; miners and farmers were going to have it now. There was not an article made in Connecticut, which was opposing this bill, which was not protected, “not an article from a wooden button to a brass clock or from carpetings to Jew’s harps.” If you don’t give protection to us this way (through special bills), we’ll take a horizontal tariff for our copper and lumber and wheat and wool, and then if “your clocks will not run, let them stop.” His picture of the suffering of the miners following the closing of the mines no doubt won many to the measure. It was because of that, said Mr. Morrill, that he should vote for it, though he believed it would help speculation in copper stocks more than the suffering miners of Michigan, and that it was a blow to ship-building and commerce. Would it not be better, suggested Mr. Grimes of Iowa, to organize a branch of the Freedman’s Bureau and send it to Michigan to take care of the miners?

The bill finally passed and by large majorities, and in February, 1869, went to President Johnson. Whatever the influences which had induced Johnson to sign a bill which must have been so repugnant to him as the wool bill, there was little chance that they would have any effect upon him now. His term was almost over. In a few days he was to yield the White House to “that little fellow Grant,” as he called him, and go back to his Tennessee home to hoe potatoes and discuss politics with his neighbors in his son-in-law’s village store.

He was going out in a sense victorious, for he had not been convicted, and his arch-enemy Stevens was dead, and yet it is doubtful if the end of his terrific fight with Congress gave him much happiness, if indeed anything could give him real happiness. Certainly Johnson suffered throughout his four years as President as few people at the time realized. One of his secretaries once said that in the two years he was with him in the White House he never saw him smile but once. Ill himself, his beloved wife a bed-ridden invalid, unfitted for companionship, suspicious of his associates, narrow in mind, bitter and resentful in heart, there was little reason indeed why Andrew Johnson should smile. Yet unquestionably he got a grim pleasure from his vetoes, even out of his impeachment trial. He believed he would be convicted, and his secretary tells of the satisfaction he got from the idea that his persecutors would all come to bad ends. He learned Addison’s Cato by heart, and went about the White House rooms delivering it. He studied the trial of Charles I of England, and ordered the names of those who signed the death warrant and the terrible ends to which they all came tabulated. His secretary says he believes Johnson was not a little disappointed when he was acquitted. It took from him the bitterest of the many bitter cuds he incessantly chewed.

Throughout his administration Johnson had fought with little effect the horde of lobbyists, speculators, land grant agents, and other suppliants for government aid, whom the war had brought together and Congress had rather encouraged than discouraged. The bills granting tariffs to special interests belonged to this category unquestionably, however respectable their supporters, and it was to be expected that Johnson would veto the copper bill, and he did, sending with his veto the following message—not his own, however. The letter was written by Mr. Wells.

Feb. 23, 1869.

To the House of Representatives: The accompanying bill, entitled “An Act regulating the duties on imported copper and copper ores,” is, for the following reasons, returned, without my approval, to the House of Representatives, in which branch of Congress it originated.

Its immediate effect will be to diminish the public receipts, for the object of the bill cannot be accomplished without seriously affecting the importation of copper and copper ores, from which a considerable revenue is at present derived. While thus impairing the resources of the government, it imposes an additional tax upon an already overburdened people, who should not be further impoverished that monopolies may be fostered and corporations enriched.

It is represented, and the declaration seems to be sustained by evidence, that the duties for which this bill provides are nearly or quite sufficient to prohibit the importation of certain foreign ores of copper. Its enactments, therefore, will prove detrimental to the shipping interests of the nation, and at the same time destroy the business, for many years successively established, of smelting home ores in connection with a smaller amount of the imported articles. This business, it is credibly asserted, has heretofore yielded the larger share of the copper production of the country, and thus the industry which this legislation is designed to encourage is actually less than that which will be destroyed by the passage of the bill.

It seems also to be evident that the effect of this measure will be to enhance by 70 per cent the cost of blue vitriol—an article extensively used in dyeing and in the manufacture of printed and colored cloths. To produce such an augmentation in the price of this commodity will be to discriminate against other great branches of domestic industry, and by increasing their cost expose them most unfairly to the effects of foreign competition. Legislation can be neither wise nor just which seeks the welfare of a single interest at the expense and to the injury of many and varied interests at least equally important and equally deserving the consideration of Congress.

The enactment of such a law is urged as necessary for the relief of certain mining interests upon Lake Superior, which, it is alleged, are in a greatly depressed condition, and can only be sustained by an enhancement of the price of copper. If this result should follow the passage of the bill, a tax for the exclusive benefit of a single class would be imposed upon the consumers of copper throughout the entire country not warranted by any need of the government, and the avails of which would not in any degree find their way into the treasury of the nation. If the miners of Lake Superior are in a condition of want, it cannot be justly affirmed that the government should extend charity to them in preference to those of its citizens who in other portions of the country suffer in like manner from destitution. Least of all should endeavor to aid them be based upon a method so uncertain and indirect as that contemplated by the bill, and which, moreover, proposes to continue the exercise of its benefactions through an indefinite period of years. It is, besides, reasonable to hope that positive suffering from want, if it really exists, will prove but temporary in a region where agricultural labor is so much in demand and so well compensated. A careful examination of the subject appears to show that the present low price of copper, which alone has induced any depression the mining interests of Lake Superior may have recently experienced, is due to causes which it is wholly unpolitic, if not impracticable, to contravene by legislation. These causes are in the main an increase in the general supply of copper, owing to the discovery and working of remarkably productive mines and to a coincident restriction in the consumption and use of copper by the substitution of other and cheaper metals for industrial purposes.

Although providing for an increase of duties, the proposed law does not even come within the range of protection in the fair acceptance of the term. It does not look to the fostering of a young and feeble interest, with a view to the ultimate attainment of strength and the capacity of self-support. It appears to assume that the present inability for successful production is inherent and permanent, and is more likely to increase than to be gradually overcome; yet in spite of this it proposes by the exercise of the law-making power to sustain that interest and to impose it in hopeless perpetuity as a tax upon the competent and beneficent industries of the country.

The true method for the mining interests of Lake Superior to obtain relief, if relief is needed, is to endeavor to make their great natural resources fully available by reducing the cost of production. Special or class legislation cannot remedy the evils which this bill is designed to meet. They can only be overcome by laws which will effect a wise, honest, and economical administration of the government, a reestablishment of the special standard of values and an early adjustment of our system of state, municipal, and national taxation (especially the latter) upon the fundamental principle that all taxes, whether collected under the internal revenue or under a tariff, shall interfere as little as possible with the productive energies of the people.

The bill is therefore returned, in the belief that the true interest of the government and of the people require it should not become a law.

Andrew Johnson.

Of course Congress passed the bill over Johnson’s veto. Mr. Pike of Maine, who regarded the bill as “class legislation of the worst kind,” and knew the feeling that one of the President’s vetoes inspired, begged his colleagues “to vote on the measure and not on Andrew Johnson,” but no remonstrance or argument had any effect. The bill was passed over the veto by a large majority.

It was again demonstrated that any private interest which could secure the backing of a powerful Senator or Representative like Sherman of Ohio, Chandler of Michigan, Kelley of Pennsylvania, could obtain what it wanted from the Congress of the United States, though that favor might raise prices to consumers without giving them compensation in other directions, might destroy established industries, and injure an established commerce.

The demonstration was not lost. By 1870 the tariff was a conglomeration of special favors. The duties were not for revenue—many of them, like copper, cut down the revenue. They had no relation any longer to the excise, for while that had been steadily decreased the promise to decrease the tariff at the same time had been broken. The duties had no relation to each other; that is, the cost of manufacturing an article might be materially increased by the duty on copper or iron or soda ash, but it received no compensating help—not until it had organized a lobby and laid siege to Congress.

These unjust and unscientific duties had not been laid without protest. Men like Morrill, Garfield, Fessenden, Allison, Kasson, Raymond, and Sumner had warned against the outbreak. “It smells of monopoly,” they said again and again, and yet most of them when it came to the test voted with their party. Many of the ablest Republican newspapers, especially those in the West, harangued incessantly against the unfairness of the legislation. But remonstrance, even an attempt at discussion, only aroused the angry cry of “free-trader” from the dominant faction in Congress. “It has become impossible,” said Mr. Wells, in his report of December, 1869, for one “to suggest any reduction or modification whatever looking to the abatement of prices artificially maintained in the interest of special industries without being immoderately assailed with accusations of corrupt and unpatriotic motives.”

The tariff legislation was but a part of the deplorable and general attempt which followed the war to make Congress do for the individual what it was his business to do for himself. Men seemed to believe that their futures depended on legislation—to have forgotten or never realized that legislation can do nothing more than distribute wealth—it cannot produce it, and that the only way you can get money to legislate into the pocket of one individual is by taking it out of the pocket of another. Washington had come to be filled with as fine a band of plunderers as ever besieged a National Congress: tax swindlers, smugglers, speculators in land grants, railroad lobbyists, agents of ship companies, mingled with the representatives of industries seeking protection, until it seemed as if Congress was little more than a Relief Bureau. At one time in 1869 there were 41 railroads or would-be railroads seeking aid in the House, and 37 in the Senate. What was to be the effect of this outbreak of protectionism? Many sober people asked themselves the question in dismay. But at the moment everybody was looking to Grant. The new President would certainly help the situation—bring back Congress and the party to candid discussion, institute economies, clear Washington of the self-seekers.

CHAPTER III
THE WAR TARIFFS CONTINUED

Whatever hope moderate protectionists in Congress may have had that the new President would be influenced by their arguments in favor of tariff reform, was soon scattered. General Grant was of uncertain political antecedents. It is doubtful if he ever had any particular interest in the tariff question, and it is certain that he did not at that moment consider it a question for his administration to meddle with. In his first message he advised postponement of revision and against the renewal of the reciprocity treaty between the British Provinces and the United States. The one financial duty which he saw at his inauguration was the resumption of specie payment, and on that his voice was firm.

But even more important than the attitude of the new President on the tariff was the attitude of the new leader of the House. Who that would be was still uncertain. Thaddeus Stevens, who for fully eight years had driven the House like a flock of sheep, had died in August, 1868. There is no doubt that a sigh of relief went up from all the younger element in Congress. “The death of Thaddeus Stevens is the emancipation of the Republicans. He kept the party under his heel,” said James G. Blaine one day soon after, as he walked in the rotunda of the Capitol with a friend. “Whom have you got for leaders?” asked the friend. “There are three young men coming forward,” Blaine replied. “Allison will be heard from, so will James A. Garfield,” and then he paused. “Who is the third?” “I don’t see the third,” Blaine replied, gazing up into the dome. The third appeared a little later when Mr. Blaine was elected Speaker of the Forty-first Congress.

Blaine’s attitude on the tariff was well known. He believed in high protection, but he was a politician before he was an advocate, and could be depended upon to give full hearing to anybody in his party who could muster votes. That he did not consider the tariff reformers strong enough to receive much consideration on the Ways and Means Committee was shown by his appointment of the chairman—Robert C. Schenck of Ohio. General Schenck’s tariff position had been well characterized by himself when the bill of 1866 was up. “Sitting here a friend of protective tariff for eight years,” he said, “I have voted aye or nay as those who got up the tariff bills have told me.” “But,” he went on to say, “we begin to find something like fair play is proper in these things: We claim that what we do and can produce shall have the same protection which is given to the industry of the country, applied to the business of manufacturers.” And henceforth Mr. Schenck worked for duties for the farmer, for anybody in fact that asked one. It is clear that the House thus organized could be depended upon to support the doctrine of high protection.

The vitality of the opposition within the party made itself evident, however, almost at once. Republican district conventions, particularly in the West, showed themselves restive, and at Mansfield, Ohio, in June, 1869, General Roeliff Brinkerhoff actually succeeded in getting into a Republican platform the following resolution:

“Resolved, That we are opposed to all class legislation, government subsidies and grinding monopolies of every kind, and, therefore, we heartily favor a revision of the present oppressive tariff, so as to adjust it purely to a revenue standard.”

The way the press took up General Brinkerhoff’s resolution showed how popular his theory was. Murat Halstead published in full the speech the General had made in presenting the resolution—and it was copied and commented on all over the country. The Free Trade League of New York City, a very energetic organization, sent for the General, and with him planned a lecture campaign. This plan was carried out; General Brinkerhoff and Professor Arthur L. Perry, of Williams College, the author of a book generally used at the time, “Elements of Political Economy,” spending much of the fall and winter in discussing the need of tariff reform. At the same time a group of strong Republican newspapers, including the Portland Advertiser, the St. Louis Democrat, the Pittsburg Commercial, the Cincinnati Gazette, and the Chicago Tribune, one of the very ablest papers in the country, turned their batteries on the tariff. The last-named led in the campaign and led well. The Tribune was edited, at that time, by Horace White, and under his direction had attracted general attention and respect for its sound and authoritative economic discussion. Mr. White was a zealous student of economics, and he poured into the Tribune all the results of his careful work.

The chief opponents of Perry and Brinkerhoff and White in the discussion, were Horace Greeley and Henry C. Carey. Greeley was an extremist. “If I had my way—if I were king of this country,” he told Garfield once, “I would put a duty of $100 a ton on pig-iron and a proportionate duty on everything else that can be produced in America. The result would be that our people would be obliged to supply their own wants, manufactures would spring up, competition would finally reduce prices, and we should live wholly within ourselves.” And to prove the wisdom of this belief he began the publication in the New York Tribune of a series of Essays on Political Economy.

At the same time Henry Carey threw himself into the debate, writing a long series of letters to public men. Carey was at this time over 75 years old—and a more fierce and dogmatic championship of a cause could not be conceived than his of high protection and of paper money. Originally a free-trader Carey had early concluded that society was too undeveloped to practise it, and that a long period of protection must precede. His views on social and economic subjects he had elaborated in many volumes, the first of which had been published in 1835. The chief of his works are his “Principles of Political Economy” and his “Principles of Social Science.” Both of these have been translated into a half dozen European languages, and they certainly must be reckoned with largely in tracing the influences which have made for protection in our time. Carey in spite of all his hard labor saw the people recede from his views in 1846, and the return to protection in 1860 had given him unbounded joy. He wrote Morrill frequent letters of counsel and instruction when he was at work on the bill of 1861, urging him always to more arbitrary action than his just and reasonable mind relished. “Nothing less than a dictator is required for making a really good tariff,” Carey once said to him. So convinced was he of his position, so sure that he had solved finally the economic problem that any discussion or criticism spurred him to the most intolerant opposition. After Richard Cobden’s death in 1865, Carey said in a public gathering in Philadelphia that he regarded it as one of those instances of special providence for which the United States had especial reason to be thankful; for, said Carey, it was the intention of Mr. Cobden if he had lived to have again visited the United States; if he had done so he might have lectured, and so have done great harm to the cause of protection.

David Wells was a particular abomination to Carey. His reports pointing out the unjust discrimination caused by certain tariffs, and the fact that wages were not increasing in the ratio of expenses Carey charged to be untrue—juggling of figures paid for with “British gold.” One of his pamphlets answering Wells he headed with this quotation from the New Testament: Then one of the twelve called Judas Iscariot went unto the chief priests and said unto them “what will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you?” And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver and from that time he sought opportunity to betray him ... and forthwith he came to Jesus and said “Hail Master,” and kissed him.

As a matter of fact Wells was doing serious injury to the schedules then in force by pointing out what they were and were not doing. For instance there was the wool bill of 1867. It had been in operation for nearly two years, and according to Mr. Wells wool was in a more depressed state than before its passage. His summary of conditions was startling:

1st. Wool to the agriculturalist at a lower price in gold than has almost ever before been experienced.

2d. A decrease in the number of sheep in the United States, estimated by the Commissioner of Agriculture at four millions for the single year of 1868, while other authorities place the total decrease as high as 25 per cent since the passage of the wool tariff.

3d. A condition of the woollen manufacture characterized by a greater depression than that of any other branch of industry in the country, with the exception of ship-building; small profit accruing to a few, heavy losses to the many, with numerous and constantly recurring failures.

4th. An increase in the importations of foreign fabrics of wool; the imports of the fiscal year 1868 being returned at $32,458,884, and for 1869 at $34,620,943.

5th. Encouragement of smuggling and its apparent reduction to a system.

“In short,” concluded Mr. Wells after a full discussion of these points, “what is now needed to restore prosperity to the woollen industry, is a removal of all duties on the importation of foreign wools and dyestuffs, and a general reduction of the duties on manufactured woollen fabrics of every description to 25 per cent ad valorem. On this basis the most experienced woollen manufacturers in the country assure the commissioner that they can at once extend, diversify, and secure prosperity in their business. On this basis the cost of domestic fabrics will be so far reduced as to give great relief to the consumer, and lead to an immediate and largely increased consumption. And on this basis only can the wool-growers expect any immediate increased demand for his staple product of merino fleece; while in respect to the combing and the finer wools it is sufficient to say that the supply of these wools has not for the last few years increased in proportion to their consumption, and that the extension of their use in the American industry, which would inevitably follow a remission of the duties upon their import, would so far increase their demand as to give to the domestic producer all the encouragement that would prove necessary.”

Among the many cases which Mr. Wells analyzed in his reports none excited more interest than that of salt. Salt was so widely diffused in the United States, and its production in various sections had been so cheap and simple, that the price before the war was very low. The efforts of the states where it was found, particularly of New York State, had always been to keep it abundant and cheap. But so many persons had gone into the business in that state that there had been at times over-production and serious price-cutting, and as early as 1860 the New York salt men formed a company to put a stop to this sort of thing. By a clever manipulation of the State Assembly, which was the guardian of the salt-wells, they secured a law which permitted them to prevent the starting of any new salt-works. They then went to work to get control by buying or leasing all existing works. Succeeding in this they promptly shut down many of them and began to limit the output. The next year after the combination was formed came on the war, and the tariff on salt was raised to 12 cents a bushel (it had been 1½ cents in 1857). A year later it was raised to 18 cents, a duty equivalent to from 100 to 150 per cent of its value. This high rate practically put an end to foreign competition, and the exigencies of war taking the salt of Virginia and Louisiana out of the market, the Northern works had things pretty much their own way. Salt, which had sold at 20 cents a bushel in 1860, was selling five years later at 66 cents, and in 1869 at 48.

The Syracuse company made extraordinary profits under these circumstances. In 1861, the year after their first combination, 7 per cent. In 1862 they paid six dividends, one of them 12½ per cent. They soon issued a stock dividend of 100 per cent, and paid the same large cash dividends on this. In the first six years after the combination was formed it paid out $2,000,000 in dividends on a paid up capital of $160,000, and had a surplus of $600,000 on hand.

In the meantime the Michigan salt-works were growing rapidly. Their output which in 1860 had been but 4000 barrels became over a half million in 1864! But the same thing happened there as in Syracuse—too many companies. Sixty-six were operating there by 1866, and combination was applied, and the Michigan companies were soon consolidated into two. But the end of the war loosened the Southern works and competition was in danger of being restored. The New York and Michigan companies hastened to prevent such a disaster. They entered into negotiations with the Ohio River Company to limit the output, and the latter to make itself firmer leased the Kanawha, Virginia, Salt Springs for $75,000 a year and shut them down. Simultaneously with this campaign for making salt scarce at home, the industry began one to make it still dearer, an agitation for more duty—18 and 24 cents a hundred pounds were not enough, they wanted 30 and 42 cents, and this in spite of the fact that the internal revenue tax had been removed from salt. If the copper and wool men could get special bills through, why not they? There seemed no good reason to the House of Representatives—and they actually passed the measure—though the Senate did not concur, for lack of time, and the bill never became a law.

This interesting combination had not only succeeded through the tariff in making salt scarce and dear, but they had, as all such combinations do, given the lie to their claim that they could not produce it at a cost which would enable them to sell it cheaper, by exporting in 1868 some 500,000 bushels, which they had sold in competition with foreign salt, and by offering the New England fishermen who were allowed to import salt without duty, prices as low as those abroad; that is, they had one price for the land and another for the sea, one for Canada and another for the United States.

Mr. Wells’s evidence on the salt monopoly was complete—it had made a necessity of life dear through a tariff much higher than the internal tax and the higher wage of American labor called for. The greater part of the extra price the consumers were paying was going not into the pockets of the laborers, but into those of the operators.

After salt the portion of the reports which attracted the most attention dealt with the tariff on iron. Pig-iron was still enjoying the protection of $9.00 a ton, given it in the spring of 1865, and this, though practically all internal revenue taxes on it had been removed. Its price had risen from $22.70 a ton in 1860 to an average in 1869 of $40.61. The cost of producing this iron in the United States, including interest, repairs, and incidentals, was from $24.00 to $26.00 a ton, and it could be bought in England at $27.12. Mr. Wells’s conclusion, after examining all the elements in the problem, was that the cost of pig-iron to the American consumers was from $8.00 to $10.00 per ton more than was necessary to pay the American laborer his higher wage, and give the American manufacturer a fair profit; that is, the iron men were receiving a bonus of from $8.00 to $10.00 a ton from the country. Of course, this high price of pig-iron affected the cost of production in all sorts of industries. The most telling illustration of its effect was that of ship-building. The year the Civil War broke out the tonnage of the merchant marine of the United States was 5,539,813. Twice as many American vessels entered British ports as British entered American ports. The American Clipper was famous all seas over. We were building vessels for the foreigners, and everybody was quoting with pride a remark of John Bright in the House of Commons that the finest vessels sailing between England and Australia were built in the United States. Iron vessels were at this time beginning to replace wooden. England had taken the lead in their building, but we were beginning the industry, and our success in all related industries made it certain that we should succeed here. The war, of course, interrupted trade sadly. But the alarming thing was, that the war over, there was no recovery of the loss. On the contrary, it increased. In 1869 the tonnage had fallen to 4,246,507. Instead of American vessels filling British ports, British filled ours. A trade between the United States and Brazil carried on in 1860 in 345 American and 178 foreign vessels was almost exactly reversed. Shipyards all along the coast were shutting down. Why was it? The ship-builders did not hesitate to say: “The day of the iron ship has come, but it cannot be built in America. The ship that costs $88,000 in Scotland, costs $138,000 here.” It is not the superior cost of labor the ship-builders contended. The advantage the Scotch and English ship-builders have in cheap labor is compensated for with us by superior efficiency and by labor-saving devices. It is the cost of materials that cripples us. Just as the increased cost of copper, through a high duty, had put an end to copper bottoming and repairing of wooden ships in American ports, so the high tariff on iron and lumber was putting an end to ship-building.

Mr. Wells included many other similar illustrations in his report, but it was wool, salt, iron, and ship-building which demonstrated his points most clearly: that tariffs, which were so high that they were practically prohibitive, as in these cases, could not restore a depressed industry, they raised prices unnaturally high to the consumer, gave unnatural profits to the few manufacturers as in the case of pig-iron, led inevitably to monopolies as in the case of salt, and destroyed related industries as in the case of ship-building.

The report created a great noise and played a big part in the debate on the tariff bill, which General Schenck introduced into the House in February, 1870. That any bill attempted at this juncture should follow the pledges the leaders had given in ’62 and ’64 to reduce the tariffs as the internal taxes were reduced, would seem evident. But there was no proof that General Schenck and his committee had given more than a passing glance at these pledges. That the tariffs, whose unjust and dangerous excess had been demonstrated, should be corrected, seemed evident—but they were either ignored or only partially readjusted. Thus pig-iron, which undoubtedly would have been amply protected by a duty of $3.00 a ton, was allowed $7.00. The revenue was reduced, as it was imperative it should be, by lowering the duties on sugar, tea, and coffee—a “free breakfast table” being the committee’s slogan. An animated wrangle followed the introduction of the bill. The leaders on the extreme wings were William D. Kelley of Pennsylvania for the high protectionists, and S. S. Cox of New York for the free traders; while Messrs. Allison of Iowa and Garfield of Ohio led the moderates.

Mr. Kelley was at this time at the height of his power, and a more passionate and convinced supporter of the doctrine of protection has never sat in the Congress of the United States. He had not always been a protectionist. “In 1847,” he wrote once, “I had seen with gratification the protective tariff of 1842 succeeded by the revenue or free-trade tariff of 1846. To promote this change I had labored not only with zeal and industry, but with undoubting faith that experience would prove its benefits. For ten years all went well, and then came the panic of 1857.” To Mr. Kelley it was a knockout blow. He seems not to have considered the natural causes of the disturbance, but to have concluded the trouble lay entirely in the tariff, and for two years he went through the agony of a man losing his faith. Then in 1859 he sought Henry C. Carey for help. His conversion to protection was complete. As he himself said he came to regard the doctrine as an “exquisite harmony.” Everything which we could produce or manufacture should be so protected that the foreigner could not enter the market. By diversifying and expanding our industries we would draw greater and greater numbers to our country, thus giving larger and larger markets to our farmers. The manufacturers were to supply all the tools of the farmers and miners. Encouraged by prosperity production would multiply, and competition would reduce prices at home lower than abroad. It was a perfect circle.

There is no doubt that the basis of Kelley’s devotion to protection was his belief that it was for the interest of the American working classes. The improvement of their condition was the passion of his life. Apprenticed as a boy to a Boston printer he had refused to be sent to college lest it might wean him from his class. He wanted to taste with them all the experiences of poverty—to know what it cost for a day laborer to live and rise in America. He had studied law at night, had sought the society of Channing and Emerson, had become a man of influence, but his motive had remained unchanged. The misery he saw in 1857 he charged entirely to the free-trade system. He could not rest until he had found a substitute. He believed he had found it in the “exquisite harmony” of protection.

Having adopted a formula he believed competent to solve all problems, Kelley could support no criticism of its operations. Mr. Wells’s demonstration that high tariffs had not restored wool to its old vigor, had been the determining factor in building up the salt monopoly, that the iron men were getting the lion’s share of the duty on iron, that we could not build ships if we kept the price of materials so much higher than in other countries, was to him little better than blasphemy. Wells became his pet abomination—a detestation soon after extended to Professor Sumner of Yale, a man and an institution existing, he used to say angrily, for “the stupefaction of the youth of this country!”

In the debate on the Schenck Bill Mr. Kelley’s defence of the high tariffs was impassioned and angry. Monopoly, what did he care for monopoly, he cried, when Mr. Allison called his attention to the fact that a certain iron manufacturer whose scale of wages Kelley was praising, had, with the only three other of his kind in the country, agreed upon a list of prices made by adding to the price abroad the duty and a profit on the cost at home. “I do not care what they agreed to do if they are thereby enabling workingmen to keep their children at school, well-fed and comfortably clad, to maintain their seats in church and to lay something up for old age and a rainy day.”

Kelley’s refusal to consider any argument for lowering duties, particularly on iron, led to a charge that he was in the pay of the iron manufacturers. No proof of this accusation was ever offered. The New York Nation, which repeated it in 1872, made the amende honorable soon after, saying that Mr. Kelley and his friends had convinced them that he had no interest which would justify this charge. Kelley’s case was different from that of Thaddeus Stevens, who did own an iron foundry. The cause of the charge was due no doubt to Kelley’s unwillingness to admit that there could be evils in applying his favorite doctrine. For corruption outside of the tariff he had a just indignation—as for the whiskey frauds. He looked with horror on Simon Cameron; and in 1872, when office-seeking was causing great scandal, he refused to accept renomination to Congress, except on condition that hereafter he should not be regarded as a “patronage broker.” His defeat was generally prophesied, but he kept his word and won.

At the other end of the scale from Kelley was Samuel Sullivan Cox, by far the most eloquent, witty, and well-informed debater the Democrats had. Cox was an uncompromising free-trader, and one of the most interesting figures in Congress. He was still a young man, forty-four at this time, but an experienced one. A graduate of Brown, he had first taken part in public life as the editor of the Statesman of Columbus, Ohio. Here at the very start he earned his sobriquet of “Sunset Cox” by an editorial, which went all over the country; “A Great Old Sunset,” it was called. It opened, “What a stormful sunset was that of last night! How glorious the storm, and how splendid the setting of the sun.”

His popularity sent him to Congress in 1857, where, although a Democrat, he immediately put himself in opposition to the Buchanan administration by voting against the Lecompton Constitution. In 1866 he removed to New York City, which promptly sent him back to Congress as one of its representatives. The spirit and wit Cox could infuse into a tariff debate can only be understood by reading the Congressional Record. His irreverent interpretations of extreme protectionism kept poor Mr. Kelley in a constant tumult. Kelley’s sense of humor, which seems not to have been strong at any time, was utterly swamped by the serious view he took of his favorite doctrine, and Cox gibed him unmercifully. “Pig-Iron Kelley” he called him, and his resolutions “pig-iron resolutions.” Perhaps his most successful sally at his opponents in this Congress was his resolution against free sunshine—a resolution adapted from Bastiat—made when there was a fight on against lowering the duty on coal:

“Resolved, That all windows, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains and blinds shall be permanently closed, as also all openings, holes, chinks, clefts, and fissures through which the light and heat of the sun have been allowed to enter houses to the prejudice and injury of meritorious miners and dealers in gas-coal to protect domestic industry.”

“For the sun is a ‘foreigner,’” explained Mr. Cox. “He comes from abroad, and we must shut out the light of the sun in order to gratify these Pennsylvania gentlemen who have a monopoly of this article of coal.”

The real fight on the Schenck Bill was not, as already said, between Republicans and Democrats; it was as it had been in 1866 and 1867, in the party, between Mr. Kelley and his friends and the moderate protectionists, led by Allison and Garfield. Almost without exception the speakers on this middle ground opened by disclaiming that it was a question of protection or of free trade. It was a question of revenue, of moderate temporary protection, and of keeping promises made in the war. And nearly all of them having thus defined their positions attacked the bill, because it did not summarily cut down the tariffs on salt, iron, leather, coal, lumber, and other articles, where it could be conclusively shown that they were working chiefly for the benefit of the few.

Mr. Allison, who was particularly hard on the excessive duty on iron, wanted a reduction of at least 20 per cent on all leading articles. He knew he differed from the majority of the Ways and Means Committee on this, he said, but—

“It is not a question of political partnership. It is a question of affecting every interest in this country and every class, and because of the great interests involved should receive careful consideration at our hands irrespective of partisanship.... I warn those who insist so pertinaciously upon a retention of these high duties upon necessary articles of consumption that they only hasten the time when a more radical change will be made in our tariff laws. What manufacturers need most of all is stability in legislation, avoiding sudden and sweeping changes. The changes which I have proposed would reduce the revenue only a few million dollars, while to the consumers of manufactures produced they would reduce the cost of those products many million dollars. In my judgment such a policy would revive many industries now languishing, and not interfere with the great industries already established, and which under any change we are likely to make will still be largely protected. Our policy should be so to cheapen manufactured products that we can revive our export trade, now swept away, because we cannot compete with other nations in the markets of the world. If we could restore what we have lost, and in addition greatly enlarge our exportations of manufactures, we should then have an enlarged home market for our agricultural products, which would then be exported in a concentrated form in exchange for other commodities which we do not now and cannot produce.”

The debate on the bill occupied the House much of the time from the middle of March until the 6th of June, when it was passed. The Senate took it up at once, and the debate there followed very much the same lines as in the House:—protestation that it was not an academic question—pleas from Mr. Morrill and his friends to remember the war time pledges—warnings against the “smell of monopoly”—plans for removing the causes of the decline of ship-building. In short, the Republicans themselves rehearsed fully and forcibly the injustice in certain tariffs then in force, and asked the party to correct them. All of the correction they got was $2.00 a ton off pig-iron. Salt, leather, lumber, wool, copper, and other articles were not touched. The relief demanded for the consumer came in the breakfast table. Thus the bill, which the President signed on July 14, reduced the duties on tea about 40 per cent; on coffee, 40 per cent; on sugar of the lower grades, 33⅓ per cent; on clarified sugars, 213
7 and 12½ per cent; on spices from 33⅓ to 75 per cent. On brandy the reduction was $3.00 to $2.00 per gallon, or 33⅓ per cent; on spirits from grain, 20 per cent. The free list was largely increased, certain important materials for manufacturing, ivory, India rubber, and rags for paper making, being included in a far greater number of unimportant items.

Mr. Kelley and his sympathizers had saved the doctrine of high protection, and they accompanied their victory by a manœuvre which they evidently hoped would preserve them in the future from the necessity of considering such troublesome arrays of facts about the effects of particular tariffs as those forced upon them in the last four years by Mr. Wells’s reports. They persuaded the President to refuse to continue the office of special commissioner of revenue, which Mr. Wells had filled since his appointment by President Lincoln in March, 1865. The majority of Congress deeply deplored this move, and joined in signing a letter to him expressing their appreciation of his services. The wise men of the party realized only too well how they would be crippled without Mr. Wells. It was a loss which time has only intensified. It is not too much to say, that if he had continued to study and expound officially the revenue system for the next twenty years with the same dispassionate thoroughness and clearness that characterized the five years’ work he did do, the problem of the equitable distribution of wealth in this country would be much nearer an intelligent solution than it is to-day.

The passage of the Schenck Bill and the removal of Mr. Wells only intensified the sentiment of the tariff reformers. A most interesting movement had sprung up in that year (1870) in Missouri. It was a new organization, called the Liberal party, headed by Colonel William M. Grosvenor, the editor of the St. Louis Democrat, Carl Schurz, United States Senator from Missouri, and Gustavus Finkelnburg, a Representative from that State. The Liberal Republicans asked for several things which they felt they were not getting under Grant: general amnesty, revenue reforms, resumption of specie payment, and civil service reform. They had put up a ticket in Missouri, and elected it. Sympathy with their aims was widely diffused, and all over the country Republican conventions began to put tariff planks into their platforms similar to theirs, or to the one General Brinkerhoff had slipped into the Ohio platform in 1869, while party organs, like the Portland (Me.) Advertiser, the Chicago Tribune, the St. Louis Democrat, redoubled their efforts. In the fall the Free Trade League again sent out General Brinkerhoff and Professor Perry on a lecture tour. General Brinkerhoff made a stir with a lecture, which he called “The Tyrants of Syracuse.” It was a scientific dissection of the Salt Trust, which surpassed in completeness and convincingness anything which had been achieved in any one of the many analyses which had been given in Congress. The cumulative effect of the agitation began to stir the rulers of Congress, particularly Mr. Blaine, who was a candidate for re-election as Speaker. Unless he could make a compromise with the tariff reformers he saw there was danger of their uniting with the Democrats and thereby defeating him. He went to Chicago and sought Horace White “for the sole purpose of talking over the situation.” A little later he asked the four whom he evidently considered the most influential in the movement to meet him secretly in New York. The four were William B. Allison, Horace White, Charles Nordhoff, and General Brinkerhoff. There was a long discussion, ending in a proposition from Mr. Blaine that if the reformers would permit him to be re-elected Speaker he would permit them to name the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, and give them a majority on it of their way of thinking. The proposition was accepted, and Mr. Blaine was asked to appoint Mr. Garfield.

There was no reason to suppose that Mr. Blaine would not keep his promise, nevertheless the suspicion that he was “slippery” in politics was not uncommon, and the Free Trade League concluded to send General Brinkerhoff to Washington to see that the arrangement was carried out.

The new Congress—the Forty-second—opened on March 4, 1871. General Brinkerhoff had made a careful study of the tariff record of the members of the new House and felt sure of a majority, but it was resolved to test the tariff sentiment by a surprise resolution. Bills were prepared putting coal and salt on the free list, and Eugene Hale of Maine was asked to introduce them, under the Monday morning rule. Mr. Hale consented, and Mr. Blaine promised to recognize him. The bills were introduced suddenly as arranged, brought immediately to vote, and, after some skirmishing, passed, to the despair of Mr. Kelley, who, as Mr. Cox said, wailed now like Jeremiah, though in the last session he had talked like Isaiah. “I was in the majority then,” said Mr. Kelley, ruefully.

Sure of the House, there now remained only to make sure of Mr. Blaine. As the days went on and the appointments promised were not made, General Brinkerhoff felt more and more uneasy, but said nothing. Finally one day as he was on the floor of the House, Mr. Blaine sent a page to him asking him for an interview:

“He then called someone to the chair,” says General Brinkerhoff in his Recollections, “and as he went out of the south door I went out of the north door, and went around and met him. He took me down to the basement and into a room he called his den. He then locked the door and went to a cupboard and brought out some refreshments, and we sat down at a little table.

“After awhile he told me he wanted to talk with me about the Ways and Means Committee, and to ask my opinion in regard to a cast of a committee that was in his mind. He took a pencil and a slip of paper from a drawer and wrote down nine names and then turned it around for me to read. I saw that he kept his finger on the paper, and that he did not intend to let me take it away, and so I took a little time to study its make-up, and get it clearly in my memory. I saw at a glance that he was not carrying out his agreement, because Dawes was at the head as chairman, and not Garfield. I saw also as I looked over the list that a majority of the committee were not revenue reform men, although it was a combination calculated to deceive any one not fully posted on individual records.

“That a breach of faith was meditated was evident enough, but just what to do about it was not so evident, and so I asked questions to gain time as well as information. I asked him why Dawes instead of Garfield was at the head. ‘That is what I want to talk about especially, for I find it will make trouble to give Garfield the chairmanship, and it seems to me that Dawes is sufficiently in harmony with you people to be satisfactory, and the very fact that he is not an extreme man will be an advantage to you in the House.’ He said Garfield had not had sufficient service on the committee to entitle him to promotion over old members like Kelley and Dawes. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘Kelley would take a fit if I put Garfield ahead of him.’ ‘Possibly, that may be so,’ I said, ‘but you knew that just as well when we were in New York as you do now, and I am very sure our people would not be willing to substitute Dawes for Garfield in any event, for at heart he is not with us any more than Kelley.’

“The fact was there were only four men on his list who were not protectionists, and after discussing the matter awhile, he said, ‘This is not a finality by any means, it is simply tentative and I will make the committee so that it will be satisfactory.’ He repeated the word ‘tentative’ two or three times, but I made up my mind at once that a Ways and Means Committee satisfactory to the revenue reform people would never be made by Mr. Blaine, and so we parted after an hour’s talk with the understanding that he would see me again soon.”

That evening General Brinkerhoff met Garfield by appointment. “You are not to be chairman of the Ways and Means Committee,” he told him. “The protectionists will be in a majority on it.”

“You are wrong,” Garfield said; “Mr. Blaine has already written me assuring me of my appointment.”

“Let me see the letter,” said the General. Garfield’s face fell. He had not the letter. Mr. Blaine had asked that it be returned because life was uncertain. “You will not be appointed,” General Brinkerhoff reiterated. Garfield walked the floor for a few minutes, and then stopping, said: “General Brinkerhoff, if Mr. Blaine does not appoint me chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, he is the basest of men.” He was not appointed, but a few days later Mr. Dawes was.

No move could have been made which would have crystallized so effectually the tariff sentiment of the reformers and sent them so surely toward the Democrats as this. All over the country signs of dissatisfaction multiplied. They were only strengthened by other causes of complaint with the party—the failure to secure civil service reform and the awful need of it; the treatment of the South, which had led to a strong movement, headed by Greeley, in favor of general amnesty; the delay in resuming specie payment. These specific causes were intensified by the feeling about Grant. He had utterly disappointed the hopes of those who had looked to him to put an end to the open corruption and raiding which prevailed in Washington at the time of his election, and he had become almost the tool of some of the very worst elements in the party. Dissatisfaction had become abuse, and every evil in the country was laid at his door, an exaggeration Mr. Cox ridiculed in the next campaign by declaring, “I lay the horse distemper to Grant. Run me as an anti-epizoötic candidate at large.”

Between the real issues and the dissatisfaction with Grant there seemed reason enough for revolt, particularly to the Liberal Republicans of Missouri, who had succeeded in their bolt; and accordingly in January, 1872, they called a meeting of leading reformers in St. Louis. Here it was decided to put forth a declaration of principle and call a national convention in Cincinnati, Ohio, in May, 1872, of all those who felt that the issues were sufficiently important to justify independent action. Among contributing causes to this movement was the revolt in the Republican party, growing out of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868, and the attempt to read out of the party the seven Republican Senators who had voted Not Guilty. The continuing proscription of the “seven traitors” offended all persons who upheld the right of private judgment and they naturally rebelled against such party tyranny.

The hope of the leaders in the Liberal movement was to organize an entirely new party and to put forth a platform and candidates which would secure the support of the Democrats. The time between the St. Louis and the Cincinnati meetings was used in an energetic canvass of the country. The result was that a convention of some seven hundred people met in Cincinnati in May, but it was not seven hundred people united on issues. While the Missouri Liberals and their friends led in its organization, and expected to secure a platform and candidates to their liking, the convention by a series of fine manœuvres was captured, for the last man in the United States whom the tariff reform element would have chosen—and that was Horace Greeley! Almost before they knew what had happened to them, the men active in securing the convention found themselves with the most devoted high protectionist in the country on their hands, and a meaningless tariff plank in their platform! A more ironical ending to a great movement could not be imagined. To be sure, on one great issue to which the convention was committed, Horace Greeley had been a leader, and that was amnesty for the South. He had turned the New York Tribune’s full strength against the policy of revenge and humiliation, which the Republican party so blindly inaugurated, and he had suffered their severest punishment in consequence. But in no other particular was he in harmony with them, and a more unfit man to cope with the ruling corruption could not be imagined. As the Nation well said, he was a man not more remarkable for generosity and kind-heartedness than for the facility with which he could be duped, and not more remarkable for his hatred of knavery than for the difficulty he had in telling whether a man was a knave or not.

The tariff reformers left Cincinnati in despair and uncertainty—what should they do? A meeting was called at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York and the situation discussed. It was a “bad job,” all agreed, but on one point they could meet, that of amnesty. It was worth making a fight for. The Democrats would probably endorse Greeley if they stood by the Cincinnati convention. The meeting wavered and halted until finally late at night Carl Schurz in a speech, which those who heard it declare to have been one of the most eloquent he ever made, turned them to Greeley. The majority decided to waive tariff reform for the time being and join the movement to beat Grant.

The strength and the respectability of the faction which had seceded from the Republican party on tariff reform and kindred issues, alarmed the leaders who had been backing the iron and wool and copper and salt people in their demands. They appreciated that they must do something toward reform or the party would suffer still more seriously. All through the early months of 1872 a struggle went on to get a bill which should cut down the surplus without antagonizing any politically strong special interest. It could not be done. Senator Sherman finally said frankly to the lobbyists who were besieging the committee that it was to their interest to have a reduction made. “In my deliberate judgment,” he said, “it is better for the protected industries of the country that this slight reduction of duties (it was the question of a general 10 per cent reduction) should be made rather than to invite a contest which will endanger the whole system.”

After much struggle Mr. Dawes reported a bill in April, which he hoped Congress could unite on. Mr. Finkelnburg of Missouri spoke for the bill. It was not what he wanted, he said, but it should be supported, because it was a step in the right direction:

“Its chief merit,” said Mr. Finkelnburg, “lies in this, that after six years of peace it is the first bill reported to the House by a regular standing committee which proposes to make a substantial and general, though moderate reduction, in the war duties imposed upon the leading necessaries of life, the staple articles of consumption used by the people of the United States. It is the first step in the scaling downward, the inauguration of a policy of reduction, and as such I bespeak for it the support of all friends of revenue reform.

“It is true the reductions proposed in the bill are very moderate; so much so that the bill may, with apparent justice, be criticised for not going far enough. It is not what I would like to see, and far from my ideas of true revenue reform; but I gave it my support firstly, because I want to accomplish something practical, and I felt that if we asked the House to do more it would result in nothing being done; and secondly, because I recognize a fact which should govern all legislation of this kind, namely, that changes in a tariff schedule, which more or less affect business relations and values throughout a country, ought to be made slowly and gradually, step by step, leaving to the next year what remains undone in this, until we arrive at that normal point where the duties may once more assume a permanent character as they did before the war.”

It was indeed a reasonable bill to the reasonable man, but those interests which considered only themselves fought fiercely to save what the urgencies of war had given them. Many a member, it is plain from the debate, would have willingly supported a more radical lowering of duties, but he had important constituents goading him to look after them, and he dared not speak his mind freely. In many cases about the only argument these gentlemen offered was that they would willingly enough give up the duty on their coal or salt or lumber if Pennsylvania would on her iron, Michigan on her copper, Connecticut on her clocks. There was a pretty general frank admission that the high tariffs were a bad business, but “if you get it for your constituents you must give it to me for mine.” It was a phase which gave great joy to Mr. Cox, and he mocked at it in a speech long remembered:

“Let us be to each other instruments of reciprocal rapine,” said Mr. Cox. “Michigan steals on copper; Maine on lumber; Pennsylvania on iron; North Carolina on peanuts; Massachusetts on cotton goods; Connecticut on hair pins; New Jersey on spool thread; Louisiana on sugar, and so on. Why not let the gentleman from Maryland steal coal from them? True, but a comparative few get the benefit, and it comes out of the body of the people; true, it tends to high prices, but does not stealing encourage industry? Let us as moralists, if not as politicians, rewrite the eighth commandment: Thou shalt steal; because stealing is right when common.

“As I am a Representative of New York, and Onondaga, with the aid of the foreign solar artisan, evaporates salt, ought I not also to steal to help Onondaga? Stealing by tariffs, Mr. Chairman, is, as De Quincey proved of murder, a fine art. If everybody stole from everybody, is there any reproach to anybody? If everybody is a burglar, is there any need for anybody to lock up houses?

“How happy we shall be when we can all look each other in the face here, as now I look into the face of the gentleman from Massachusetts, clasp hands, and say: God bless you, my brother; you have stolen from me, and I from you; let us love one another. Then the little unprotected pigs, who are crowded by the big pigs quietly eating out of the trough, will squeal no more to be let in, for on this idea all shall be fed by swallowing each other’s food; and when all are fed, no one loses and we shall be happy.”

There was another significant feature to the debate, and that was the way it got on the nerves of Congress. Before the session was over there was an almost open admission that they did not know nor care much whether certain tariffs which were causing trouble, were just or not. For instance, Senator Logan of Illinois was greatly disturbed because the tariff on printed books was only 25 per cent, and that on the paper which made them was 31½ per cent. He argued long and earnestly over the matter, but finally was snapped off summarily by Senator Sherman. “It is like trying to row a flatboat up the Mississippi River to argue against the Committee on Finance in the Senate,” wailed poor Mr. Logan. We mean no disrespect to the gentleman, Mr. Morrill hastened to assure him, but is it any wonder we are weary of the subject and want to drop it after hearing delegations and representatives of all the parties in the business, and after having argued it out twice in committee? “No,” said Mr. Bayard of Delaware, “it is not; it only shows the folly of attempting to adjust duties in this way.” And as a matter of fact, the debate in the spring of 1872 showed, as most tariff debates have, what probably every candid member of Congress has always admitted after a few years of experience, that it is impossible for a Congress subject to the continual political and commercial pressure of private interest to make a just tariff bill.

The Dawes Bill was signed formally on June 6th by President Grant. As it stood its most important features were a 10 per cent reduction on articles manufactured from cotton, wool, iron, paper, glass, and leather, and an increase of the free list by such articles as hides, jute, and paper stock, and a reduction on coal, salt, lumber, and several other articles. All materials to be used in the construction of vessels built in the United States for the foreign trade were admitted free. At the same time a bill was passed removing entirely the duty on tea and coffee.

It had been a hard battle to get the bill through, but it was certainly a step toward more equable taxation. If the country had remained prosperous it is probable that in the next Congress the revenue reformers would have continued the work of equalization and distribution, but the country did not remain prosperous. The year 1873 saw a panic of wide extent, a panic caused by gigantic speculations in railways, in land securities, in booming schemes of every kind. Men spent everything they owned in roseate ventures and then borrowed all their hopeful neighbors would lend, and this madness followed only seven years after a war, which had cost the country perhaps 4000 millions of dollars! It was not a quick, sharp panic with easy recovery. Its shocks recurred again and again, and the desolation it spread dragged itself over several years. No time indeed for reform. But not so bad a time for those who had objected to the lowering of the duties in the bill of 1872. The falling off of revenue due to decreased importation was reason enough to them to make an effort to replace its provisions. They hurried on to this more rapidly than they would have done perhaps if in 1874 the general dissatisfaction with the Grant Administration intensified by the hard times had not caused the election of a majority of Democrats to the House. The protectionists, having only a short term of power left them, hastened to take advantage of it. We must have more revenue, they urged. The surplus of 1873 and 1874 is but $2,000,000. We shall have nothing for the sinking funds—we must put more taxes on tobacco and spirits, more duties on molasses and sugar, and we must restore the 10 per cent reduction on manufactured goods. It was urged by the tariff reformers that if revenue was wanted the repeal of the 10 per cent reduction would help but little—that the restoration of the duty on tea and coffee was the simplest and fairest—but the protectionists were determined to get back their 10 per cent, and they did it, though only after a hard fight and a close vote. And thus it happened that when the Republicans resigned to the Democrats in 1875, the majority in the House of Representatives, which they had held for fifteen years, they left behind them tariff schedules devised for war needs and enacted by them under a definite pledge of reduction when the war should be over and internal taxes removed.

CHAPTER IV
THE BUSINESS MAN TAKES CHARGE

The bill of 1875 took away from the tariff reformers of the Republican party practically all they had won in an eight years’ fight. The duties were again on a war basis, and while the need of revenue had been the plea for putting them back, everybody knew that the real victory was to the high protectionists. What could the Republican revenue-reformers do? The question came home with force now, for they were on the eve of a presidential campaign. It became still more difficult to answer with the appearance of the platform of the Democratic party, which for the first time in twenty years came out boldly on the tariff question. That it did so was due largely to the sagacity and fire of a young Southerner who was to play a large part in the coming struggles on the question—Henry Watterson, editor of the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal.

Mr. Watterson was what may properly be called a “born journalist.” His father before him had been an active newspaper man and almost constantly since he was sixteen, when he had edited a juvenile sheet whose political editorials had been copied all over Tennessee, he had been connected in one way or another with a newspaper. At eighteen he had written for Harper’s Weekly and The Times in New York. At twenty he was serving under Roger A. Pryor in Washington. After the war broke out he had not been able to resist the army, but even there he broke ranks once to establish at Chattanooga a semi-military daily which he called The Rebel, and which for a year he made the delight of the Confederate army. At the close of the war Mr. Watterson started a paper in Nashville, but in 1868 he was asked to take a position on the Louisville Journal—a paper made famous by George D. Prentice. He did so, and from the start his influence was magnetic. The paper grew in popularity and power until its editor, with good reason, was called the Dictator not only of his state but of his party. Politics was his element, and he fought for whatever cause he championed with a vigor, a wit, an eloquence that were the terror of his opponents. His opinions on the tariff were uncompromising. He had no patience with anything but “tariff for revenue only,” and he went to the Convention of 1876 resolved to have his way on that point, and he had it by writing in the plank himself. It was a very characteristic bit of Wattersonian literature:

Reform is necessary in the sum and modes of Federal taxation to the end that capital may be set free from distrust and labor lightly burdened. We denounce the present tariff levied upon nearly 4000 articles as a masterpiece of injustice, inequality, and false pretence. It yields a dwindling and not a yearly rising revenue.

It has impoverished many industries to subsidize a few.

It prohibits imports that might purchase the products of American labor.

It has degraded American commerce from the first to an inferior rank on the high seas.

It has cut down the sales of American manufacture at home and abroad, and depleted the returns of American agriculture—an industry followed by half our people.

It costs the people five times more than it produces to the treasury, obstructs the processes of production, and wastes the fruit of labor.

It promotes fraud, fosters smuggling, enriches dishonest officials, and bankrupts honest merchants. We demand that all custom-house taxation shall be only for revenue.

It is evident from what we have seen of the record of the Republican tariff-reformers that no great number of them would follow the Democrats in any such radical program as Mr. Watterson’s. Wells and Brinkerhoff, in fact, were about the only prominent tariff leaders of 1872 who turned to the Democrats in 1876. Carl Schurz, Murat Halstead, and Horace White all stayed with the party. But there was an even more important question than what the Republicans would do. It was what the Democrats themselves would do. Were they ready as a party to stand by “tariff for revenue only”? The question of Mr. Hayes’s election was no sooner settled than it became evident that they were not. The Democrats in the House divided completely on the question, the wing following the party platform being led by Colonel W. R. Morrison of Illinois and Roger Q. Mills of Texas—the protectionist wing being led by Samuel J. Randall of Pennsylvania.

Mr. Randall was an avowed protectionist-Democrat, and a man who, his colleagues had learned, usually was able to get his way. Randall had first entered Congress in 1862. He was a quiet, persistent, hard-working person who attracted little attention for several years; then the Republicans, sure of their majority and wishing to expedite business, undertook to adopt rules which would prevent obstruction. The quiet Mr. Randall set himself against the attempt. He led the small Democratic minority with a skill so unusual that more than once he blocked the Republicans’ way until it was too late to pass the measure. His endurance seemed unlimited. From one session lasting 46 hours and 25 minutes where Randall had forced the roll to be called seventy-five times, he came out as fresh as he went in. At another time in the fight over the “Force Bill” he was on the floor for seventy-two consecutive hours. After his party secured the House in 1874, Randall was put at the head of the Committee on Appropriations, where he cut down appropriations some $30,000,000. He came to the Speaker’s chair in time to preside through one of the most critical episodes in the history of Congress—the dispute over the Tilden-Hayes election. His conduct at this time was eminently cool, wise, and fair, and greatly strengthened his position in the country. It was not alone his parliamentary skill which won him followers. His presence counted for much. Randall was one of the handsomest men of his day—with a face chiselled like an old Roman’s and lit by a pair of large dark eyes of amazing fire and softness. Speak of Sam Randall to-day to one of his old colleagues and it will not be long before he will tell you with softened voice of “those wonderful eyes,” “that classic face.” Randall’s force and charm were such that they overcame a lack of studious habits, of reflection, and of broad views.

But as has been said, Randall was a protectionist, and he put now at the head of the Ways and Means Committee a man of moderate protectionist leanings, an old-time shipping merchant of New York City, Fernando Wood. Wood was a picturesque character, who had made a name for himself politically as the mayor of New York from 1854 to 1858, when the town needed reform quite as badly as it ever has since. He succeeded in getting himself reëlected mayor again in 1861, when he stirred up the ire of the North by proposing seriously that New York City secede and set up as a free town! Wood at once went to work on a tariff bill, but he took few of his party into his confidence, and he ignored those who, like Wells, were considered experts. Indeed, he went his way so arrogantly that the opposing wing of his party broke out in expostulation in December, 1877, Roger Q. Mills introducing the following resolution:

“That the Committee of Ways and Means be instructed so to revise the tariff as to make it purely a tariff for revenue, and not for protecting one class of citizens by plundering another.”

The resolution stirred up Mr. Wood considerably. It was “nonsense,” he said. The Committee of Ways and Means would discharge its duty faithfully, irrespective of the resolution. It would in due time report the results of its deliberations to the House, and in the meantime it required no instructions of any kind in the matter. A more menacing sign of unrest over the Wood Bill than Mr. Mills’s resolution, came about the same time—a flood of petitions against any revision of the tariff not made by its friends. By actual count 177 petitions were introduced. They came from twenty-nine different States: from New York 22, from Pennsylvania 28, from Massachusetts 17, from Maine 15. That they originated with a protective steering committee somewhere in the background—that is, that they were not spontaneous outbreaks—was evident from the fact that the phrasing of the whole 177 was practically identical. Whether they came from Alabama or Maine, Pennsylvania or Kansas, whether they pleaded for iron, or lumber, or cotton, or copper, or paper, or silk, they nearly all plead in identical terms that Congress would take no action concerning a revision of tariff duties “until after it shall have ascertained by an official inquiry the condition of the industries of the country and the nature of such tariff legislation as in the opinion of practical business men would best promote the restoration of general prosperity.”

Whether it was known to Congressmen generally or not where this flood of petitions originated, it must have been to many. As a matter of fact the “steering committee” behind it was the most powerful protective organization the country had seen at that time—the Industrial League of Pennsylvania. Formed about 1867, the League was intended to be national in extent and to represent all protected industries. Its first president was Peter Cooper, and its executive committee was made up of the foremost manufacturers of the day. From the beginning the Pennsylvania branch dominated in the League largely because of the energy of its president, the Hon. Daniel J. Morrell, and of its secretary, Cyrus Elder, and of the ability and far-sightedness of its Executive Council, including Mr. Joseph Wharton and Mr. Henry C. Lea of Philadelphia.

At once on its organization the League had become a power in Washington. The rapid removal of the internal war taxes had been due to its pressure. The Schenck Bill of 1870 had been practically written by the chairman of its Executive Council, Mr. Joseph Wharton. The League’s latest achievement had been the restoration of the 10 per cent reduction of duties made in 1872. It thus came to its new attack—a tariff made by “practical business men”—with all the prestige of an important victory.

The methods used by the League in carrying on campaigns were simple enough. It had secured, after much careful selection, a body of correspondents in manufacturing centres, chiefly laboring men. These correspondents circulated the League’s literature and secured names to its petitions. The petitions once filled out were returned to the headquarters of the League, and from there forwarded to the proper Congressman, who, so far as any printed sign went, might have supposed the document spontaneous in his district. The petitions were then followed up by personal letters from individual workingmen, sent direct to the Congressmen, and by personal visits from manufacturers. It was one of the most extensive and thorough organizations for bringing apparently spontaneous pressure to bear on Congressmen which the country has ever seen. It goes without saying that the political power of the organization was enormous—particularly in Pennsylvania, where it practically dictated who should be elected. Already Mr. Blaine himself had recognized the influence of the Pennsylvania branch by consulting the head of the Executive Council of Pennsylvania, Mr. Joseph Wharton, about whom he should make chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in 1871. It was this powerful association which now came out for no revision until after the “opinions of practical business men” had been secured.

It was not until March (1878) that Mr. Wood brought in his bill. He tabulated interestingly his objections to the tariff in operation. They were: Too many articles mentioned (2172); compound duties; ambiguity; the articles for the rich less highly taxed than those of the poor; encouragement of fraud; prohibitory duties, causing loss of revenue and enhanced prices to consumers; cumbersome machinery of operation; expensive collections. He confessed that the bill he presented did not deal with these demerits as they deserved, that he would cut the duties 50 per cent, if he could, instead of 15 per cent, as he had, but he had done the best he could.

The features of the Wood Bill were novel and interesting. It had but one list—the dutiable; any article not mentioned there was supposed to be free. It reduced the number of dutiable articles from 1524 to 575. It put duties on many raw materials. It imposed but one kind of duty on an article—ad valorem or specific as seemed to him best. It levied a retaliatory duty of 10 per cent on goods coming from countries which discriminated against the United States. It allowed a drawback on all exported goods containing foreign materials. It allowed the purchase of foreign-built ships by Americans and the free importation of ship-building materials. The general object of the bill Mr. Wood said was to revive commerce without materially affecting manufacturing interests whose right to protection for a still longer time Mr. Wood recognized. He considered his bill merely a beginning of a new policy in tariffs, looking toward the final complete withdrawal of the system of taxing consumers for the good of private individuals.

From the first the Wood Bill was cursed by the indifference of a large number of his own party,—men like S. S. Cox and Morrison, who did not speak at all on it,—by the open opposition of the moderate Republican tariff men like Garfield and Kasson, and by the bitter condemnation of the Industrial League, which called it “blundering,” “ignorant,” “an attempt to overthrow the industrial system of the country.” Naturally, under these circumstances the debate upon it languished. Indeed, the only personal incident in the debate which is interesting from this range is that at this time William McKinley of Ohio made his first speech in support of protection of American industry. It was a strictly orthodox speech calculated to give comfort to Mr. Kelley, and it was used as an opportunity for presenting a petition which the Democrats had been trying to keep out signed by over 100,000 laboring men of seventeen different States, praying for a 10 per cent increase of duties.

The character of the bill as well as the lukewarm attitude of the House toward it made a fine opening for Mr. Kelley, and he thoroughly enjoyed himself riddling it. He was an impressive speaker with a sonorous voice which had been carefully trained, for Kelley once had thought of going on the stage, and in preparation had studied with both Booth and Barrett. He now went at the measure with joy, and in the course of his speech gibed Wood unmercifully for yielding to a rhetorical temptation which seems to beset every writer who speaks on taxation; that is, imitating Sydney Smith’s famous paragraph on the overtaxed English farmer.

In introducing his bill Wood had said:

“The farmer in the West, where lumber is scarce, pays a tax of 20 per cent on the lumber his house is built of; a tax of 35 per cent on the paint it is painted with; of 60 per cent on his window glass; of 35 per cent on the nails; of 53 per cent on the screws; of 30 per cent on the door-locks; of from 35 to 40 per cent on the hinges; of 35 per cent on the wallpaper; of from 60 to 70 per cent on his carpet; of 40 per cent on his crockery; of 38 per cent on his iron hollowware; of 35 per cent on his cutlery; 40 per cent on his glassware; of from 35 per cent to 40 per cent on the linen he uses in his household; of 51 per cent on the common castile soap he uses; 48 per cent on the starch—”

And so on, ending up:

“Suffice it to say that the furnishings of his child’s cradle and the coffin in which he is finally buried pay a direct tax or one enhanced in price by our tariff system.”

Kelley sat smiling through the passage, and when he came to discuss the bill said:

“I was amused by the chairman’s expression of sympathy with the overtaxed farmer.... It was so amusing to note the gravity and pathos with which he started his poor farmer out to buy taxed hardware, shoes, etc., for himself and clothes and medicine for his wife. When I first read that gem of his speech in my youth, or earliest manhood, just after Sydney Smith had produced it, it made an impression on my mind that still lingers. But I have become so used to hearing it that when he commenced its delivery with such fine effect I found myself in the condition of Diggory in ‘She stoops to Conquer’: ‘Diggory, you talk too much,’ the squire said; ‘you must neither talk nor laugh while attending on this party,’ ‘Ecod, Squire, then you must not tell that story of old Grouse in the gun-room, because I have been so used to laughing at that story for the last twenty years that I am afraid I can’t hold myself.’

“Sir, for the last twenty years I have been so in the habit of laughing, at least in my sleeve, when hearing gentlemen reproduce that admirable novelty that I could not help doing so when the chairman of my committee startled me by reciting it. I have it before me as uttered by the gentleman, then from Ohio, but who was carpet-bagged to New York, and who is sometimes known by the sobriquet of ‘Sunset,’ as he delivered it in 1864.... It was quoted the other evening by the gentleman from Mississippi.... Subsequently I heard it from my friend, the late James Brooks. Then from our friend, S. S. Marshall, of Illinois, and there has never been a tariff bill under discussion that I have not heard it three or four times; and I repeat I could not help laughing when the chairman of the committee got it off with such solemnity.”

The Wood Bill never got out of the House, but it was not because interest in the tariff was abating. There was a deep unrest in the country on the subject, and it was stirred by a band of tariff-reformers of great ability. It is doubtful, indeed, if we have ever had as able a group of teachers as those who kept up their hammering in the ’80’s, undismayed by the disaster of ’72. To Perry and Wells and Horace White, whom we have already met, should be added two in particular, William G. Sumner and Joseph S. Moore.

Mr. Sumner, who since 1872 had held the chair of history and economics in Yale University, was a young man educated at Geneva, Göttingen, and Oxford. He had begun his career as a clergyman of the Protestant Episcopal Church, but had left it for academic work. A few years ago at a dinner in New York, Mr. Sumner explained how he became interested in the tariff question: “Thirty-five or forty years ago,” he said, “I became a free trader for two great reasons as far as I can now remember. One was because as a student of political economy my whole mind revolted against the notion of magic that is involved in the notion of a protective tariff.... The other reason was because it seemed to me that the protective tariff system nourished erroneous ideas of success in business and produced immoral results in the minds and hopes of the people.”

Mr. Sumner did not add at this time another interesting fact—that he was first aroused to active public efforts against protection by Grant’s suspension of the office of Special Commissioner of Revenue in order to get rid of the reports of David A. Wells. It was a very good illustration of the effect of trying to silence honest speech on a question of public interest. The high protectionists, in ridding themselves of Wells in Congress, turned him into the public forum, where he was immediately reënforced by Mr. Sumner. Two voices were raised where there had been one.

In journalism the most effective writer at this time was the “Parsee Merchant,” Joseph S. Moore. Moore was a clever German-Hebrew, who had come to New York from Bombay and had secured a place in the New York Custom House. He had first attracted attention in 1869 by a series of letters to the New York World, signed “Adhersey Curiosibhoy.” These letters, addressed to “Sahib Greeley,” told of the adventures of a Parsee merchant who came to New York from India to buy goods. His theory in coming, he said, was that as the United States was the land where certain things his firm traded in were raised they ought to be cheaper there; and as the United States bought jute, seeds, gums, etc., from India, he could establish a direct trade instead of the indirect through London. He wanted copper, but copper he found cost five cents more a pound in New York than in London. He wanted cotton prints, but they were 25 per cent dearer here than in England. He wanted enamelled hides, but they cost 25 per cent more than in England. He went to New Haven to buy carriages, but the price was $1100 in currency against 90 guineas in London. He wanted iron; it cost 80 cents more than in England, 60 per cent more than in Bombay. He wanted wood-screws, but the “wood screw sahib” laughed and told him he had a better market at home than any the Parsee could bring him and in it he could sell all he could make at from 70 to 100 per cent more than the foreigner paid. Discouraged, the Parsee wrote a series of over forty letters to “Sahib Greeley,” begging him to reflect and weigh the facts in his “great political economical mind” and explain to him why a policy which produced such prices for the people of America and made trade with foreigners impossible, was not stupid.

So effective was the Parsee that he greatly incensed the Industrial League. The Executive Council declared him to be subsidized by British gold and attributed to him much for which he was in no way responsible; for instance, the Wood Bill, of which Moore really disapproved, they characterized as a “crazy structure contrived by a foreigner who has been so long tolerated in the New York Custom House that he has grown to imagine himself an authority.” The opposition to the Parsee was so strong that Secretary Sherman finally removed him.

The only effective bit of tariff legislation in this period, 1876 to 1882, was due largely to the Parsee Merchant—the removal of the duty on quinine. The wholesale price of this medicine, enormous quantities of which were consumed, particularly in the Middle West, had risen in 1877 and 1878 as high as $4.75 an ounce, the highest point recorded in the history of the business. The Parsee merchant took up the matter in the press. The duty on quinine—40 per cent—was, he declared, “a sickening, disgraceful blood tax.” It was made by only four houses in the United States, all of them manufacturing chemists who were growing enormously rich—which was true. They brought in their bark free, and they were able to make their own price for the product. The press took up the cry. Frightened by the popular indignation, one firm of quinine manufacturers offered Moore $100,000 to withdraw his opposition. Several young Congressmen saw the chance, and in rapid succession ten different bills repealing the duty on quinine were brought into the House. The one brought to vote was introduced by James McKenzie, a young Kentuckian. It went through without debate, a victory which earned for Mr. McKenzie a name by which he is called to-day in Kentucky—“Quinine Jim!”

The Senate was less in a hurry about the quinine bill, for there it met the opposition of Mr. Morrill, who on principle had always fought against legislating a duty off or on a single article without considering those related to it. He pointed out now that the makers of quinine used several articles on which they had to pay duty—fusel-oil, distilled spirits, soda ash, East India bark (if they used that variety, which few of them did). To compel the manufacturers to pay these duties and give them no compensating duty on their product was unfair. But the tide was against him. “Raise a cry of ‘mad dog,’” Mr. Morrill commented, “and the dog is sure to die.” And he did—the bill passed.

As a matter of fact the effect of the removal of the duty was magical. In five years from the date the bill became a law—July, 1879—quinine had fallen from $3.40 per ounce to $1.23, and in ten years, July, 1889, to 35 cents, in 1905 to 21 cents. The quinine manufacturers were thunderstruck. They declared that they were ruined, and very likely they believed so. At all events, they discharged their hands and closed their works. As the country was not moved to tears by the spectacle, they gradually reopened their factories and resumed business, and eventually became more prosperous on a free-trade basis than they had been before. They remain a bright and shining example of the ability of Americans to compete with foreigners in a fair field and without favor in any industry not forbidden by our soil and climate. The quinine bill was the one tariff result the Democrats had to show for the four years they had held the House!

The presidential campaign of 1880 did not change the attitude of the two parties at all on the question. The Democrats repeated their “tariff for revenue only” plank, the Republicans their declaration that “duties levied for the purpose of revenue should discriminate so as to favor American labor.” It is doubtful if either party expected at the time of their conventions that the tariff would cut much of a figure in the campaign. Garfield, from whom if from any Republican of good party standing, sound counsel on the question should be expected, kept suspiciously silent. He knew as well as anybody, since Greeley had long ago told him, that the only objection the dominant faction of the party had against him was that he was not “sufficiently protective.”

By instinct and training indeed Garfield was a free trader. He was a Williams College man, and there had come under the influence of Professor Perry’s vigorous and clear reasoning. He came out of college committed to Perry’s ideas. From the beginning of his public life finance interested him, and he lost no chance to familiarize himself with the subject. In 1862, being called to Washington from the field to sit in a courtmartial for some weeks, he spent all his leisure with Secretary Chase studying the Treasury Department. In 1863 he was sent to Congress, where he was put on the military committee, but two years later, at his own request, he was transferred to the Committee of Ways and Means. Here he attacked all problems with resolution and industry. He pored over Tooke’s “History of Prices,” mastered thoroughly the history of tariffs in England and the United States, and acquainted himself with all the intricacies of the schedules. From the first he set himself against the efforts of Stevens and Kelley to place protection before revenue as an object of the tariff. Commerce and the consumers were quite as important as manufacturers, he insisted. He took a middle ground in argument, which he summed up in 1866 as follows:

“Duties should be so high that our manufacturers can fairly compete with the foreign product, but not so high as to enable them to drive out the foreign article, enjoy a monopoly of the trade, and regulate the price as they please. To this extent I am a protectionist. If our government pursues this line of policy steadily, we shall, year by year, approach more nearly to the basis of free trade, because we shall be more nearly able to compete with other nations on equal terms. I am for a protection which leads to ultimate free trade. I am for that free trade which can be achieved only through protection.”

One excellent feature of Garfield’s tariff work was his willingness to consider all the facts. When the attack began in Congress on David Wells, one of the first manœuvres was an attempt to prevent the printing of his reports. Mr. Garfield protested forcibly:

“I confess my great surprise,” he said, “at the opposition of the gentleman from Pennsylvania to the printing of this report of the Special Commissioner of the Revenue.... He admits, in the first place, that the facts stated are generally correct—that the statistics collected and arranged in tables are true and correctly stated, but declares that the marshalling of the facts is dangerous—that they are put together in such a way, and such inferences are drawn from them, that the report is dangerous to Congress, and to the enlightened people of the country. The gentleman asks this House to make a humiliating confession in which I, for one, am not ready to join. If any theories or opinions of mine can be damaged by facts, so much the worse for my theories. An officer who has served the country so ably and faithfully as the Special Commissioner of the Revenue deserves well of the country. I trust the motion to print will prevail.”

As we have seen, the tariff reformers of 1870–72 really numbered Garfield as one of them and wanted him as the head of the Ways and Means Committee—a position he would have had had it not been for Mr. Blaine’s slipperiness. The events that followed—the panic of 1873, the outspoken plank of the Democrats in 1876 in favor of tariff for revenue only, the effort of his party to keep quiet on the tariff—did not change Garfield’s views, though they did make him a shade more cautious in expressing them.

When he came to face a campaign for the presidency in 1880, he must have realized that whatever he thought about the tariff would count for little if a struggle were precipitated. He had nineteen iron foundries in blast in his Ohio district, and the watch their owners kept of him creeps out more than once in his speeches. He must have known that in case it should be needed these gentlemen were ready to make the biggest fight they had ever made for high protection. Indeed, only a few months before the nomination the ablest one among the organized metal workers, Mr. Joseph Wharton, had openly served notice of their intention on the coming administration. Mr. Wharton was speaking in Pittsburg on “The American Ironmaster,” and said: “It is meet that we should declare to the country that we will support no party and no candidate who cannot be depended upon by something better than election-day promises to protect and defend home labor. It is fitting for us to call ‘hands off’ to those who are itching to tear our tariff laws to shreds; to call upon the President in advance to refrain from meddling with commercial treaty-making and to veto, as he doubtless would, any measure injurious to home industry which a hostile majority in Congress may pass; to call upon the representatives of all other American industries to stand by us as we will stand by them in resisting all changes in the tariff laws and all tariff-making by treaty until these laws can be carefully and prudently revised by a Congress or a commission known to be devoted to the interests of the nation.”

That Garfield knew of this speech is certain, for a copy of it bearing his stamp was turned over to the Congressional Library when he left Congress in the spring of 1880. Altogether it was enough to make a man cautious, and it was certainly a mark of political sagacity on his part that he said nothing in his letter of acceptance about the tariff issue. But it was not to be downed. The Republicans, failing at the opening of the campaign to excite anybody about the South, suddenly attacked the Democratic phrase, “tariff for revenue only.” What did it mean? Why, nothing if not the destruction of the “home market,” the consequent shutting down of all American manufactories, the idleness of all American laboring men, a reign of “pauper labor,” the end of “prosperity.” Unfortunately for the Democrats, their candidate, General W. S. Hancock, a splendid soldier and gentleman, apparently was not certain that the phrase “tariff for revenue only” meant anything in particular. He tried to parry lightly with his famous remark that the tariff was only “a local affair.” The more he and his supporters talked, the more of a tangle they made of it. It was quite apparent if the tariff was to be a live issue they were too uncertain and too divided on it to handle it. The Republicans, on the contrary, came out boldly for protection to American industry, and on this they won. They won—but the victory seemed only to make more insistent the demand for revision. “I suppose,” said Mr. Morrill, regretfully, “that if the Bible has to be revised from time to time the tariff may have to be.”

If there had been no other reason at this time, the piling up of the surplus would in itself have forced a revision. The return of good times which began to be perceptible in 1878–79 had of course stimulated imports. In 1878–79 nearly $215,000,000 in duties had been collected; in 1879–80, $386,000,000. In these two years the national debt was reduced by a hundred million dollars, and there was more money left in the Treasury than they knew what to do with. Of course a stop had to be put to this. But more imperative than the surplus was public opinion. It was suspicious of high protection. The results of the census of 1880 had begun to filter through the country, and accordingly people began to compare the last decade—1870–80, which had been lived under a tariff of about 42 per cent (on dutiable goods)—with the one from 1850–60, lived under a tariff of about 20 per cent. In each had occurred a disastrous panic. In each there had been, in spite of panics, a great growth in agriculture, in population, in manufacturing. Taken on the whole, which had been the more normal growth?

To start with, it was evident that one claim of the high protectionists was a humbug—that is, given protection you had prosperity. Mr. Kelley, as we have seen, had become a high protectionist in 1859, because low tariff—he called it free trade—had not prevented a panic in 1857. But neither had a high tariff prevented the panic of 1873. “Where,” exclaimed the Parsee merchant, “was the Baal of protection all this time? Why did he not come to the relief of this distress? Alas, he was as lame, as impotent, and as false as the Baal in the Bible. The one was unable to strike a lucifer match in the plains of Judea three thousand years ago, and the other could not light a blast furnace in Pennsylvania.”

The census showed, too, that the general growth between 1850 and 1860 was greater than between 1870 and 1880. Capital had increased in the first decade about 90 per cent, in the second but 32 per cent; hands employed 37 per cent in the first, 33 per cent in the second; wages 60 per cent in the first, 22 per cent in the second; materials used 86 per cent in the first, 36 per cent in the second; products of manufacture 85 per cent in the first, 27 per cent in the second. The increase of the second decade over the first had been amazing in certain specific cases, as in iron and steel. In 1860 the iron production had been but 821,223 tons; in 1880 it was 3,835,191. In 1860 it was 60 pounds per capita; in 1880, 171 pounds. It was protection that had done this, said the Iron and Steel Association, but why had it not done as much for wool? As we have seen, the wool interests had secured the passage of a special bill in 1867 giving them the highest protection they had ever had, but in spite of it the industry had lagged. Evidently protection was not infallible. There were other elements in the problem of prosperity—what were they? Again, what about the prosperity it claimed to produce—that of iron and steel, for instance—was that prosperity equally divided? Was a high tariff as good a distributor as it was a generator?

All of these questions had to be answered, but how was it to be done? Not by a Congress in which “tariff for revenue only” Democrats and “revenue-reform” Republicans were at large, decided the Industrial League. Their notion of revision was to have it done by their own representatives, and at once they began an active campaign for a commission, such as was hinted at in the petitions of 1877 and in Mr. Wharton’s Pittsburg speech in 1879, quoted above. In November, 1881, a great tariff convention was called in New York by the manufacturers, and this body committed itself to the idea of a Tariff Commission.

Naturally, all this agitation had stirred Congress. Early in 1880 the Senate had passed a bill providing for a commission, but the House, jealous of its rights in the matter of devising revenue bills, did not agree. Now, however, the Secretary of the Treasury asked for a commission, President Arthur in his first message asked for one, the Industrial League kept up the pressure, and finally in the spring of 1882 the House consented. The idea of Senator Eaton of Connecticut, with whom the bill for the commission originated, was that it should be composed of nine members—six experts, one for each of the six great industries of the country; two statisticians such as “David A. Wells of Connecticut and R. M. T. Hunter of Virginia,” and as chairman “one of the great governing heads of the country, not an expert in anything except in all that makes men great.”

Mr. Wharton’s idea, as given at the Tariff Convention, was that “each of the chief groups of industry should be represented by one man.... For president, a man of high standing, preferably one known to his fellow-citizens as having acceptably performed important public service, and of really exalted character and intelligence, should be chosen. For secretary, a man well versed in the working of our existing laws, in Treasury rulings and judicial decisions, and in the ways of custom houses and the tricks or evasions of unscrupulous importers, would be most valuable.

“It might be necessary that what is loosely called the Free Trade element should be represented on the commission; both political parties should certainly be. Seeing that the appointments would be made by a Republican President, and that the Republican party is firmly committed to the principle of Protection to home industry, it would obviously be right that a majority of the commission should be Republicans and that a majority also should be distinctly Protectionists, but extremists of every kind are to be avoided.”

President Arthur evidently had both of these views in mind in appointing the commission, which he did as soon as the House gave its consent, but his own notion was somewhat more liberal. He cut the representatives of special industries down to four: wool manufacturers, wool growers, sugar, and iron and steel. John L. Hayes, the efficient manager and lobbyist of the Wool Manufacturers’ Association, was made chairman of the body—a choice probably obligatory on Arthur, such was Hayes’s influence among high protectionists in the country. The suspicion the wool growers had of the wool manufacturers (the latter wanting free wool) made it necessary to give them a special representative, and Austin M. Garland of Illinois was appointed—a fair-minded man willing to consider that there were other interests than wool in the country. Sugar was looked after by Duncan F. Kenner of Louisiana. He had been a member of the Ways and Means Committee of the Confederate Congress, and since the close of the war had been active in the reconstruction of his state. Kenner’s interest in a protective tariff centred around sugar entirely. The one really broad-minded man among the representatives of industries was Henry W. Oliver, Jr., of Pennsylvania, an iron manufacturer. Oliver was a man of large experience and foresight, and a keen judge of men, and from the start he threw his influence on the commission to the consideration of the general interest as well as of iron and steel—which he by no means neglected!

An excellent appointment, made at the suggestion of Mr. McKinley, was Judge Jacob A. Ambler of Ohio. Judge Ambler was an old-fashioned country lawyer, able, learned, and honest—a man jealous of the honor of any office he held or trust he handled, full of contempt for greed, extravagance, and grafting, shrewd in detecting them, and relentless in punishing them. His influence on the commission was most healthy. It was due to President Arthur’s knowledge of the Custom House administration (Arthur was Collector of the Port of New York from 1871 to 1878, when he was suspended by Hayes) that William H. McMahon, for twenty years an officer of the New York Custom House, was put on the board. McMahon had no interest in any phase of the question except administration, but that he knew from top to bottom, and his knowledge was invaluable to the commission. In order that there might be a statistician in the number, Arthur appointed a young man from the Census Bureau, Robert P. Porter. Porter was an Englishman and a free trader, who had found his way to America at sixteen, and had become a journalist in Chicago. In 1877 he had published an article in the Princeton Review which attracted the attention of President Hayes, and from which the latter quoted fully in one of the speeches made on his Western journey in 1878. When Hayes reached Chicago on this trip, Porter was presented to him, and the President at once claimed him for the Census Bureau. Here he made many friends, among them Judge Kelley, who lost no time in converting him to protection and gladly backed him for the commission.

The remaining members were John W. H. Underwood of Georgia and Alexander R. Boteler of West Virginia, two gentlemen who were appointed chiefly that their respective sections might be represented.

The announcement of the commission awakened no great enthusiasm anywhere. It was not sufficiently strong in business representation to make the Industrial League feel secure, and the appointment of Mr. Hayes as chairman naturally aroused the suspicion of moderate tariff men. Nor did that portion of its work obvious to the public increase confidence. Its first business, of course, was to get information about the actual industrial condition of the country. It set out to do this chiefly by means of public hearings in various cities. Starting out in July at Long Branch for three months it junketed about from Long Branch to New York, from New York to Boston, from Boston to Rochester, from Rochester to Buffalo, then in turn to Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Louisville, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, Des Moines, St. Louis, Nashville, Chattanooga, Atlanta, Wilmington, North Carolina, Richmond, Baltimore, New York again, then Pittsburg, Wheeling, Philadelphia, and finally back to Long Branch.

In this time 604 witnesses were listened to, and many of them questioned at length. They were of all shades of opinion, from the uncompromising free trader, like Professor W. G. Sumner, to the equally uncompromising higher protectionist, like the Iron and Steel Association. They were of all shades of selfishness, from the petty selfishness of a man who refused to consider what effect the duty he wanted would have on a related industry on the ground that he “had no interest in that business,” to the enlightened selfishness of the big iron man who advised lower tariff on iron and steel in order to placate public opinion and so save the system. A great number of witnesses wanted more protection. The chemists pleaded for a restoration of the duty on quinine. Mr. Joseph Wharton pointed proudly to his great nickel and steel works as proofs of what protection could do for infant industries, and urged that it be applied next to tin plate. Mr. John Roach of Chester, Pennsylvania, farmer, iron manufacturer, ship-builder and ship-owner, employer of 3000 workingmen with a weekly pay roll of $33,000, gave his experience as a proof that upon protection depended the prosperity and the future of the country. In Mr. Roach’s judgment all business irregularities came from a failure to carry out the doctrine to its logical results, which logical results were prohibitive tariffs for all raw and manufactured products possible to our country, and subsidies for all industries which could not be reached by duties, such as ship-building.

While praises of the results of protection and pleas for more of it were in the majority, there was considerable complaint of its damages and demands for freer trade. It is true, said the German silver makers in answer to Mr. Wharton, that you are making money, but how about us? We have to pay so much for nickel that we cannot sell in foreign markets, and it was pointed out that the Meriden Britannia Company had been obliged to establish a factory in Canada in order to keep a foreign market for its goods—a factory it still operates. What of that? said Mr. Wharton. “There is no market in the world that is comparable to this country as a market of manufactured goods.” All very well, retorted the people who used nickel, if you have a nickel monopoly and the market wants more than you can supply!

There were others that complained in the same way that the higher cost of materials cut them off from a foreign market. Colonel Albert A. Pope, the great bicycle manufacturer of the day, said that he was shut out of South America by English makers. He could offset the extra wage cost here by his more efficient machinery and methods, but his materials were so much dearer that he could not compete. A manufacturer of neckwear and trimmings complained that he could not sell his goods in foreign markets because his imported materials cost too much. The carriage-builders claimed that previous to the Morrill tariff they had a market in Cuba and South America, but they had been run out entirely by France, who could put goods there at half the American price. The oil cloth manufacturer pleaded for free trade. “If you give us free trade, we can send goods to any part of the world and do an enormous business.”

Consumers of copper complained that they paid, in 1875, 23 cents in New York for copper which cost 18 in London; in 1879, 17.5 for what cost 12.2 in London; in 1880, 20 for what cost 13.5 in London. Indeed, importers and manufacturers had at times been able to buy American copper in London so much cheaper than at home that it had paid them to buy it there and send it here. (It came in duty-free if proved to be an American product.)

Nor were the high protectionists even in steel and iron without opposition from men who, like them, profited from the growth of iron and steel industries. Mr. Abram S. Hewitt of New York, for instance, declared that from his point of view the duties were altogether too high, profits unfairly large. In speaking of steel profits he said: “I have never known any such profits in connection with anything with which I have had anything to do;” a statement which confirmed everything which could be learned about the carefully concealed profits of that industry—for instance, not long before this in a law-suit involving the estate of J. Edgar Thompson, the fact had been brought out that he had received as high as 77 per cent per annum as dividends on his steel holdings.

A sinister phase of the testimony was the recurrence of the word monopoly. The theory of Mr. Kelley and his kind had been, of course, that when in consequence of high protection the manufacturing of an article became profitable, capital rushed in to take advantage, and such competition resulted that prices eventually fell lower than they were abroad. But it was not working that way. In the steel and iron business, for instance, as soon as prices began to go down from interior competition a combination to keep them up resulted. It was even shown in the hearings that in 1878 the Vulcan Works of St. Louis had been paid to shut down.

It was October when the commission terminated its public hearings and settled down to prepare its reports. The scrappiness of the testimony, the evident absorption of the majority of the witnesses in their own interests and not those of the country, the little attention given to commerce and the consumer, the failure to get anything like exact statistics, created the impression that nothing important would result. A bad impression was made on the public, too, by the flock of individuals which everywhere hovered around the commission apparently to say to it privately what they did not care to say on the witness stand. These persons beset the members as they dined, walked, rode across country in their special train. They invited them to dinner and to the theatres—a horde of hungry duty-hunters who did more to demonstrate to the fair-minded members of the commission the peculiar evils inherent in any protective system than reams of the ablest theoretical teaching could have done.

The report was submitted to Congress in December, and its publication was a surprise all around. It was far more intelligent, far-reaching, and disinterested than a cynical public had expected. Poor Mr. Henry Carey Baird, the quinine-makers, the whole band of duty-grabbers, were in dismay. They had been betrayed, they said, and it was young Mr. Porter who had done it. He was an Englishman. It was evident he was an emissary of British free traders, sent over by them as a boy to be educated for the task of undermining American prosperity.

No tariff reformer indeed could have asked a better platform than that on which the Commissioners claimed they had worked. Early in their deliberations, they said, they had come to the conclusion that a substantial reduction was demanded—that it was necessary for general industrial prosperity. “No rates of defensive duties,” declared the commission, “except for the establishment of new industries which more than equalize the conditions of labor and capital with those of foreign competitors, can be justified. Excessive duties, or those above such standard of equalization, are positively injurious to the interest which they are supposed to benefit.” They encourage “rash and unskilled speculation” to go into business, they “discredit our whole national economic system,” they cause “uncertainty,” destroy the “sense of stability required for extended undertakings.” No such “extraordinary stimulus” as the war taxes gave was now necessary. The great improvements in machinery and processes made in twenty years “would permit our manufacturers to compete with their foreign rivals under a substantial reduction of existing duties.” Twenty per cent was the general reduction which they had decided manufacturing could support, and they estimated that the changes they proposed would produce a reduction of fully 25 per cent.

When one came to examine in detail the schedules proposed by the commission, it was apparent that, however good their platform, they had by no means lived up to it. The changes were marked by many inconsistencies. The duty on chemicals was cut down with rigor, and quinine was left on the free list, but the duty on crockery and glass was raised without presenting any satisfactory proof that the conditions of labor and capital required an advance. The duty on steel rails was dropped from $28.00 to $18.00—which was still prohibitive—and raised on steel blooms. The copper duty was reduced 20 per cent; nickel 16⅔ per cent; pig iron 4 per cent. The duty on iron rods, cotton-ties, and many manufactures of iron were raised 50 and more per cent.

The singular inconsistencies apart, however, there was enough of what was practical, sound, and helpful in the report to make it an admirable basis to work on. The most serious question seemed to be whether those who had created the commission would stand by its findings. Would the Industrial League consent to a 25 per cent reduction? Would the horde of individuals who had beset the commission during its labors keep their hands off? Would Congress accept and act upon it in the same spirit and with the same intelligence as had been bestowed on its preparation? That it intended to act upon it was obvious. The report was immediately referred to the proper committees in both House and Senate, with orders to prepare bills. Haste was necessary. The last election had gone against the Republicans, the House after March 4th would be Democratic. If the tariff was to be revised by its friends, they must act quickly.

CHAPTER V
THE MONGREL BILL OF 1883

In a message sent to Congress in December, 1882, President Arthur said:

“The present tariff system is in many ways unjust. It makes unequal distributions both of its burdens and benefits.... I recommend an enlargement of the free list so as to include within it the numerous articles which yield inconsiderable revenue, a simplification of the complex and inconsistent schedule of duties upon certain manufactures, particularly those of cotton, iron, and steel and a substantial reduction of the duties upon those articles and upon sugar, molasses, silk, wool, and woollen goods.”

The words had unusual weight, for Arthur was the only President we have had who could speak from a practical experience in administering the customs. For seven years (1871 to 1878) he had been Collector of the Port of New York. It was at a time when the Custom House was undergoing a series of rude shocks, the combined results of the ambiguities of the tariff laws, the greed of importers, the dishonesty of some of its officials, and the “pernicious activity” in politics of others. Arthur had been obliged to fight for the honor of his own administration, and he had finally been suspended by President Hayes. That is, President Arthur knew much from close contact of the ambiguities, the frauds, the injustice of the duties then in force, so that any expression of his had the merit of being “practical.” It had additional force, because nobody could doubt Arthur’s devotion to protection. He had been from boyhood a “Henry Clay Whig.” Everybody recognized that nothing but a profound conviction that the country demanded lower duties would have driven him to ask for them. The country indeed had not long before this given the Republicans a stern rebuke on its tariff policy by electing a good-sized Democratic majority to the House in the next Congress—the forty-eighth, meeting in December, 1883.

Spurred to action by Arthur’s message, the report of the Tariff Commission, and by their own defeat, the Republicans lost no time in getting to work. The report of the Tariff Commission was sent at once to the Committee of Ways and Means in the House and to the Finance Committee in the Senate, and both bodies began to frame bills. Under ordinary circumstances, the Senate would have been obliged to wait for a bill from the House before expressing itself,—the House alone having the right to originate revenue bills,—but the circumstances were not “ordinary.” The Senate at this moment had before it a bill for reducing the internal revenue. This bill had come from the House in the preceding session and had only been kept from becoming a law by the filibustering of certain Democratic Senators. It was somebody’s bright idea now to tack to this internal revenue bill, as an amendment, a tariff bill of the Senate’s own making. It was, of course, an adventure of uncertain issue. The House was notoriously jealous of its constitutional rights. Would it recognize a measure proposed by the Senate? The Senate thought it worth the trial at least, and fell to work.

The two committees which at opposite ends of the Capitol now began to sit daily over the tariff were remarkable bodies. At the head of the Senate committee was Mr. Morrill, who twenty-three years before had introduced into the House of Representatives the bill with which this narrative opened. Since 1867 he had been a member of the Senate, giving the bulk of his time to revenue questions. He was seventy-two years old now, and in spite of over twenty years’ labor on tariff schedules was still dignified and courteous!

John Sherman was next to Morrill on the Committee—a place he held with bad grace. Sherman had lost his rank on the Committee of Finance, of which he had formerly been chairman, by his appointment to Mr. Hayes’s cabinet in 1876, it being an invariable rule that a member returning to the Senate after an interregnum should go to the foot of his party colleagues on committee. When Sherman returned in 1881 he thought he should be an exception to the rule. He had up to this time outranked Mr. Morrill in both House and Senate. His services as Secretary of the Treasury had given him special skill in dealing with revenue questions. But Mr. Morrill declined to yield. It looked as if Mr. Sherman would sit at the foot of the table, when Mr. Allison, who was a member of the Committee, appreciating the strain, quietly suggested to his Republican colleagues that Mr. Sherman be moved up next to Morrill. This was done, but from the beginning of the work on the bill the effect of his defeat was most noticeable on Sherman’s temper and attitude. He was arrogant in committee and out. He says in his “Recollections” that he was “piqued” by Morrill’s failure to yield to him. The word is mild.

It began to be noticed soon after the Committee went to work that Mr. Sherman was getting much help from the member at the foot—a new Senator, the Senator from Rhode Island—Nelson W. Aldrich. People who watched the hearings said he seemed to have at his tongue’s end all the facts which bore on the high tariff side. It was said on the inside, too, that he was the man who had written the cotton schedule for the report of the Tariff Commission. He had certainly done well for his constituents. He had secured an increase on that class of cotton goods which was chiefly imported, and a decrease on those of which little or nothing could be imported.

The leading Democrat on the Committee was James B. Beck of Lexington, Kentucky. Beck was a Scotchman by birth and a Democrat of eighteen years’ Congressional experience. Powerful in body and mind, brave, honest, and combative, he led his party in the Senate with great effectiveness. It was on the tariff that Beck was at his best. Let him get after a rate he regarded as iniquitous and he was like an avalanche. “His mighty arms swing like hammers,” wrote an English correspondent who heard him once on that theme. “His Scotch tongue, which some call harsh and rasping, thunders out the shortest and simplest Anglo-Saxon words that can be found to compose his terse sentences. Now and then the clinched fist comes down on his desk with telling force. The whole speech is made up of facts and statistics. If a flower of rhetoric should spring up in his path he would crush it with his ponderous foot. If a trope should get into his throat, he would swallow it. Adjectives, metaphors, and similes find no place in his oratory. Like Joseph Hume, he is a man of figures, and like him he speaks like a problem in mathematics.”

The House Committee was strong on both sides. The chairman was “Pig Iron” Kelley, who, in spite of twenty-five years’ experience with protection, still found it an “exquisite harmony.” He had as supporters the experienced Mr. Kasson of Iowa and the devoted young Mr. McKinley of Ohio, but it was on neither of them he was depending chiefly. There had been put on the Committee in the previous session a man from Kansas, Dudley C. Haskell, who was now to take about the same relation to Kelley as Kelley had taken to Thaddeus Stevens in the tariff debate of 1866 and 1867. The Democrats of the Committee were four of the strongest that Congress has seen since the war—Carlisle of Kentucky, Randall of Pennyslvania, Morrison of Illinois, and Tucker of Virginia.

Here, then, were two able committees giving their entire time to tariff bills. They were under instructions from a Republican country and a Republican President to lower the duties, and they had as a guide a report of a Republican commission of their own creation advising its reduction. They had Republican majorities to back them. Their duty seemed plain. It seemed clear, too, that they should be free from outside pressure. All of those individuals whose interests were affected had had ample opportunities to lay their cases before a commission constituted for the purpose. To keep away from Washington would seem to be their obvious business. But they saw it differently. Indeed, the two committees had scarcely gone to work before a “third house” was in session—a house of lobbyists come to Washington for the express purpose of preventing the recommendations of the Tariff Commission from becoming law. The wool-growers, disgusted that Mr. Garland, representing them on the commission, had consented to nearly 20 per cent reduction, held public meetings in Ohio denouncing him, and sent down what scoffers called the “wool trinity”—Columbus Delano, one-time Secretary of the Interior under Grant, William Lawrence, afterward a Comptroller of the Treasury, and David Harpster—all wool-growers and all from Ohio.

Mr. John L. Hayes, chairman of the Tariff Commission, whose duties naturally would be supposed to be over, took rooms in Washington and as agent of the woollen manufacturers began a campaign to get more for them than as commissioner he had consented to. The makers of chemicals and drugs—and quinine particularly—instituted a siege. Agents of iron and steel, sugar, mineral water, wood pulp, of everything which had suffered a reduction, appeared in the corridors of the Capitol at Washington. “No such lobby has been seen here for years,” the correspondents began to write to their newspapers. These agents, attorneys, manufacturers, did not hesitate to say loudly that no bill should pass unsatisfactory to them. They were far from standing together, however, in their demands. Indeed, they were in incessant conflict, for they all wanted what they purchased—that is, their raw material—free; while what they sold—their product—they wanted protected! In every industry came this clash, though it was more acute between the wool and woollen men than elsewhere.

The first bill to come out of committee was that of the Senate. It was at once seen that the duties proposed were in many cases lower than those proposed by the Tariff Commission. For instance: the Tariff Commission had laid $6.72 duty on pig iron, a reduction of only 4 per cent. The Senate Committee, after going over the whole ground, had cut the rate to $6.00. Mr. Sherman had fought the decrease in the committee; he continued to fight it on the floor. He tried for $6.72 and was voted down overwhelmingly. He tried for $6.50 and again was beaten. He argued, threatened, cajoled. He read telegrams from the iron men of his state, brought in letters and testimony, worked day and night, but it took him over a month to succeed, and then it was only, as Beck said, after “he had threatened the Senate with the defeat of the whole bill if they did not give him at least $6.50 on pig iron, and after he had drawn the party whip over the heads of his followers with an audacity I have never seen equalled in any public assembly, by threats and every other means that a great bold parliamentary leader can assert over the men who look up to him.” Beck was none too hard on Sherman. He beat his party into submission, but it should not be forgotten that the lash was on his own shoulder—the lash of Henry B. Payne of Cleveland, of the ironmasters of the Mahoning Valley, of all the highly organized iron interests of his state. He knew only too well what failure to accede to their demand meant for the party in Ohio, for they did not hesitate to tell him privately and publicly.

Sherman fought for an increased rate on wool as he did for one on pig iron. He was as hard pressed in one case as the other. The fight caused more than one hard and open tilt between him and his Republican colleagues, particularly with Allison, who disapproved a higher tariff on wool. Sherman was determined, however, and again and again returned to the attack with threats of defeating the entire bill if he could not have his way.

But Mr. Sherman was not the only Senator who openly held up the party for duties higher than the majority of his colleagues approved of. The Senators of Maine, Michigan, and Wisconsin fought for duty on lumber in the same way. The Tariff Commission had not changed the duties on lumber. It left them as they were without a word of explanation. Better so; for a more indefensible tax than that on lumber could not be conceived. It had already helped work a destruction which a hundred years could not repair, and its continuance seemed little less than crime. The duty on sawed boards was $1.00 and $2.00 per one thousand feet, according to variety. Under this protection, combined with the enormous demand which the growth of the country had created, the cutting of timber had been carried on recklessly and lawlessly, particularly in Wisconsin and Michigan. Ten years before, in 1873, the danger of exhausting the forests beyond repair had been shown and Congress had passed the Timber Culture Act to encourage planting; but while it gave a bonus for planting on one hand, it continued the bonus for cutting on the other. Pine in particular was being stripped off. A Federal Commission had just issued a report showing that there was only about 81,000,000,000 feet of white pine standing in the three principal states—enough for ten years only. The duty, combined with the knowledge that the supply was limited, kept prices so high that in the “treeless states,” like Nebraska and Kansas, new settlers were in great distress. From all over the West, indeed, came the cry for relief. People were living in dugouts, because of this tax, the Western Senators and Representatives told Congress. Their cattle had no shelter, their fodder was covered only with a thatch. What made the tax more vicious was the well known fact that the forests were largely in the hands of the “lumber barons,” men who had in one way or another secured vast tracts of land at from $1.25 to $2.50 an acre and who now were gathering in $8.00 or more an acre by unrestricted cutting of the timber. The Senate of the United States numbered one of the greatest of these barons—Philetus Sawyer, Esq., of Wisconsin.

Naturally it was not the interests of Mr. Sawyer which the timber Senators pleaded! It was the cause of the lumbermen and of the millmen. The tariff must be kept up in order to give them their higher wage. They must not be put into competition with the pauper wages of Canada! As a large percentage of the laborers who received this higher wage were Canadians who came over for the season only, the argument had little effect. It was not argument indeed that saved the lumber duty. It was saved because the Southern Representatives who threatened to defeat it were told they could not have a duty on sugar unless they consented to one on lumber, and they made the trade.

Such barter went on openly in many other items. One of the most determined efforts to force a duty was made by Senator Mahone of Virginia, who wanted $2.00 a ton on iron ore. The Tariff Commission had allowed 50 cents—the Senate Committee had allowed 50 cents, but Mahone made a fierce fight for more. He tried for $2.00, for $1.00, for 85 cents, for 75 cents, for 60 cents. He brought up the point at every opportunity, but again and again was voted down overwhelmingly. “I’ll defeat the bill if this duty is not raised,” he is reported as saying, and Sherman backed him in his threat.

His attitude was the attitude of the representatives of various other interests, big and little; that is, it developed almost as soon as the debate began that leading Republican Senators were determined to keep up duties in which certain of their constituents were interested and that to do this they were ready to trade and dicker with fellow Senators. That this determination of Sherman, Mahone, and others was clearly demonstrated was due largely to the quick wit and the daring of Mr. Beck. He filibustered so adroitly from the beginning of the contest over the schedules that again and again he forced Republicans committed to tariff reform to go on record against a proposed reduction or for a proposed increase. In Sherman’s struggle for the increased duty on pig iron, Senators like Morrill, Allison, Dawes, Frye, Hoar, Hale, Hawley, all voted against an increase at first, but finally were whipped into line, Allison being the last to yield. Mr. Beck gloated over them, loudly pointing out how different ones had solemnly declared on the floor they would not support the increase, yet had yielded at last. Nothing could stop him. An effort was made to limit the debate to ten days. “Never!” shouted Beck, “not to ten weeks.” Not even the effort of his party to put an end to his obstruction availed. He gloried in his insubordination.

It was the 20th of February before the Senate Bill was passed. Two weeks before this the bill had taken on an importance quite unexpected. This change was due to the growing certainty that the House was not going to be able to finish its bill and that if a tariff bill was passed this session, it would be the measure on which the Senate was working. No sooner did this rumor go out than the whole body of lobbyists, whose work up to this time had been concentrated on the House, rushed pell-mell to the corridors of the Senate to see what they could do to make the measure “satisfactory” before it was reported. Some of the things they helped to do have already been alluded to.

The House Bill was having a hard time. The Committee, instead of following the Tariff Commission report and reducing duties 20 per cent, had reduced them less than 10 per cent. Now there was no doubt but that a majority of the Republicans in the House were in favor of real reform. Most of them declared they dared not go home without a reduction of taxes. But there was a powerful Republican minority who believed with Senator Sherman that it was more essential to satisfy the combined industrial organizations besieging the Capitol than it was to satisfy public opinion. This minority was determined no bill which gave anything like a 20 per cent reduction should pass. It is not unfair to say that it wanted a bill, but a bill which gave the appearance of reduction, not actual reduction.

The Democrats, too, were divided. John G. Carlisle, who led the majority, was what may be called a constructive free trader; that is, he believed in scaling down duties as rapidly as industries enjoying them could support it, until a ‘tariff-for-revenue only’ basis was reached. He declared now that if the Republicans had presented a bill which sincerely attempted to embody the reduction of 20 per cent suggested by their commission and demanded by public opinion, he would favor its passage, but Kelley’s bill he would not support. Randall, who led the Democratic minority, was a high protectionist, but Randall was really willing to support any bill which promised to get the tariff out of the way. He expected to be a candidate for Speaker at the opening of the next Congress and did not want to divide his party by supporting protection in opposition to the Democratic majority.

From the very beginning of the debate on the bill it became evident that each faction was ready to fight strenuously to carry out its program. The Carlisle Democrats began by bringing to issue almost every item as it was read. They made amendments, debated them, forced them to vote by voice, by rising divisions, and by tellers, and they openly declared that they would keep this up until the Fourth of March rather than allow Mr. Kelley’s bill to come to vote. Their tactics indeed were very like those Mr. Beck was using in the Senate and their effect was identical; that is, they constantly forced the Republicans to put themselves on record against lowering duties. Not infrequently they were aided in their work of obstruction by revenue reform Republicans, particularly from the West, where the tariff on lumber and an increased duty on barbed wire were causing indignation.

So strong a program of opposition was developed that in ten days after the discussion opened it became evident that if any bill was passed it would be because the high protection faction yielded to the demands of the majority of the party for a reduction or that they carried their program by superior parliamentary tactics. That they were in strong position for the latter everybody saw. As a fact they held all the strategic positions: the speakership, the chairmanship, and a majority of the Ways and Means Committee, and of the Committee on Rules. For the moment, however, the work was all in the hands of Chairman Kelley and his lieutenants. Mr. Kelley had been ill from the beginning of the session and he had asked Mr. Haskell to take charge of the bill on the floor. A more sympathetic and vigorous understudy than Haskell, Kelley could not have had. He was a man only forty years old, a powerful individual, over six feet high, with a voice as big as his body, and with the face and eyes of an evangelist. His earnestness for a cause he had espoused was almost tragic in its intensity, and forced him to work and fight for it passionately and untiringly. Two subjects had occupied him so far in the six years he had been in Congress, polygamy and protection. He hated the first as he revered the second. Indeed, for Haskell protection was as complete a solution of all economic difficulties as it was for Kelley, and he had the same fanatical devotion to the doctrine. The only question he asked himself in making a tariff bill was whether an article could or could not be raised in this country. If it could not, he would put it on the free list. If it could, he would protect it beyond the possibility of foreign competition. Of course, this reduced his labor to finding out how much each article needed to be put beyond competition. This was a matter of fact. As soon as he was put on the Committee of Ways and Means, which was at the opening of the 47th Congress, he went to work with unparalleled industry to master the conditions of each article. He became a veritable encyclopædia of information on the “needs” of industries. When the work on the bill of 1883 began, he doubled his efforts. His days he spent in committee and in the House, his nights receiving representatives of all sorts of industries. The facts and figures they gave him he attached in long festoons to copies of the bills which he was making ready for the debate.

Convinced as Kelley and Haskell were of the perfection of their doctrine, it was not to be wondered at that they looked on the Democratic opposition to the duties they were trying to carry through as outright filibustering or that they were willing to lend themselves to almost any manœuvres which would thwart it. Their first move was to try to stop debate. The attempt threw the Democrats into violent excitement, for so far only two out of sixteen schedules had been considered. It was an effort to gag the House, they declared. “Such a proposition,” said Mr. Carlisle, “has never been heard of in the parliamentary history of this country, a proposition to destroy the freedom of debate on a bill to raise revenue.” “Stop your filibustering then,” was the gist of Mr. Haskell’s retort. “Never under gag rule,” retorted Mr. Carlisle.

The failure of this attempt to get his bill to vote discouraged Kelley, and it began to be rumored that he and his colleagues were going to drop it and go to the country with the charge that the Democrats had killed it by obstruction. The rumor reached the White House and Arthur let it be known that if Congress failed to pass a bill he should call them in extra session.

The dilemma was a serious one for Mr. Kelley. It was evident that the Democrats would never allow his bill to come to vote unless its duties were materially reduced. He could never consent to that. But the President demanded a bill of some kind, would call an extra session to get it if necessary. The only hope seemed in the Senate bill, which was already fairly advanced and which Kelley knew would soon be reported. But this Senate bill did not suit him at all. Its duties he saw were bound to be considerably lower than those recommended by the Tariff Commission. Supposing that he waived the constitutional objection to a revenue bill originating in the Senate and let it come before the House, was there any method by which he could make it suit his notion before it came to vote? The question was a difficult one, and for the moment there seemed no answer.

As day by day passed and nothing was done, irritation and uncertainty grew on both sides. Only the lobby rejoiced. There would be no reduction after all! But they did not reduce their pressure. Indeed it increased rather. The iron and steel men called down Commissioner Oliver. The mineral water men stirred up their attorney, Roscoe Conkling. Every interest engaged the highest-sounding names it could secure for a final day and night attack.

The effect of all this on the two chambers was deplorable. Particularly in the House did the debate lose all semblance of sincerity and order. Again and again it was broken up by charges and counter-charges—by contradictions, appeals to the Speaker, cries of “Hear, hear!” “Order, order!” “Rule, rule!” The Democrats, gloating over the apparent predicament of the Republicans, taunted them repeatedly with not intending to pass a bill—charges which maddened Mr. Haskell especially. One day when these taunts were unusually sharp, Haskell lost control of himself. Towering like a giant, his face white as a sheet, he shouted, “We will see who wants reduction! We will see who are the obstructionists. I move that the committee rise”—a motion intended to close debate on the bill. The Democrats almost as a body were on their feet at once, rushing down the aisles, dragging in members from committee rooms, haranguing on gag rule. A long and acrimonious debate followed, but as before, the attempt to close debate failed.

Another day, when both sides were heated and bitter, Townshend of Illinois declared that the bill of the Ways and Means Committee did not originate in Congress at all, but was “sired by a lobby of hired agents of monopoly and was brought forth in a secret conclave unknown to the rules of the House.” Mr. Haskell’s wrath was terrible. “Every word of his declaration is a scandalous falsehood,” he thundered. There was confusion on both sides for a moment but the friends of the two calmed them down. The next morning, however, Mr. Morrison waited on Mr. Haskell at his boarding house on Eighth Street with a peremptory demand that Mr. Haskell make public retraction of his offensive utterance or he, Mr. Morrison, would feel obliged to request Mr. Haskell to name some gentleman to confer concerning further remedies for his friend’s wounded honor. Mr. Haskell laughed at the idea of a duel, but he assured Mr. Morrison that so long as Mr. Townshend’s statement stood on record, his assertion of its falsehood would stand against it. And there the matter remained.

Such was the temper of the House when the Senate bill reached it on February 20—a poor temper indeed for candid legislation. Nevertheless, the bill could probably have been passed promptly if Mr. Kelley had been willing. The Carlisle Democrats criticised it, but they declared it too good to obstruct. As for the majority of Republicans, they were in favor of it. But Mr. Kelley was not willing. His first business then was to block any attempt to get the bill off the Speaker’s table and pass it by a regular procedure; a thing not difficult to do, for Speaker Keifer was playing perfectly into his hands and could be depended upon not to recognize anybody whom Kelley and Haskell were unwilling should get a hearing. Indeed, the Democrats had been saying for days that nobody could catch the Speaker’s eye unless Kelley first gave the wink. In this matter of keeping back the bill so small a matter as a misplaced semicolon aided Kelley materially. In looking over the engrossed copy sent to the House from the Senate, Mr. Haskell had discovered one which considerably changed duties on iron. He would not consider a bill so “ragged, ill-considered, and half made,” he declared. The poor little semicolon held up the House and gave half the papers in the country a subject for editorials. The Senate clerk hastened over to correct the error. It was only a slip. He could easily remedy it, he urged. “No,” said Speaker Keifer sternly. He was not going to allow a Senate clerk to make a tariff bill for them. The bill had to be taken back to the Senate and corrected by proper procedure.

While the semicolon and other small matters were taking up time the Republican leaders were closeted with the Committee on Rules, which they controlled, in an effort to find a way out of their dilemma. If they could get the bill into a conference of their own kind and revise it and then pass it, they would be satisfied. It all amounted, as a matter of fact, to finding a way to defeat a bill which the majority would accept and to make and pass one which the minority wanted.

Now in anticipation of the difficulty in which they expected to be when the Senate bill reached them, Mr. Kasson had some days before this proposed a revision of the House rules which would allow a majority to take the Senate bill from the table to concur in, or to non-concur in, and send to a conference. If Mr. Kelley could have been sure of a majority for nonconcurrence he would have risked this procedure, but he found he could not. In caucus and out he canvassed the Republicans and always with the result that he feared a vote would result in concurrence. He was afraid of the Kasson rule.

It was certainly not an easy problem, but it was solved, and the man to solve it was a member of the Committee on Rules, Thomas B. Reed of Maine. Reed had been six years in the House and in this time had shown himself an excellent debater and parliamentarian. On the tariff he was sound enough to suit Mr. Kelley and “practical” enough to suit Mr. Sherman. From his point of view it was idle to discuss the matter. Protection, he said, was the accepted doctrine of the country—a closed question. His business was to get what his constituents wanted. His remarks on the lumber tariff and its relation to forest preservation show his general attitude. “I want to know why this country should preserve my forest for the benefit of some other gentleman? I should like to know why the principal industry of the State of Maine should be destroyed because the gentleman from Illinois thinks that his state needs a more humid atmosphere? Why, sir, the very purpose of forests in the course of nature is to be cut down and have houses built of them.... I tell you each generation can take care of itself, each generation is sufficient unto itself.”

The rule Mr. Reed now proposed for extracting the high protectionists was an admirable introduction to his later career as a parliamentarian. It ran as follows:

“That during the remainder of this session it shall be in order at any time to move to suspend the rules, which motion shall be decided by a majority vote, to take from the Speaker’s table House Bill No. 5538, with the Senate amendment thereto, entitled a bill to Reduce Internal Revenue Taxation, and to declare a disagreement with the Senate amendment to the same, and to ask for a committee of conference thereon, to be composed of five members on the part of the House. If such motion shall fail, the bill shall remain on the Speaker’s table unaffected by the decision of the House on said motion.”

It was a rule which allowed the House to declare a disagreement but not an agreement. It allowed a majority to non-concur, but forbade it to concur! A New York Herald correspondent characterized Mr. Reed’s rule perfectly when he declared that it realized the Irishman’s dream of a gun which should fire so as to hit the object if it was a deer and miss it if it was a cow! It was on Saturday, the 24th of February, that Mr. Reed reported his rule, and on Monday it was taken up. Only seven days then remained of the session. The storm which burst over the rule when it was read on Monday was quite worthy of its audacity. It was a “monstrous proposition,” said Mr. Carlisle. “It is a fraud on parliamentary law; a fraud on all that is just and fair in our politics; it is revolutionary,” said Mr. Cox. Mr. Reed listened placidly to it all and finally closed the discussion by declaring coolly that he himself considered the procedure he was introducing as “forcible,” that he should never be in favor of such a rule save in a “great emergency,” but that such an emergency he considered to be at hand. The country demanded a revision. The Democrats had defeated the House bill by a systematic course of obstruction. The Senate bill was not satisfactory to business men; it was unconstitutional to adopt it, but something must be done to relieve distress. There was nothing to do but revise the Senate bill “in the quiet of a conference committee.” The rule was adopted after nearly a day’s debate by a vote of 129 to 22.

But the Democrats were not through yet. They raised the constitutional question—was the House of Representatives to waive its right to originate revenue measures? Never. The discussion precipitated lacked sincerity, for leading Democrats had already testified to their willingness to let the Senate bill go through as it stood. Mr. Haskell finally stopped debates by a resolution which was carried. It turned the constitutional question over to the Tariff Conference for decision. The manœuvre was adroit. It simply meant that if the Tariff Conference did not result satisfactorily to the high protectionist members, they had the plea of unconstitutionality to fall back on, or as somebody put it, “If pig-iron goes up, the amendment of the Senate will be constitutional; if pig-iron goes down, it will be unconstitutional.”

It was late on Tuesday, the 28th day of February, before finally things were adjusted, and the conferees appointed by both House and Senate. The appointments precipitated another tangle. As was to have been expected, Speaker Keifer appointed a high protectionist committee—packed it, moderate Republicans, who were not represented at all, said. Mr. Randall, who was one of the two Democratic appointments, felt so badly about the make-up that he refused to serve. This tangle was straightened out, and finally on the evening of the 28th the conferees had their first meeting. Among those from the Senate were Beck and Bayard. They were disturbed by the idea that the conference might not be “full and free,”—that is, that the constitutional question might be raised,—and when they found they could get no assurance to the contrary they withdrew. Ten different Senators were appointed before two could be found to accept! These were Mahone and McDill, both Republicans!

When the Committee was finally under way it made quick work of revision—as indeed it could do, having a powerful high protection majority. There were sharp contests—more than once rumors ran up and down the Capitol, where for the last few days all Washington had congregated, watching developments, that the conference would fail because Sherman was not getting his desired increase on wool or because Morrill was failing in his efforts to keep down the rate on pig-iron. The tension the uncertainty caused was broken at noon on March 2, when Mr. Morrill entered the Senate and said: “I desire to ask unanimous consent for the printing of the report of the Conference Committee.” It was granted and at nine o’clock that evening the printed report was before the Senate. Of course everybody turned at once to the items over which the great struggles had come. Had Sherman secured his rate on pig-iron and wool, Mahone on iron ore, Kelley on steel and quinine and nickel, the Louisiana planters on sugar?

The most cursory examination showed that the high protectionists had got much that they asked. Iron ore had been raised to 75 cents a ton after having been given 50 by tariff commission, by House, and by Senate. Pig-iron was restored to $6.72; steel rails, after having been given $15.68 in the Senate and $15.00 in House, were raised to $17.00. Mr. Beck attacked the bill violently, making a most imposing array of duties raised, but of course saying nothing of those lowered! At the same time he attacked Sherman for his part in raising duties. Sherman was not jubilant, however, over what he had done. Indeed, he was almost in despair. For if he had succeeded in the metal schedule, he had failed in the wool. The wool bill of 1867 had put compound duties on wool—10 cents a pound and 11 per cent ad valorem on all wools costing 32 or less cents a pound; 12 cents a pound and 10 per cent ad valorem on all costing over 32 cents. The ad valorems were dropped in the bill of ’83. The rate on carpet wool was also lowered. The duties on manufactured goods were lowered less on the whole than those on raw wool. In the bill of ’67 the manufacturer had been allowed a specific duty of 50 cents to compensate him for the duty on wool and dyestuffs; this was dropped to 35 cents in the bill of ’83; but on several grades of woollens the ad valorem duty was raised. It was raised indeed in every case where importations were large. On cheap goods the duties were so high there could be no competition; indeed they could have been lowered considerably and the situation remained unchanged. But wool-growers and wool manufacturers were both incensed at the bill. Senator Sherman took his failure much to heart and he refused to sign the conference report. It was a question if he would vote for the bill. But when the matter came to a test, as it did about midnight of Saturday, March 3, he voted yea.

“I have always regretted,” Mr. Sherman wrote twelve years later, “that I did not defeat the bill, which I could have readily done by voting with the Democrats against the adoption of the conference report, which passed the Senate by the vote of yeas 32, nays 30. However, the propriety and necessity of a reduction of internal taxes proposed by the bill were so urgent that I did not feel justified in denying relief from burdensome and unnecessary taxes on account of provisions in the bill that I did not approve. With great reluctance I voted for it.”