“Gentlemen, you can pass your bill. You can pass it when you please,” Colonel Roger Q. Mills told the Republicans in Congress at the outset of the debate on the McKinley Bill; “but whenever it does pass it will have a Hell Gate to go through after it leaves the House and Senate. There is a whirlpool with sunken rocks beneath the surface of the water through which your little craft will have to sail.

“You say that this question was settled at the last presidential election. Yes, Grover Cleveland had a majority of one hundred thousand votes of the American people. If there is anything in the signs of the times, they indicate that that majority will be greatly increased in the near future. I want you to pass your bill and go with it out West; take it with hair, hide, and wool all over it, and discuss it there; I want you to meet the people whom you have ‘not hesitated’ to tax from 1 to 200 per cent on the necessaries of life.

“Mr. Chairman, we promise our friends that we will examine their bill. It needs discussion, and will get whatever we are permitted to give it; and then when we have done that you will pass it, and when you leave this House and Senate with this enormous load of guilt upon your heads and appear before the great tribunal for trial, may ‘the Lord have mercy upon your souls.’”

This was in May of 1890. The bill became a law in October. In the interval, wise Republicans like John Sherman and James G. Blaine were doing their utmost to prepare for the passage of the “Hell Gate,” which Colonel Mills had prophesied and the roar of which became louder with each week’s approach to the fall elections. While his party granted the duties which bolstered the trusts, Mr. Sherman hurried through his bill making trusts a crime. While his party raised higher the wall which shut trade both in and out, Mr. Blaine worked for free trade between ourselves and our neighbors on the American hemisphere. But these were palliatives, not cures, and sensible people recognized their character. The storm was on the party almost as the measure went through. In the Congress which passed the McKinley Bill, the Republicans and Democrats stood 166 to 159. In the House of Representatives elected a little over a month after the passage of the McKinley Bill the proportion was 88 to 236: they had lost 78 votes. No such avalanche as overwhelmed the party in the fall of 1890 is loosened by one cause. It is always a number, but in this case it was a number of which the prohibitive duty and the political methods it had required to force it through Congress was the centre and strength. The other causes were kindred in their nature. The overthrow of the party at bottom was a plain revolt against the political immorality, the intellectual humbug, and the unholy greed which had produced the bill. At the heart of the Democratic victory was the inspiration of a real cause. The defeat of ’88 had left the party determined rather than cast down. They knew they were fighting for a right principle. Their joy in the conflict grew rather than diminished as the months passed.

The Democrats had won the House and Senate and all the indications were that they would win the presidency in 1892. The first fifteen months’ trial of the new measure admirably served their ambition, for that happened which, lack of work aside, makes life hardest for the world in general,—the price of food went steadily up. The fact that a dollar would buy more sugar did not compensate for the fact that it bought less flour, less corn-meal, less meat, and fewer potatoes. Moreover, there were other advances which irritated the world in general,—advances in the prices of coal, lumber, and particularly tin ware and canned goods. Tin plates which sold for $4.79 a box in 1890 sold for $5.33 in 1891, and by the time the tin found its way into a milk pan or a dinner pail or a tomato can there was a still greater per cent of increase. It was so palpably a higher cost because of the duty, it was so generally and correctly believed that the increase would not for many years benefit more than a few, that irritation increased with every purchase. Among manufactured goods it was tin plates almost alone which advanced. Manufactured goods generally fell in price in 1891. Some of the high grade cottons and woollens advanced, but these were exceptions. The fact of a decided increase in a common article like tin plate, the fact that coal and lumber were dearer, quite overshadowed the fall in the prices of goods generally.

There was no hesitation in the minds of the Democrats about what they should do with their power when they took possession of Congress in December, 1891. They proposed to begin at once to reform the McKinley Bill. The history of their efforts in the ’80’s being what we have seen, and Roger Q. Mills being still a member of the House of Representatives, it was to be expected that he would be elected speaker of the House. Mills was a candidate, so were Charles F. Crisp of Georgia and William M. Springer of Illinois. On the Tuesday before the Democratic caucus, Colonel Mills had one hundred and twenty votes pledged. When the first vote was taken, Mr. Crisp was in the lead. On the thirtieth ballot Mills was defeated by one vote. After the contest, he took the Congressional Directory and checked off the names of twenty-four men who had asked him for committee assignments, promising to support him in return; the doughty Colonel had refused. Once in the contest Springer sent him word that he would withdraw if Colonel Mills would make him chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Colonel Mills asked to have the proposition submitted in writing! Tom Johnson, who was devoted to Mills, came to him once when the balloting was going on, and said, “I do wish you wouldn’t be a fool; give me two chairmanships and ask me no questions and I will elect you on the next ballot.” The Colonel only shook his head. There is no doubt that if he had withdrawn with his followers from the caucus and thrown the election into the House, the Republicans would have elected him. Indeed, they so sent him word.

Mr. Crisp was elected, and he appointed Mr. Springer chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. To Colonel Mills he offered the second place on the Committee; this Mills refused, “Having been a member of the committee of the Ways and Means for ten years, and chairman in the fiftieth Congress,” he wrote Mr. Springer, “the reasons which have in your judgment rendered my appointment as chairman unwise would disqualify me for service on any other part of that Committee, and it would not be sincere to say that it would be agreeable to accept your tender.

“I leave to you, without suggestion from me, to make such other arrangements as you, in the discharge of official duty, may determine.”

There was no possibility of any legislation passing beyond the House in that session of Congress. A Republican Senate and President stood in the way, but agitation for political and educational purposes was possible and it was carried on. Fully 150 petitions were presented the first session of the new Congress, the 52d, December, 1891 to August, 1892, asking for the repeal of the whole or some part of the McKinley Bill. More than 100 bills were introduced, providing for its repeal or amendment. The Democrats undertook only the reform of especially obnoxious duties. Five bills were brought in: (1) a bill to place wool on the free list and to reduce the duty on woollen goods; (2) a bill to admit free of duty bagging for cotton, machinery for manufacturing bagging, cotton-ties and cotton-gins; (3) a bill to place binding twine on the free list; (4) a bill to reduce and ultimately to abolish the duty on tin and terne plates; and (5) to reduced the duty on lead ores. These bills were all passed by the House after thorough discussion; as good material as the party could have for the presidential campaign which was on the country before the “pop-gun” bills, as the Republicans called them, were out of the way.

In the face of an almost certain victory in the impending election, serious Democrats began to ask themselves what, after all, should they do? What did they mean by tariff reform? To the majority there is no doubt that it meant simply a combination of tariff for revenue and of moderate protection of those industries already established, which it was believed could not yet compete with foreign goods. They professed to believe in free raw material—and did unless the raw material happened to be a leading product of their constituents. They were not generally in favor of drastic cutting, but preferred it to gradual.

This in the main was the position of Mr. Cleveland. It certainly was a little more radical than some of Mr. Cleveland’s advisors, Mr. Whitney and Mr. Vilas, for instance. But it was a position which filled men like Colonel Mills and Henry Watterson and Tom Johnson with disgust. They determined that it was time that the party stopped its coquetting with protection and followed a single-hearted tariff-for-revenue only policy, and it was such a policy which Mr. Watterson in particular determined should be adopted by the Democratic convention. He had succeeded in getting a tariff-for-revenue only plank into the platforms of 1876 and 1880. In 1884 he had seen his party, “with General Butler astride its back and Mr. Randall on its flanks,” as he described it, obliged to straddle. In 1888 this straddle had been repeated. Mr. Cleveland, seeing a “condition and not a theory,” could not sanction a plank which promised to reform the tariff with revenue only in mind. He knew the effects of duties on industries ought to and would be considered. Mr. Watterson went to Cincinnati in 1892 prepared for the fight of his life. He won. They called him a platform-smasher afterwards; he corrected them: he was a platform-maker; and that was true. Henry Watterson by his tactics and eloquence led the Democratic convention of 1892 to declare for tariff-for-revenue only, and Mr. Watterson meant just that.

“How would I make a tariff bill?” he said, later, in one of the most notable political speeches of the period.

“By the aid of all the best experts and authorities I would get together all the needful statistical data. I would then find a clean sheet of paper. I would lay this on the table—not the little round one, but the big oblong table—in the Ways and Means Committee Room. Then I would open the cupboard containing, among other perishable contents, the McKinley Bill. I would take this out none too gently—and pitch it into the fire. Then I would draw upon my clean piece of paper three lines. Thus:

I would begin at the top of the first column with sugar. Then the duty, say one cent a pound. Then the estimated revenue—say $35,000,000. Then I would abolish the sugar bounty, making a difference of $45,000,000 in the revenue. I would follow with tea and coffee. I would continue, giving precedence as far as possible to revenue-yielding commodities not produced in this country, down through the largest revenue-yielding domestic products—without the least regard to protection, incidental or otherwise—and when I got $200,000,000 I would stop. Then I would take another bit of white paper, and I would frame an Internal Revenue Act, raising $175,000,000 on spirits and tobacco-making, $375,000,000 in all—and the rest, $50,000,000 or $75,000,000, as the estimate might require, I would raise by a tax, first on inheritance and dividends, and then, if needs required, on big incomes.

“Then I would call the Committee—the Democratic members of the Committee, I mean—and, when any one of them proposed to confuse the simplicity of this perfectly plain Tariff-for-Revenue-only Act by the old cant about the danger of being too precipitate and extreme, I would knock him out—not down—by saying: “Read the National Democratic Platform.””

How far from this uncompromising sort of revision Mr. Cleveland was, his letter of acceptance in 1892 shows:

“Tariff reform is still our purpose. Though we oppose the theory that tariff laws may be passed having for their object the granting of discriminating and unfair governmental aid to private ventures, we wage no exterminating war against any American interests. We believe a readjustment can be accomplished, in accordance with the principles we profess, without disaster or demolition. We believe that the advantages of freer raw material should be accorded to our manufacturers, and we contemplate a fair and careful distribution of necessary tariff burdens rather than the precipitation of free trade.

“We anticipate with calmness the misrepresentation of our motives and purposes, instigated by a selfishness which seeks to hold in unrelenting grasp its unfair advantage under existing laws. We will rely upon the intelligence of our fellow-countrymen to reject the charge that a party comprising a majority of our people is planning the destruction or injury of American interests; and we know they cannot be frightened by the spectre of impossible free trade.”

Mr. Cleveland was inaugurated in March of 1893, but tariff reform was not the first work before him. The Silver Question was the more pressing, and the extra session he called for August had as its business the repeal of the purchasing clause of the Silver Bill which the Republicans had adopted in 1890, and by which they had bought a part of the votes for the McKinley Bill. The extra time of this session was utilized to begin work on the tariff. More loudly than ever the public demanded its reform. Nothing that had been promised that the McKinley Bill would do had been done, nothing but reducing the surplus—and that had been overdone. The combination of free sugar, prohibitive tariffs, and reckless spending with purchasing bonds not yet due at a premium, had reduced it to over $105,000,000 in the year the bill was adopted, to $2,500,000 in the year Mr. Cleveland was elected and a deficit was ahead; in fact, Mr. Cleveland inherited a deficit which the fiscal year after his inauguration had reached nearly $70,000,000. He also had inherited a business depression, the culmination of which came in the first summer of his administration, and along with the deficit and panic a series of labor troubles equal to those of the ’80’s. The McKinley Bill had failed utterly to do the two things which its makers had oftenest declared it would do, preserve prosperity and satisfy labor. Steadily after its passage depression grew. In 1892 the labor troubles of our country were as acute as in any year of our history, and these troubles were in the highly protected industries, in iron, steel, wool, and cotton. The McKinley Bill was not the cause of the depression, as the Democrats argued. The world was in panic. One of those periodic disturbances which sweeps the globe, a logical result of man’s bungling with the laws of trade, had started. That we did not feel the acute pangs of this disturbance as soon as Europe was due to the stimulants we had been taking in the way of high tariffs and cheap money. When they wore off, as they quickly did, our condition was the worse for the delay. A few months after Mr. Cleveland’s election the depression and unrest culminated in the panic of ’93. There has always been an effort to shift the responsibility of this disturbance on the Democrats. The panic of ’93 was caused, so Republican orators have repeated for eighteen years, by alarm at the prospect of a Democratic revision of the tariff. There was never a serious charge with less foundation. That panic was headed directly towards us long before Mr. Cleveland’s nomination. A McKinley bill could not stop it; but it did make it the more acute when it came, by the very fact that it had helped free silver to hold it back.

By utilizing the extra session, the Ways and Means Committee had a bill ready for the regular session which began in December, 1893. The chairman now at the head of the Committee was James Lyne Wilson of West Virginia. His appointment to succeed Mr. Springer, who had engineered the “pop-gun” bills, had been particularly satisfactory to the tariff-for-revenue only Democrats. Mr. Wilson was a man of fifty, an educated gentleman, who had been, in turn, a Confederate soldier, a practising lawyer, and a college president. Through it all he had kept alive a disposition to politics. He had written and spoken on whatever public question was uppermost. He had attended conventions, and served as a delegate, a “scholar in politics.” Finally, this interest and activity took him to Congress, where his sound economic ideas and his skill in presenting them had recommended him to the best element in his party, Cleveland, Carlisle, and Mills. In 1884 he aided Carlisle in his fight against the Randall faction. In 1888 he was put on the Ways and Means Committee, where he served Mr. Mills excellently. It has been customary to speak of Mr. Wilson as impractical and academic, but the bill he brought in in December, 1893, far from being a schoolmaster’s application of his own theories, was distinctly practical. The bill was not what he had hoped to make it. Mr. Wilson said in his report: “With the tariff, as with every other long-standing abuse that has interwoven itself with our social and industrial system, the legislator must always remember that in the beginning temperate reform is safest, having in itself the principle of growth.” The first step he had had in mind was to take taxes from the materials of industry. In Mr. Wilson’s judgment it was the higher cost of raw materials rather than higher wages which hampered American manufacturers. Therefore the Wilson Bill made wool, coal, iron-ore, hemp, and flax free. To “help the farmers” duties were taken from agricultural machinery, from cotton bagging, from salt, and from binding twine. An effort was made to do away with all specific duties. On manufactured goods there was no severe reduction: from one-third to one-half on window glass; 25 per cent on steel rails; lower rates on what Mr. Wilson called the “bogus industry” of making American tin plate; one-fourth cent per pound on refined sugar instead of one-half.

The bill was a grave disappointment to the tariff-for-revenue only Democrats. It did not go far enough, complained Mr. Mills in an article in the North American Review for February, 1894. It was only “a Sabbath Day’s journey on the way to reform.” He would have put every item in the chemical schedule on the free list. He would not only have made ores free, but pigs, bars, bloomers, slabs, ingots, sheets, and plates, that is, all materials which had been advanced to a first or second stage towards manufacture. On the same principle he would have made not only wool and hemp free, but yarns and fibres. Mr. Mills was particularly disturbed because Mr. Wilson had not equalized the import duty and the internal taxes on beer, whiskey, and tobacco. He believed these three should bear the brunt of taxation. As it was then, the internal tax was low and the duties very high. The brewers, distillers, and cigar-makers paid low taxes, and, cut off from foreign competition by high duties, kept up prices. Colonel Mills reckoned that under the McKinley Bill the duty on imported cigars amounted to $70.44 a thousand, the internal tax was $3.00 per thousand. He wished to make each $6.00. This would give revenue and cheaper cigars at once. At the same time it would check the tendency to combine.

A more severe critic than Colonel Mills was Mr. Watterson. In a speech in Louisville in January, he said:

“I have read with exceeding care and great concern, the reports accompanying the newly-introduced measure, of Tariff revision. The Democratic report begins by a masterly declaration of Tariff-for-revenue only logic, to end in an actual exposition of Protectionist practice. For the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee I entertain the very greatest respect. He is an able, conscientious, patriotic Democrat. He has encountered difficulties and made sacrifices, and endured disappointments, which should earn him the sympathy, rather than the criticism, of his party associates. But, with submission, I think he has been forced by pressure, and not by his own consent, to bring in a measure that strikes a blow at the cause of genuine Tariff Reform, and may set the policy of revenue only back for many years to come. It is far, very far, from a measure that can be truthfully described as embodying the idea of ‘a Tariff-for-revenue only.’ It is merely better than the McKinley Bill in degree, not in kind, and if Protectionism is ever to be dislodged, I doubt the Trojan-horse stratagem to which it seems to incline. We live in the age of Carnegies and Goulds, not in that of Priam and Æneas.”

But the bill Mr. Wilson reported was better from a Democratic point of view than the one sent to the Senate early in February. The chief difficulty encountered in the passage through the House he hinted at in an anecdote he told just before the bill was voted on.

“When Sir Robert Peel was just entering upon his work of tariff reform in England,” said Mr. Wilson, “he read to the House of Commons a letter that had been sent him by a canny Scotch fisherman. The writer protested against lowering the duty on herrings, for fear, as he said, that the Norwegian fisherman might undersell him; but he assured Sir Robert, in closing the letter, that in every respect except herrings he was a thoroughgoing free-trader. I trust that no Democrat to-day will be thinking more about his herrings than the cause of the people.”

It was not the “herrings” which had found their way into the bill, however, which caused the largest number of Democrats to hesitate over it. They were all accustomed to them. It was a greater innovation, an amendment providing for a tax on all incomes of over $4000. Mr. Wilson had not approved of it, he had believed it inexpedient; but when the committee decided otherwise, he threw in his fortunes loyally with them. “I have never been hostile to the idea of an income tax,” he said. “It has been opposed here as class legislation; it is nothing of the kind, Mr. Speaker; it is simply an effort, an honest first effort, to balance the weight of taxation on the poor consumers of the country who have heretofore borne it all. Gentlemen who complain of it as class legislation forget that during the fifty years of its existence in England it has been the strongest force in preventing or allaying those class distinctions that have harassed the governments of the Old World.”

The bill was passed, “herrings,” income tax, and all, on February 1, 1894, and was at once sent to the Senate. So sharp had the criticism of the bill been that the Democratic caucus appointed a sub-committee of three to go over it and make a more representative Democratic measure, before it should be reported. This committee was made up of Jones of Arkansas, Vest of Missouri, and Mills of Texas. Colonel Mills had been elected to the Senate the fall before. Although not a member of the Finance Committee, he was placed on the sub-committee. After three weeks’ hard and incessant work, the bill was reported to the Democratic caucus, and here a strong opposition at once developed, an opposition so obstinate that it was obvious it would defeat the bill if it could not be satisfied. The leaders of this faction were Senators Arthur P. Gorman of Maryland and Calvin S. Brice of Ohio. These gentlemen had organized so solidly a small number of their party colleagues, dissatisfied with the reductions the bill made on articles in which they were interested, that they were able to say to the Committee that unless their demands were satisfied no bill should pass. A look at the make-up of the Senate shows how easily they could carry out their threat. There were in the body thirty-eight Republicans, forty-four Democrats, and four Populists, the latter voting on the tariff with the Democrats. Five votes diverted from the forty-four would, if the Republicans voted solidly, as they were expected to do, give a majority of one against the bill. Messrs. Gorman and Brice could show the five votes. One of these was that of David J. Hill of New York, who had given notice that he would in no case support a measure carrying an income tax. The result of this alignment was that the bill was revised under the direction of Senators Gorman and Brice and reported to the Senate with some 634 amendments.

As an illustration of the kind of reconstruction which went on, take the sugar schedule. It is an illuminating example of tariff-making as practised by the Senate of the United States, both then and now. We have seen what the McKinley Bill did for raw sugar,—made it free, but gave bounties to the home sugar-growers equivalent to two cents a pound. As for refined sugar, all grades from No. 16, Dutch Standard, upward, were allowed one-half cent a pound, which was undoubtedly a pure gratuity to the sugar trust. Formed in 1887, with a capital of $50,000,000, the stock of this organization had not been listed on the New York stock exchange until February of 1889. When the McKinley Bill was first brought into the House in January of 1890, sugar certificates were worth fifty cents on the dollar. Their rise between that date, when it looked as if refined sugar would be given no duty, and the date in May, when the one-half cent was fixed, was told three years later on the witness stand by a Senator of the United States who was familiar with operations of this sort, Calvin S. Brice of Ohio:

“During the month of January,” said Mr. Brice, “sugar stock fluctuated between 50 and 60, with as wide or wider fluctuations in each of the four following months. So then when the bill had passed the House of Representatives and had been favorably considered and settled in the Senate Finance Committee in May, the sugar trust certificates had advanced to 95, an advance of 45 points or $22,500,000 computed on the capital of the sugar trust, or $33,750,000 if the other $25,000,000 which were added a few months afterwards as representing the Spreckels, Harrison, and Knight refineries are taken into account. During the fall of 1890 the Baring panic temporarily depressed sugar trust certificates, as well as other securities in the New York Stock Exchange, but as soon as that had gone by, the sugar trust certificates went above par, and eventually under the operations of the McKinley Act reached 134 or 135; an advance from January, 1890, when the McKinley Bill was introduced, of 85 points, or $42,500,000 on the sugar trust certificates, and an advance of $63,750,000 on the American Sugar Refining Company’s Stock, the Company which in 1891 succeeded the original trust.”

The dealings in the certificates on the New York Stock Exchange in 1890 Senator Brice declared to have amounted to 8,000,000 shares, $800,000,000. As for profits, the trust’s president, Mr. H. O. Havemeyer, said on the witness stand in 1894 that he reckoned them at close to $25,000,000 for the three years, or, as he put it, “three-eighths of a cent more on every pound they (the consumers) ate.” Without the McKinley Bill this would have been impossible, and, said Mr. Havemeyer, “as long as the McKinley Bill is there we will exact that profit.”

This episode had scandalized the country and intensified the disgust with the sugar refiners which their open swindling in the preceding fifteen years had aroused. When the Democrats in the House came to make their bill they at first proposed a duty of one-fourth cent a pound on refined sugar, half of what McKinley had given. This was undoubtedly one-fourth of a cent too much. With free raw sugar the refiners could carry on their business at a profit. This was demonstrated to Mr. Wilson’s satisfaction while the bill was still in the House, and when it left, refined sugar as well as raw was free.

As said above, the bill was referred to a sub-committee of which Colonel Roger Q. Mills was a member. Now Mr. Mills, like most tariff-for-revenue only Democrats, had always held that a tax on raw sugar was one of the least obnoxious that could be placed. It yielded a large and steady revenue. It was true that it was a tax falling more heavily on the poor than on the rich, but unhappily most taxes are unjust in this respect. Holding this opinion, and believing that the bill did not provide sufficient revenue, Mr. Mills, as he later related, said to his colleagues:

“We have got to have more money than the Wilson Bill makes, and we have to have a duty on sugar. I do not want it. I do not like to go backwards. I would not have taken sugar off the dutiable list and put it on the free list. It has been done, and I do not like to put anything back on the dutiable list, but we have got to do it, and you may as well make up your minds about it. We have to have more money.”

Senators Vest and Jones held out for several days against him, but finally they reluctantly agreed to a duty on raw sugar. On refined they proposed only enough to make up to the refiners for the extra cost of their raw material—that is, a compensatory, not a protective, duty.

But this plan never reached the public. The House bill had aroused the Sugar Trust to wrath, and all through the winter and spring of 1894 one or more of its chief officers was in Washington, besieging the Senate and the Administration. Mr. H. O. Havemeyer, the president, Theodore Havemeyer, the vice-president, and John O. Searles, secretary and treasurer, armed with samples and statistics and proofs of political influence, urged upon a worried and reluctant committee a scheme of duties which would give them at least as large a benefit as they had under the McKinley Bill. The gentlemen seem to have been able to secure the attention of all the Senators whom they thought it worth while to approach, excepting Senator Mills. Mr. Havemeyer made repeated efforts to get to him, but always failed. Finally he asked Secretary Carlisle to give him a note of introduction. He knew Senator Mills, he told the secretary, but he was a busy man and peculiar, and it was difficult to see him. Mr. Carlisle gave the note, and one evening Mr. Havemeyer presented it at the Senator’s door with his own card and that of Mr. J. R. Rickey, the inventer of the famous “gin-Rickey.” Was the Senator in, and would he see them? The answer came back. “Senator Mills is in, but he will not see the gentlemen.” Nor did Mr. Havemeyer ever succeed in presenting his ideas of a sugar schedule to Senator Mills.

The activities of the sugar people caused all sorts of rumors to run rife through the press, and finally when the bill was reported on the 20th of March providing a rate of about one cent a pound on raw sugar with an additional one-eighth of a cent per pound on refined, there was an immediate outcry. When later further changes were made in the schedule, making it more intricate and more advantageous to the refiners, dissatisfaction grew. “It would have been quite as appropriate and edifying,” said the Nation, “and quite as good policy, to have enacted that the Standard Oil Trust should receive $30,000,000 out of the public treasury during the next six months as a reward of merit, and two and one-eighth cents per gallon for all the oil they might hereafter sell in this country, as to do what is done for the sugar trust.” The ugliest rumors were afloat, talk of bribes, deals, and threats. They finally culminated in an article published in the Philadelphia Press and signed “Holland” (E. J. Edwards), in which in a most circumstantial way the author declared that $500,000 had been contributed to the Democratic campaign fund by the Sugar Trust. In return pledges had been given that the Trust would be taken care of. When the House removed the duty, the Trust had reminded the Administration of its pledges. Mr. Carlisle, by Mr. Cleveland’s directions, had appeared before the sub-committee and had told them that the party was bound to satisfy the sugar interests. There were detailed descriptions of interviews between sugar men and Senators, and of directions sent from the White House. One of the shameful features of the story was that a number of Senators had taken advantage of secret information on the sugar schedule to speculate in sugar stock. This amazing story of political barter would have raised a chorus of jeers, had there not been before the country’s eye so much corroborating evidence. The clamor was so loud over the article that in May an investigation was made. Many of the details of the story were discredited. Mr. Cleveland, Mr. Carlisle, and Mr. Mills were certainly cleared, but a substantial scandal remained. By the frank admission of Mr. Havemeyer, it was proved that the trust was in the habit of making contributions to both parties, that is, each party got something, if the result was doubtful. If not, the contribution went to the dominant side, that being the one to which the trust would look for favors. This conclusion is clinched by the following bit of a dialogue which occurred in the course of the investigation:

“Mr. Havemeyer.—The American Sugar Refining Company has no politics of any kind.

“Senator Allen.—Only the politics of business?

“Mr. Havemeyer.—Only the politics of business.”

Whatever the Democrats received in 1892 from the Sugar Trust,—and it is probably as certain that they received, not $500,000, but a good sum, as it is certain that Mr. Quay received something like $100,000 from the same source in the campaign of 1888,—it was the sugar refiners who succeeded in getting the rates they wanted into the Wilson Bill, not the sugar-producers. So strong was their position with the faction remodelling the bill, that is, with Mr. Gorman and Mr. Brice, that they were able to overpower even the Louisiana Senators, on whom the victory of the insurgents was supposed to depend, and to replace the specific duty which these interests wanted and which raw sugar long had had, by an ad valorem rate, a form which was believed to work and probably did work decidedly to the advantage of the trust.

The charge in the Press article that many Senators had speculated in sugar stock, was investigated. Men like Cushman K. Davis, George Gray, George F. Hoar, Roger Q. Mills, John M. Palmer, John Sherman, and John P. Morgan had to suffer along with Quay and Brice, Smith of New Jersey and Murphy of New York, the humiliation of an examination. Senators McPherson and Quay acknowledged that they had been dealing in sugar while the schedule was in the Senate. In no other cases was the fact established, but the suspicion remained in spite of denials that other Senators were equally guilty. This popular belief was more strongly entrenched around Senator Aldrich than any other member of the body. He had been the chief advocate of the refiners in the Senate for a number of years. He was a friend of John O. Searles, and the two had been much together while the schedule of 1894 was making. His fortunes apparently expanded rapidly about this time. The suspicion crystallized in a nickname for his country home which still clings to it,—“the sugar house,”—but there was never a vestige of proof, so far as the author knows, that sugar had anything to do with Senator Aldrich’s fortune.

Of course, it would have been impossible for the sugar Senators to have received the favors they did if they had not acquiesced in similar gifts to other interests. They paid for their advantages by consenting to a duty on iron-ore, on silverore containing lead, and on coal, all of which should have been free under Democratic doctrine. They paid by consenting to scores of increased duties on manufactured articles, which in some cases raised rates to the McKinley level. A typical transaction was the duty on collars and cuffs. It had been cut by the House. Senator Murphy of New York wanted it raised to oblige certain constituents. He threatened to vote against the bill if he was denied. He, of course, got what he wanted.

Nor was it the Democrats alone who raided the Wilson Bill. The revolt of Senators Gorman and Brice was an invitation to the Republicans to see what they could do for their constituents. When the news of what was going on spread through the country, Washington rapidly filled up with the agents and counsel of the protected industries, and under the leadership of Senator Quay a campaign of obstruction was carried on. Unless you give us what we ask, you shall have no bill at all, said Senator Quay; I will talk it to death. He began to execute his threat on April 14, and ended on June 16. Day after day, the Congressional Record states laconically, “Senator Quay resumed the floor in continuance of the speech begun on the 14th of April,” and occasionally it adds, “speech will be printed when finished.” Senator Quay occupied twelve days of the period in his filibustering. He ceased because he had assurance that the duties he sought would be granted. His speech covers some 235 pages of the Congressional Record, an exhibit of legislation by violence which happily has few parallels in our history. James M. Swank, the manager of the Iron and Steel Association, says that Senator Quay secured higher rates of duties in “hundreds” of cases by his filibuster. He and Senator Aldrich seem to have turned their advantage mainly to saving their own chief industries,—iron and steel and cotton,—for both schedules were written by the manufacturers.

The chief industry which did not get about what it wanted was wool. The House had provided for free wool and a 35 per cent duty on all manufactured goods. This was 5 per cent less than Mr. Mills had proposed to put on woollens in 1888. Of course the Republicans prophesied the most terrible disasters from this change. The industry had been sharing in the general depression of the country, that is, the McKinley Bill had not been able to make it prosperous. The National Association of Wool Manufacturers, confronted by this fact, pleaded that the bill be given a longer test. They declared that there was a “universal agreement between manufacturers” that the “tariff was now scientifically adjusted.” Nobody was going to suffer from the rates, they said, and in time they would insure permanent prosperity. The Association, of course, overlooked the fact that the rates they were then enjoying had, with only slight decreases in 1883, been in force since 1867, and that they had not prevented periodical depressions. They overlooked the fact, too, that, far from being united, as they declared, a very large body of the ablest woollen manufacturers in the country were at that moment petitioning for free wool and advising lower duties on their own products. All of this had little effect on the Democrats. The schedule went to the Senate as it had been prepared by Mr. Wilson’s committee; and when the sub-committee took hold of it, the duty on woollens was made 30 per cent instead of 35 per cent. This schedule was reported to the Senate on March 20, and soon after that the wool-growers and wool manufacturers learned of the Democratic insurgent movement for higher duties led by Gorman and Brice.

“As soon as it became known that all the schedules were being written up to or towards protective rates,” one of their leading historians wrote afterwards in the Bulletin of the Association, “the woollen manufacturers began to gather in Washington with a view to discovering what could be done to save their own industry from destruction. The first efforts to this end were directed towards securing compound duties. Many variations in the compound rates originally suggested were made, finally resulting in a schedule in which all manufacturers acquiesced.

“The compound schedule was thrown out of court almost immediately, coupled with the information that under no circumstances would the suggestion of compound duties on woollen goods be considered. If at this juncture the woollen manufacturers had been so fortunate as to possess among the Democratic Senators a single friend, so earnestly and honestly their friend as to do for them what certain Senators did for certain other industries (notably several branches of the iron and steel industry), this compound schedule could have been forced into the bill, as other specific duties were forced into it everywhere else, as the condition precedent to its passage. But they had no such friend, none at least who was willing to go as far as other Senators went for other industries. Thus it happens that the wool schedule is almost the only one in the Senate bill which was not dictated by some one powerful enough to make its terms fairly satisfactory to the industries concerned.”

The Wilson Bill was returned to the House Committee with 634 amendments attached. The Committee refused to accept the amendments and a conference was arranged. Nothing came of this. The Senate conferrees held to the amendments, the House conferrees to disagreement. In reporting the disagreement to the House, Mr. Wilson read a letter from President Cleveland protesting against the bill. It voiced his pain and disgust at the outcome of the long fight he had led and counselled resistance to the miserable compromises which filled the bill:

“My public life has been so closely related to the subject” (tariff reform), Mr. Cleveland wrote, “I have so longed for its accomplishment, and I have so often promised its realization to my fellow-countrymen as a result of their trust and confidence in the Democratic party, that I hope no excuse is necessary for my earnest appeal to you that in this crisis you strenuously insist upon party honesty and good faith and a sturdy adherence to Democratic principles.

“I believe these are absolutely necessary conditions to the continuation of Democratic existence.

“I cannot rid myself of the feeling that this conference will present the best, if not the only, hope of true Democracy. Indications point to its action as the reliance of those who desire the genuine fruition of Democratic effort, the fulfilment of Democratic pledges, and the redemption of Democratic promises to the people. To reconcile differences in the details comprised within the fixed and well-defined lines of principle will not be the sole task of the conference, but as it seems to me its members will also have in charge the question whether Democratic principles themselves are to be saved or abandoned.

“There is no excuse for mistaking or misapprehending the feeling and temper of the rank and file of the Democracy. They are downcast under the assertion that their party fails in ability to manage the government, and they are apprehensive that efforts to bring about tariff reform may fail; but they are much more downcast and apprehensive in their fear that Democratic principles may be surrendered. In these circumstances they cannot do otherwise than to look with confidence to you and those who with you have patriotically and sincerely championed the cause of tariff reform within Democratic lines and guided by Democratic principles. This confidence is vastly augmented by the action under your leadership of the House of Representatives upon the bill now pending.

“Every true Democrat and every sincere tariff reformer knows that this bill in its present form and as it will be submitted to the conference falls far short of the consummation for which we have long labored, for which we have suffered defeat without discouragement, which in its anticipation gave us a rallying cry in our day of triumph, and which in its promise of accomplishment is so interwoven with Democratic pledges and Democratic success, that our abandonment of the cause or the principles upon which it rests means party perfidy and party dishonor.

“One topic will be submitted to the conference which embodies Democratic principle so directly that it cannot be compromised. We have in our platforms and in every way possible declared in favor of the free importation of raw materials. We have again and again promised that this should be accorded to our people and our manufacturers as soon as the Democratic party was invested with the power to determine the tariff policy of the country.

“The party now has that power. We are as certain to-day as we have ever been of the great benefit that would accrue to the country from the inauguration of this policy, and nothing has occurred to release us from our obligation to secure this advantage to our people. It must be admitted that no tariff measure can accord with Democratic principles and promises or bear a genuine Democratic badge that does not provide for free raw materials. In these circumstances, it may well excite our wonder that Democrats are willing to depart from this, the most Democratic of all tariff principles, and that the inconsistent absurdity of such a proposed departure should be emphasized by the suggestion that the wool of the farmer be put on the free fist and the protection of tariff taxation be placed around the iron-ore and coal of corporations and capitalists.

“How can we face the people after indulging in such outrageous discriminations and violations of principles?

“It is quite apparent that this question of free raw materials does not admit of adjustment on any middle ground, since their subjection to any rate of tariff taxation, great or small, is alike violative of Democratic principle and Democratic good faith.

“I hope you will not consider it intrusive if I say something in relation to another subject which can hardly fail to be troublesome to the conference. I refer to the adjustment of tariff taxation on sugar. Under our party platform and in accordance with our declared party purposes, sugar is a legitimate and logical article of revenue taxation. Unfortunately, however, incidents have accompanied certain stages of the legislation which will be submitted to the conference, that have aroused in connection with this subject a national Democratic animosity to the methods and manipulations of trusts and combinations.

“I confess to sharing in this feeling, and yet it seems to me we ought, if possible, to sufficiently free ourselves from prejudice to enable us coolly to weigh the considerations which in formulating tariff legislation ought to guide our treatment of sugar as a taxable article. While no tenderness should be entertained for trusts, and while I am decidedly opposed to granting them, under the guise of tariff taxation, any opportunity to further their peculiar methods, I suggest that we ought not to be driven away from the Democratic principle and policy which lead to the taxation of sugar by the fear, quite likely exaggerated, that in carrying out this principle and policy, we may indirectly and inordinately encourage a combination of sugar refining interests. I know that in present conditions this is a delicate subject, and I appreciate the depth and strength of the feeling which its treatment has aroused.

“I do not believe that we should do evil that good may come, but it seems to me that we should not forget that our aim is the completion of a tariff bill, and that in taxing sugar for proper purposes and within reasonable bounds, whatever else may be said of our action, we are in no danger of running counter to Democratic principle. With all there is at stake, there must be in the treatment of this article some ground upon which we are all willing to stand, where toleration and conciliation may be allowed to solve the problem without demanding the entire surrender of fixed and conscientious convictions.”

It was on July 19th that Mr. Wilson read this letter to the House. Following it a bitter attack was made upon Mr. Cleveland by Mr. Gorman and others in the Senate. They declared they had kept the President fully informed of the changes which were being made in the bill; that they had told him that it would be impossible to pass a bill which did not embody them. Mr. Cleveland had insisted that a bill must be passed, and he had urged them to go ahead and do the best they could. This is no doubt true. But no one who knew Grover Cleveland can accept their contention that he had practically assured them that he would accept any bill that they could pass. It was not like him to make such a promise, nor was he a man to mislead. Moreover, Mr. Cleveland would have been false to his own great sense of responsibility if, for the sake of party, he had let the repudiation of principle, and the juggling and trading the bill represented, go without public reproof. There was a chance, too, that his remonstrance might force from the Senate certain concessions, such as the free iron-ore and coal which he so much wanted. Mr. Cleveland took the chance. His letter failed to do what its author sought. Indeed, it made the dominant faction in the Senate so angry that it flatly refused to recede from any of the amendments to which the House had declined to assent. The upshot of the matter was that on August 13th the House gave in. Mr. Wilson’s brief closing remarks show his disappointment. Until the last he had hoped and believed, he said, that some form of honorable compromise would be achieved. “But,” said he, “we have simply realized in this great fight the fact so well stated by the great leader of the tariff reform fight in Great Britain—that when the people have gained a victory at the polls they must have a further stand-up and knock-down fight with their own representatives. And we have realized if nothing else the warning lesson of the intrenchment of the protective tariff in this country under thirty years of class legislation until the mere matter of tariff schedules is a matter of insignificance and the great question presents itself,—is this to be a government by a self-taxing people or a Government of taxation by trust and monopolies? The question is now, whether this is a government by the American people for the American people, or a government of the sugar trust for the benefit of the sugar trust.”

But he advised voting for the bill. It was with most of its rates as it was with the sugar duty.

“Vicious as it may be, burdensome to the people as it may be, favorable to the trust as it may be, it is less vicious, less favorable to the trust, less burdensome to the people than is the McKinley law, under which this trust (sugar) has grown so great as to overshadow with its power the American people.”

Never had an opposition a more substantial reason for taunting a majority than had the Republicans when it was finally seen that the Senate had won. Mr. Reed had been spokesman for the Republicans throughout the making of the bill and he had used his power in as sheerly and consistently brutal a fashion as is to be found in the records of Congress. But what he now said had a ring of honest indignation and it was entirely justified by the facts.

“The adoption of the Senate bill,” said Mr. Reed, “is a complete abandonment of the fundamental principles of tariff reform. The Senate bill has been constructed upon entirely different lines. It was framed upon the broad bedrock foundation of the necessity of securing 43 votes, and all minor considerations had to give way to this great underlying principle.

“Coal is taxed in order to secure the necessary votes of the selfstyled ambassador from the sovereign state of Maryland; protection is accorded to the industries of the state of Maryland as the price of her votes; seventy-five millions of people are to be burdened with a tax on sugar in order to hold the votes of the sugar-producing state of Louisiana, and the sugar trust had to have its demands satisfied in order to insure liberal contributions to the Democratic campaign fund; while Republican Senators had but to threaten interminable debate to secure full protection to the industries of their state.

“In this way the Gorman Bill was constructed and passed, and it is this measure, so framed, you now propose without amendment or debate to indorse and approve. How you are able to do this with any sense of self-respect, it is difficult to understand. You voted for the Wilson Bill under protest, declaring you did so because, it was a movement in the right direction, a step towards free trade; and now you accept the Gorman Bill without regard to the principles upon which it was constructed and without knowing whether it leads towards protection or free trade in the face of an acknowledged abandonment of all principle. Such unexampled party stultification cannot be too severely condemned.

“What will be the fate of this bill at the other end of the avenue, it is impossible to forecast, but the President of the United States will belie his reputation for courage and tenacity of purpose if he does not promptly stamp it with his veto.

“When this bill is laid before the President for Executive approval and he has sufficiently examined it to be assured of its identity as the very measure which he himself has already publicly repudiated, I can imagine him taking the Wilson letter in one hand and reading his own words, ‘This is an act of party perfidy and party dishonor,’ and then dropping his pen from the other, exclaiming with ineffable scorn, ‘Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?’”

Mr. Reed was right. The bill, which was passed by a vote of 182 to 106, 12 Democrats only voting against it, was never signed by Grover Cleveland. It became a law without his name on August 27, 1894.