 Chapter 7 Part 1 of Twenty Years of the Republic, 1885-1905 by Harry Thurston Beck This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. President Cleveland wants more. Part 1 When Mr. Cleveland, as President-Elect, proceeded to the Capitol to take the oath of office for the second time, it seemed almost as though the earlier ceremony of 1889 were being faithfully repeated. Now, as then, he was accompanied by Mr. Harrison and only the relations of the two were changed. Then Mr. Cleveland was the defeated candidate giving place to his victorious successor. Now it was Mr. Harrison who was gracefully sustaining the same role and in his turn making way for an opponent. In externals, however, the scene was essentially the same, even to the aspect of the weather, for a storm of mingled sleet and rain was raging, and Washington had awakened on that raw March morning to find the streets all whitened by a swirl of snow. Amid a driving gale and standing in what an observer graphically described as a blizzard-riddled wooden pen, the new president, bareheaded, delivered without notes of any kind a brief inaugural address. And then for five hours he reviewed the long procession which marched past the presidential stand. Its most conspicuous feature was the entire National Guard of Pennsylvania headed by the Democratic governor of that state. For the first time also in the history of inaugural parades, women participated in the pageant. A cavalcade of them from Maryland superbly mounted rode past the president adding a new element of the picturesque. More interesting, however, in view of recent political events, was the presence of 3,000 Tammany men whom several hundred were arrayed in Indian garb and with whom were leaders such as Croker, Grady and others who for nine years had waged relentless war on Mr. Cleveland. Assuredly it was for him a day of genuine triumph when even such consistent enemies as these had been brought to heel. On the day following the inauguration, Senator Hill called upon the president and the two were closeted for hours. Just what past between them no one ever learned, but it seems quite certain that Mr. Hill accepted frankly the inevitable. From that day he never seriously opposed the policy of his successful rival and more than once in the tempestuous times which followed he did staunch service in its defense. And thus began the years of President Cleveland's second term of office which a philosophical writer has truly characterized as the most momentous period in a time of peace in the history of the country and the most interesting from a political point of view in either war or peace. Note one, page 307. The fury of the elements that raged throughout the day of its inception symbolized as it were the storm and stress which marked the years of its continuance and which reached a climax at its close. The composition of the new cabinet had become known to the people before the nominations were laid before the Senate. The secretary of state was Mr. Walter Q. Gresham of Illinois, lately a judge in one of the federal courts. Mr. Gresham had been a lifelong Republican until a few months prior to President Cleveland's election. He had even been regarded as a possible Republican candidate for the presidency. At the Republican National Convention of 1888 he had received on the first ballot 111 votes standing second only to Senator Sherman who led the poll until the combination in favor of Harrison was affected. Note two, page 308. Mr. Gresham had always been a conservative, a Lincoln Republican, wholly out of sympathy with the later tendencies of his party and when the tariff was made a direct issue in 1892 he turned his back upon high protection as a policy and publicly announced his purpose of voting for Mr. Cleveland. Mr. Gresham was popular with the labor element in the Middle West and as a judge had given from the bench decisions accompanied by Obiter Dicta that greatly pleased the opponents of privilege. He was a man of the Cleveland type, sternly honest, inflexible of purpose and vigorous in mind. In some respects he fell short of the ideal requirements in a secretary of state. His training had not sufficiently familiarized him with the minutiae of diplomatic relations. He failed perhaps to appreciate the importance of these relations as compared with concerns of domestic interest. Moreover on the personal side he lacked something of that regard for the fitness of things which ought to characterize one who has to do with the representatives of foreign countries. It was Mr. Gresham's want to receive ambassadors and ministers, men bred to the most punctilious etiquette, sitting in his shirt sleeves at his desk and chewing on the stump of a cigar while he was over fond of lounging about the corridors of Willard's Hotel and mingling with the very motley mob which sprawled there at all hours of the day and night. Naturally Mr. Gresham's appointment was rather sharply criticized. Republicans regarded him as a renegade from their ranks while many Democrats thought it hard that the chief cabinet position should go to so very recent a convert to democracy. Mr. John G. Carlisle of Kentucky was made secretary of the treasury and offered a brilliant contrast to his two immediate predecessors. He was an experienced legislator who had been three times speaker of the House and a member of seven different congresses in all of which he had concerned himself with questions of theoretical and practical finance. Mr. Carlisle was of a calm, reflective and judicial cast of mind and he had to an exceptional degree the gift of lucid and convincing exposition. While acting as speaker, Mr. Carlisle once received an unusual compliment from a political opponent. Mr., afterward senator, Hiscock of New York said of Mr. Carlisle, He is one of the strongest of Democrats and I am one of the strongest of Republicans yet my imagination is not strong enough to conceive of his making an unfair ruling or doing an unfair thing against the party opposed to him in this House. Note 3, page 309. The president appointed a secretary of war, Colonel Daniel S. Lamont of New York who had been private secretary to Mr. Cleveland while the latter was governor of New York and also during his first administration as president. It was essentially a personal appointment well justified both by Colonel Lamont's devotion to Mr. Cleveland and also by his ability, his sound judgment and his admirable tact. Another personal appointment was that of Mr. Wilson S. Bissell of New York an old and intimate friend to be postmaster general. The new secretary of the Navy was Mr. Hillary A. Herbert of Alabama the first ex-Confederate to be placed in charge of one of the military departments of the government. Mr. Herbert was an accomplished gentleman and a skillful administrator. He had served as chairman of the House Committee on Naval Affairs in three congresses and was intimately familiar with the duties of his new office. Under him the Navy of the United States which a few years before had ranked as only 12th among the navies of the world advanced to the fifth place being surpassed only by the armaments of Great Britain, France, Russia and Germany. Mr. Hoke Smith of Georgia became secretary of the interior and Mr. Julius S. Martin of Nebraska secretary of agriculture. The cabinet was completed by the appointment to the Attorney-Generalship of Mr. Richard Olney of Massachusetts whose name was destined to be honorably associated with some of the most stirring events of President Cleveland's administration. When he became Attorney-General he was almost unknown outside of his native state. Educated at Brown and Harvard he was a successful lawyer who had mingled but little in public life beyond serving in the Massachusetts legislature. He had, however, a very forceful personality combining the keenness and prompt decisiveness of a trained reasoner with a certain aggressive quality which suggested under all the suave amenities of a polished gentleman the pugnacity and also the tenacity of a bulldog. President Cleveland entered upon his duties under no illusions as to the difficulty of the problems which confronted him. There was a seriousness amounting almost to solemnity in some of the sentences of his inaugural address which may have been regarded lightly by those who then heard or read them but which afterwards were seen to have been full of meaning. Toward the close he said with something like the spirit of prophecy, anxiety for the pledges which my party has made constrains me to remind those with whom I am to cooperate that we can't succeed in doing the work which has been especially set before us only by the most sincere, harmonious and disinterested effort. Even if insuperable obstacles and opposition prevent the consummation of our task, we shall hardly be excused, and if failure can be traced to our fault or neglect, we may be sure the people will hold us to a swift and exacting accountability. And then he added, I shall to the best of my ability and within my sphere of duty preserve the constitution by loyally protecting every grant of federal power it contains, by defending all its restraints when attacked by impatience and restlessness, and by enforcing its limitations and reservations in favor of the states and the people. Fully impressed with the gravity of the duties that confront me, I should be appalled if it were my lot to bear onated the responsibilities which await me. I am, however, saved from discouragement when I remember that I shall have the support and the counsel and cooperation of wise and patriotic men who will stand at my side in cabinet places or will represent the people in their legislative halls. In a letter to Mr. Justice Lamar which was written at this time, but of which the full text still remains unpublished, the president spoke of his own misgivings and of his doubt as to whether his administration were not destined to disaster. It may, however, be questioned whether even he had yet become aware how formidable were the dangers which beset him. There were three elements in the political situation so closely interrelated as to make action in regard to any one of them involve an instant complication with the other two. These three factors were, one, the relation of the great moneyed interest to national legislation, two, the spread of populism in the West and South, and, three, the condition of the government's finances. The rapid growth of great fortunes which accompanied and succeeded the Civil War had long been a subject of comment and very properly of pride among Americans of every class. Never perhaps in the history of the world was there witnessed a parallel to the extraordinary outburst of energy and genius devoted to material success which marked the years from 1864 to 1890. All at once the untouched resources of the United States seemed to be revealed to its inhabitants and thousands upon thousands of keen-witted, inventive, far-seeing men had grasped the vast possibilities which the development of these resources inherently contained. What had been accomplished in the whole of the preceding century was now surpassed by the railway builders, miners, traders, promoters, manufacturers, and financiers of this new era. The United States was like a freshly opened gold field into which prospectors flung themselves in a frantic rush for wealth and from one point of view the results were admirable. Here were rich rewards for brain and muscle, for courage and capacity. America far more than ever was for a time a land of opportunity yet there was another and a darker side which more and more became apparent as the years went by. This was seen first of all in the growing tendency of many who had become extremely rich to monopolize the sources of their wealth and thereby to bar the door of opportunity to others and furthermore in the effort too often successful to render subservient or worthless the machinery of the law to which alone those who were wronged must look for swift redress. The most signal instance of corporate power was to be found in the railways. These companies, the creatures of the state, deriving their charters from the people and often aided by generous public grants went far beyond the rights that were conceded to them. From being simply common carriers, they began to get possession of those natural products which are included among the necessities of life. First in order, they secured the three great coal fields in which 95% of the anthracite coal of the United States is mined and they secured them not by legitimate purchase but by forcing private owners to sell at prices fixed by the railway managers. Those who refused found that the railways would no longer furnish cars for the shipment of private coal thereby shutting off the individual miner from his market. When the state of Pennsylvania in 1873 forbade by a constitutional provision its railways to engage in mining coal the prohibition was at once evaded. Railway officials formed mining companies of which the directors were the same men as those who made up the railway directorates and the old abuses were continued with the added zest of defying the fundamental law. This arrangement even augmented the extortion for now the railways acting as common carriers could charge exorbitant freight rates thus justifying the mine owners i.e. the railway owners in selling the coal they shipped at whatsoever prices they pleased. It was found by a congressional committee in 1893 that the railway charge for carrying coal was far greater than the charge for carrying wheat or other similar freight and that while the means of transportation had been continually improved and the cost of handling cheapened the railway rates were higher than they had been 15 years before. Note 4. Page 313. What was true of coal was also true of timber, copper, iron and other minerals. In the west great tracks of arable land were held by the railways and barred to settlers. Note 5. Page 314. While there too by an unfair discrimination in freight charges one locality was favored at the expense of another just as one merchant or manufacturer might be ruined because of the more favorable terms that were secretly given to his competitors. Thus the railways were in a sense the masters of the state rather than its servants arbitrarily bestowing or withholding prosperity getting a firm grip on small communities, fixing at will the cost of articles of prime necessity, choking competition and thus earning for the companies the great sums necessary to enable them to pick extravagant salaries and to keep up dividends on watered stock. Note 6. Page 314. But the railway owners offered merely the most conspicuous and worst and not by any means the sole example of gross abuse of power. They had bred a score of other organized and equally rapacious corporations of which the Standard Oil Company, Note 7. Page 314. And the so-called Sugar Trust were especially obnoxious to public sentiment and most successful in their defiance of the processes of law. The continuance of a high protective tariff had added to the number of these monopolies. For while the tariff did not invariably or necessarily create an actual monopoly, its tendency was distinctly to limit competition. And in 1892 Mr. John DeWitt Warner, a careful student of political economic questions published a list of 100 corporations of this sort which had by one means or another secured tariff legislation in their own favor. The tariff, however, had nothing to do with the absorption by private corporations of valuable franchises all over the country for which they paid little or nothing while they usually exploited them in a spirit of insolent rapacity. Gas companies having a monopoly in many cities used fraudulent meters supplied inferior gas and collected excessive rates from the consumers who were absolutely helpless and without redress against what everyone well knew to be sheer robbery. It was the same with electric lighting. The street railways were in the hands of another set of owners who treated the traveling public like mere cattle, crowding them into insufficient cars in defiance of either comfort or decency, charging excessive fares for an inadequate service and carrying nothing for remonstrance or complaint. The telegraph was still another instance of an almost complete monopoly, the telephone of another, the business of the express companies of another. The mere enumeration of these facts, however, is less significant than another circumstance connected with them. Every country has witnessed phenomena not unlike these. Unscrupulous and able men are always ready to enrich themselves and to ring great fortunes from the people. In the United States, even at the time of its birth as a nation, the records were smirched by the story of stock-jobbing, dishonest contracts and the sale of influence and by a vicious eagerness to exploit every public source of private gain. Note 8, page 315. Some decades later, the nation had a further experience of the political power of wealth at the time when Nicholas Biddle and his associates of the United States Bank waged a long war against the national administration until they were routed by the fiery Jackson. Later still, the period of the Civil War which may be extended to cover the years from 1860 to 1875, saw men wielding the weapon of wealth with an unscrupulousness that has never been surpassed. But in business and in public life, it could be recalled with shame by every American. Senator Horror in a memorable speech once gave, as by a sudden glare of lightning, a glimpse of those appalling years. My own public life, said he, has been a very brief and insignificant one extending little beyond the duration of a single term of senatorial office. But in that brief period, I have seen five judges of a high court of the United States, driven from office by threats of impeachment for national administration. I have seen the chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs in the House rise in his place and demand the expulsion of four of his associates for making sale of their official privilege of selecting the youth to be educated at our great military school. When the greatest railroad of the world binding together the continent and uniting the two great seas which wash our shores was finished, I have seen our national triumph and exaltation turn to bitterness reports of three committees of Congress, two of the House and one here, that every step of that mighty enterprise had been taken in fraud. I have heard in the highest places the shameless doctrine avowed by men grown old in public office that the true way by which power should be gained in the Republic is to bribe the people with offices created for their service and that the true end for which it should be used when gained is the promotion of selfish ambition and the gratification of personal revenge. I have heard that suspicion haunts the footsteps of the trusted companions of the President himself. Note 9, page 316. Yet the things done in those years gave in their direct results no reason for despair. Those who did them were acting almost in isolation and in most instances professedly outside the pale of honesty and decency. Fisk and Gould and Huntington, Belknap, Babcock, Brady, the Chiefs of the Whiskey Ring, the plotters of Black Friday and the Star Route Criminals were by the very crudity of their methods so conspicuously evil as hardly to be dangerous. Like Tweed and his Confederates who belong to the same period they were vulgar bandits operating boldly enough on the byways of politics and commerce yet ready to take flight when attacked by the law and by public indignation. But in 1892 great wealth had led to the development of a caste of which the members were exceedingly respectable and of a very different stripe from those whom they succeeded. Well-mannered, kindly gentlemen more they, usually irreproachable in their private lives, generous in their benefactions and upholders of a conservative tradition which they had themselves created. The protected manufacturer rapidly enriched himself not by defiance of the law but strictly in accordance with it. The railroad magnate who gave rebase and drawbacks, the organizer of trust and the able captain of industry who closed and barred the doors of opportunity to any other than himself were in their own estimation far from being violators of the statutes. Every step they took was taken under the advice of the most eminent lawyers of the land. If what many of them did appeared to contravene alike the letter and the spirit of explicit legislation and if they were often sued, indicted or otherwise brought before the courts this gave them slight concern for nothing ever came of it. The law's delays were endless. Its technicality is most interestingly labyrinthine and the judge's patient and extremely well disposed. The most striking feature of this new wealth was its solidarity and the close relationship of interest among its owners. There were no longer isolated millionaires fighting each for his own hand. The chief figure in an oil company for instance would likewise be the principal stockholder in a great electric light concern having also a subsidiary interest in a match trust, a candle monopoly and a dozen gas works. Mr. H. D. Lloyd, whose zeal sometimes led him to exaggerate the importance of his deductions, but whose facts were based on irrefutable evidence was well within the truth when he wrote in 1894. A small number of men are obtaining the power to forbid any but themselves to supply the people with fire in nearly every form known to modern life and industry from matches to locomotives and electricity. They control our hard coal and much of the soft and stoves, furnaces and steam and hot water heaters, the governors on steam boilers and the boilers, gas and gas fixtures, natural gas and gas pipes, electric lighting and all the appurtenances. You cannot free yourselves by changing from electricity to gas or from gas of the city to gas of the fields. If you fly from kerosene to candles you are still under the sun. Note 10, page 318. Add to this the fact that the very same men and others like them held directorships in chains of banks in railways, in insurance companies and other fiduciary institutions that they owned a controlling interest in the leading newspapers of the country which helped to mold and control public opinion by coloring the news. Note 11, page 318. That they were lavish contributors to the campaign funds of one or both state political parties that they helped their own protégés to seats in municipal councils, in state legislatures and in Congress, and that their influence was benevolently exerted to promote their former legal advisers to positions in the state and national judiciary and one may form a faint conception of the enormous power which they wielded. Note 12, page 319. It was primarily to check this power and to bring it under the more efficient control of law that the people's party had been founded. In that party there were some who were sufficiently clear-sighted to perceive that the crux of the whole situation lay in the question as to who should control and regulate the public means of transportation and communication with such other public utilities as heat and light and water. In private hands this control was certain always to be abused and made an instrument of oppression precisely as it had been in the past. The Standard Oil Company monopoly had been reared upon the secret agreement between the railways in Pennsylvania. The beef trust had crushed competition largely by its grip upon the western roads. The transcontinental railways had fraudulently acquired and held great tracks of public lands. These and a multiplicity of related facts were known to almost everyone and therefore here should have been found the point de puits of the populace campaign. But unfortunately for their cause the leaders and most of all the masses of the new party were led astray by another plan which seemed at once more tempting and more simple of execution. They did indeed as we have already seen insert in their various platforms a demand for the government ownership of railways, telegraphs and telephones yet it was upon the silver question that they elected to make the strongest fight. Perhaps they had vaguely in mind the military maxim of a great French strategist find out what it is that your enemy dares you not to do and then do it. To the populace the whole body of merchants, bankers and businessmen in the eastern states were collectively the enemy. No distinction was made between the Wall Street gambler, the trust promoter and the note shaver on the one hand and the conservative fair-minded representatives of legitimate commerce on the other. In Kansas and Nebraska these were all equally the enemy and when it became apparent that their interests were violently opposed to the free coinage of silver that they dreaded it and viewed it as a menace to prosperity then the rank and file of the new party felt a keen delight. Here was a sharp-edged weapon ready to hand here was a sword wherewith to slay them money sharks, the shylocks, the Wall Street bloodsuckers and the trusts if free silver was a bad thing for them then surely it must be a good thing for the honest farmer. The free silver leaders of course were not all actuated by a purely economic subject. They called themselves bimetalists and honestly believed that it would be possible for the United States to maintain a double standard even though its mince should be open to the unlimited coinage of silver dollars at the old ratio of 16 to 1 which had long since ceased to be a true one. Note 13 page 320 They had read the works of theoretical bimetalists who held that the use of both metals would be economically desirable if adopted through a common agreement by the great commercial nations of the earth. This is indeed a question that still remains an open one although purely academic. The important fact in 1893 was that with the exception of India and the United States all the leading nations of the world were either upon a definite gold basis or were preparing to accept it. England which in fact though not by law had made gold its standard since 1699 adopted that standard legally in 1870 by the coinage act. In 1871 Germany demonetized silver and became a gold country. The nations composing the so-called Latin Union, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy and Greece did the same in 1877 and their example was shortly followed by Holland, Norway and Sweden while Russia, Austria and Japan signified their intention to adopt a policy of gold monomatolism at an early date. The practical question at issue in the United States therefore was not whether the double monetary standard might not be feasible through an international agreement but whether one nation alone could successfully maintain it in the face of the use of a single standard by the rest of the civilized world. The serious and more intelligent leaders of the silver men, Democrats, Republicans and populists alike believed this to be possible. They caught eagerly at stray passages in the writings of international bimetalists and gave them an illogical application. Some very conservative economists and statesmen were in fact theoretically in favor of bimetalism as a principle. Among them Mr. Afterwards Lord, Goshen and Mr. A. J. Valfour in Great Britain and in the United States General Francis A. Walker Mr. Charles Francis Adams Mr. S. Dana Horton and President E. B. Andrews of Brown University. Note 14, page 321. The names of these and other authorities were dragged into the argument and made to support assertions and deductions such as would greatly have astonished the worthy gentlemen to whom they were ascribed. But the great mass of the friends of silver did not know or care anything about the niceties of financial doctrine. They made up their own minds in a much more direct and simple way. To them, free silver had a most enticing sound indicative of opulence and easy times. They had a vague notion that if the amount of money in the country should be increased per capita, each individual citizen would necessarily have more of it in his pockets. Just how he was to get it except by working for it precisely as he had done before, they did not attempt to demonstrate. But they were certain that the free coinage of silver would increase the number of daughters per capita in the United States and that any objection to such a measure could come only from cruel capitalists in the East who wish to hold the western farmers forever in the bonds of debt. Some assured that unlimited silver coinage would drive gold out of circulation. They replied that silver was good enough for them if they could only get enough of it. When told that the United States could not single-handed maintain a system at variance with that of the great European nations, they answered that this country was big enough to do anything it pleased without asking for leave or license from the monarchies of Europe. Such were the simple, primitive ideas which influenced the minds of the silver men throughout the West. The potent of all was the belief that a vote for silver was a direct blow struck at the hated eastern capitalist and creditor. The third serious element in the political situation at the time of President Cleveland's second inauguration was the condition of the United States Treasury. When it had been turned over to Mr. Harrison's financial secretary four years before, it contained a net surplus of 97 million dollars. This had all been spent and it was now difficult even to meet the current expenses. Moreover, the financial legislation of past years had begun to inspire foreign holders of American securities with increasing apprehension. When species payments were resumed in 1879, the Treasury had set apart in gold a special fund which was never to be less than 100 million dollars for the redemption of outstanding legal tender notes, greenbacks. Of these greenbacks, there were in circulation 346 million dollars in 1892. There were also outstanding 147 million dollars of coin certificates which had been issued in the purchase of silver bullion under the Sherman Act of 1890. Note 15, page 323. These, by law, were redeemable in coin, i.e. in either gold or silver at the option of the Treasury. But President Harrison's secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Wyndham, had very unwisely ruled that the holder would not resize his option. In other words, the coin certificates, like the greenbacks, were really payable in gold. Hence, there were now outstanding government notes calling for 493 million dollars of gold while the Treasury had little more than one-fifth of that sum with which to redeem them. Yet, this was not the worst. For under the Sherman Act, which still remained enforced, the government must buy each month the issue against this bullion still more paper money to be redeemed in gold. The perplexities of the situation with which President Cleveland was confronted were, therefore, plain enough to be seen by any intelligent observer. He was pledged to reduce the tariff in the interest of free or trade, and in this he was certain to find himself in conflict with the whole power of consolidated capital, not the power of protected industries alone, but of all the allied forces of monopoly, while knew that a radical reform of the tariff would be only the first step toward a reform of other and even worse abuses. It was also plain that he must take measures to protect the Treasury and keep it solvent. But such measures would have necessity run counter to the convictions of the silver men of every party, and would convince the people of the West that Wall Street was supreme in Washington. President Cleveland's task then involved a bitter struggle with a capitalist on the one side, and inevitably fanned the flames of popular suspicion on the other. The stoutest heart might well have shrunk from such an undertaking. To carry it through successfully demanded a high order of political genius, an exceptional gift for the management of men, a perfect union of tact and firmness, and a broadly tolerant understanding of human prejudice and passion. Mr. Cleveland was by no means possessed of this rare political genius, though he did have some very fundamental qualities of the governing man, a robust intelligence, a rigorous conscience, and unlimited courage. With these qualities he had also some of their usual defects. When he understood a subject, he was a little intolerant of those who failed to understand it or who understood it in a different way. When he was convinced that he was right, he had no patience with those whom he conceived to be in the wrong. Because he was himself absolutely fearless, he scorned all such a shrink where he led. He wished, in fact, not only to accomplish his own ends, but to accomplish them in his own way, and coercion was to him more natural than conciliation. In fact, just as Strafford's motto was thorough, so Mr. Cleveland's motto might have been downright. Whatever policy he might adopt was sure to be a heavy-fisted one and to be carried out if carried out at all with no finesse but by dint of hard-sledge hammering blows. The government was a fine one for an absolute ruler, for that enlightened despot from Iris Toddle held to be the ideal governor of men, but it was dangerous in him who in a republic was obliged to carry out his plans through the unforced cooperation of other and no less independent men. Mr. Cleveland in many ways had changed in the eight years which had elapsed since his first assumption of the presidency. For one thing, he had ceased to be a provincial and had risen to the full measure of the office held. In 1885, those who noted his appearance on public occasions of great dignity as, for instance, at the funeral ceremonies of General Grant found in his external aspect, his tilted hat, his slouchy bearing, his stolid face, something that recalled the country sheriff. Since that time a wide acquaintance with men of every type no less than the pressure of high responsibility had broadened and elevated his whole cast of thought. If he was now less ungracious exterior, even more self-willed than ever and more bent on having his own way, this was only natural in view of what had happened in the preceding years. He had flouted all advice, he had done precisely as he pleased, and yet the nation had set him once more in the seat of highest honor. It is not surprising then if from the time of his second inauguration the president displayed what seemed to many a certain arrogance of manner and of language with a disposition for the prerogatives of his high office. The very phrasing of his official papers, his proclamations and his messages to Congress is noteworthy for a haughtiness such as would have been far more appropriate in the rescripts of a hereditary monarch. The personal pronoun I occurs in these documents with an unusual frequency and such expressions as I have deemed it fitting, it is my purpose, it affords me signal pleasure, I am decidedly opinion, and I am satisfied. Appear and reappear so often as to give to the whole a strongly personal coloring. Very characteristic was an executive order issued by the president on May 8. He had set apart certain hours for receiving such senators and representatives as desired interviews with him. As is usually the case, these interviews related largely to questions of patronage. The president became so irritated in consequence as to make public his annoyance in a remarkable order, the effect of which upon both senators and representatives may be easily conceived. It ran. The time which was set apart for the reception of senators and representatives has been almost entirely spent in listening to applications for office, which have been bewildering in volume, perplexing and exhausting in their iteration and impossible of remembrance. A due regard for public duty and an observance of the limitations placed on human endurance obliged me to decline from and after this date all personal interviews with those seeking appointments to office, except as I on my own motion may especially invite them. Applicants for office will only prejudice their prospects by repeated importunity and by remaining in Washington to await results. It was a number of incidents such as this that gave point to a contemporary cartoon entitled Cleveland's Map of the United States, wherein the figure of the President was so drawn as to coincide with the outlines of the country which was thus made by implication identical with himself. Under the drawing were the words, my country tis of me, of me I sing. One might well have sympathized with the President in his annoyance over the importunities of office seekers and the lack of consideration shown by the senators and representatives of his own party. But in view of the fact that he was about to recommend legislation of the most controversial character and that only by the goodwill and cooperation of the majority in Congress could it be carried through, this executive order was an extraordinary example of political tactlessness. Far more important however was a line of action adopted by President Cleveland with regard to appending international question. By this at the very outset of his administration he brought upon himself both in and out of Congress an avalanche of political unpopularity and personal dislike. At the inauguration ball in Mrs. Cleveland's company a dark-skinned graceful girl had attracted much attention. This was the Princess Keiulani the heiress apparent to the Hawaiian throne in direct succession to the Queen Deliu Kalani of whom she was the niece. The Princess was only 18 years of age. She had been educated in England and was in that country at the time when the Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown and the Queen deposed. Note 16, page 327. On getting news of this she had come at once to the United States accompanied by her guardian Mr. Theophilus Davies. It will be remembered that President Harrison's last important act had been the submission to the Senate of a treaty by which Hawaii was to be annexed to the United States. This treaty had not yet been ratified and it was with the purpose of opposing it that the Princess Keiulani had hastened to Washington. Advisors shrewdly counted on the chivalrous disposition of the American people toward women. They believed that a young and pretty girl pleading for the restoration of her rights would make a strong appeal to popular sentiment throughout the land. No sooner had Keiulani reached New York than she issued an appeal to the American people which was published in the newspapers on March 2nd. Whether she wrote it herself or whether it was written for her was a question much mooted at the time. Whoever wrote it, the appeal was sweetly pretty with a touch of false sentiment about it and a schoolgirl rhetoric that did not ring quite true so that it wholly failed of its effect and was received with smiles by nearly all who read it. In it the Princess said, Unbidden I stand upon your shores today where I thought so soon to receive a royal welcome on my way to my own kingdom. I come unattended except by loving hearts that came with me over the wintery seas. I hear that commissioners from my own land have been for many days asking this great nation to take away my little vineyard. Today I, a poor, weak girl with not one of my people near me and with all these Hawaiian statesmen against me, have strength to stand up for the rights of my people. Even now I can hear a wail in my heart and it gives me strength and courage and I am strong. Strong in the faith of God, strong in the strength of seventy million free land will hear my cry and will refuse to let their flag cover dishonor to mine. End of Chapter 7 Part 1 Chapter 7 Part 2 of Twenty Years of the Republic 1885-1905 by Harry Thurston Peck This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Cleveland once more Part 2 Of Mrs. Cleveland this island princess made an important convert to the cause she represented. Mrs. Cleveland welcomed her very warmly to the White House and gave her her most womanly sympathy. Kei Ullani was indeed a very charming girl and she made a favorable impression upon the president and also upon the secretary of state to whom she was presently introduced. Mr. Gresham, during the years when he was a republican, had been a rival of Mr. Harrison and this rivalry had in time deepened into a personal dislike. No wonder that the Harrison policy regarding Hawaii should be viewed by him with extreme disfavor. All together then between the president's natural caution which led him to move slowly in an affair begun with so much haste and Mr. Gresham's eagerness to undo the work of one whom he disliked, no surprise was felt when on March 9th a message of five lines was sent to the Senate withdrawing for the purpose of re-examination, the treaty framed by President Harrison and the Hawaiian commissioners. A few days later Mr. Cleveland dispatched to Hawaii as a special commissioner Mr. James H. Blunt of Georgia to investigate the circumstances under which the change of government in the islands had been affected. Mr. Blunt was an honest but somewhat cross-grained politician who had been chairman of the committee on foreign affairs in the House of Representatives yet one more unfamiliar with foreign affairs could scarcely have been selected for this delicate mission. He had never been out of the United States in his life and his knowledge of diplomatic usage was as limited as his mastery of social forms. In keeping with the rather primitive notions of Secretary Gresham in matters of ceremonial Mr. Blunt proceeded to Hawaii not by a regular mail steamer nor in a man of war but on board a little revenue cutter, the Richard Rush. He reached Honolulu on March 29th. President Dole and the other members of the provisional government had heard that a commission of representatives of the judiciary, the Army and the Navy had been sent to them and suitable preparations were made to receive such a commission with due dignity. An eyewitness has given a graphic account of what actually happened. All the vessels in the harbor displayed the American flag and the American cutters were wreathed about the pillars and columns of the city houses. At the pier a great multitude had assembled, stirring the passageway with roses. As the Rush Hove a Japanese cruiser the Naniwa fired a thunderous salute to which the little Rush responded like the app of a terrier echoing the deep baying of a stag hound. And then came an anti-climax that very closely approached the ridiculous. Instead of the dignified, affable and courteous body of officials that had been expected there stepped ashore a commonplace and rather sullen-looking man of 60 clad in ill-fitting clothes of blue homespun and a Panama hat. Public expectation had been roused to the highest pitch and the revulsion of feeling was instantaneous and painful. Note 17, Page 330 Mr. Blunt delivered to President Dole a letter from President Cleveland beginning Great and good friend, I have made choice of James H. Blunt one of our distinguished citizens as my special commissioner to visit the Hawaiian Islands and make report to me concerning the status of affairs of the country. His authority is paramount. Mr. Blunt brought with him other letters from the American president. One of them addressed to Minister Stevens practically suspended that gentleman from the exercise of his diplomatic functions and made him subordinate to Mr. Blunt. A second letter directed to Rear Admiral Scarrett in command of the Pacific Squadron to consult freely with Mr. Blunt and obey any instructions you may receive from him regarding the islands by the force under your command. Armed with these remarkable credentials, Mr. Blunt began in his own way to investigate the events of the preceding February. On the day after his arrival he ordered the American flag to be lowered from the government building in Honolulu and directed the force of Marines which had been stationed there to break camp and return to their ship, the Boston. This was done and the provisional government at once raised its own flag and posted its own troops with a battery of rapid-fire guns to quell any attempt to restore the queen. Note 18, page 331 When the news of these events reached the United States a great deal of very bitter feeling was excited. The American people were not strongly in favor of annexing Hawaii. Apart from a few speculators in sugar there was no great interest in the matter. A desire for foreign territory had not yet stirred the popular imagination. Had Mr. Cleveland simply put the treaty in the fire and kept his hands off Hawaii altogether, the whole affair would have been speedily forgotten. But when the credentials which he had given to Mr. Blunt were fully known they were very generally disapproved alike by Democrats and by Republicans. The President had apparently delegated the whole power of his great office to an individual, commissioner a nondescript functionary unknown to the Constitution and the stroke of the presidential pen been put over the head of a regularly appointed minister and invested with the absolute command of an important naval force. There is indeed no doubt that Mr. Cleveland exceeded his constitutional rights and that Mr. Blunt's paramountcy was unlawful. Before long a still more intense feeling was aroused by the report that the President intended to restore Queen Liliu Kalani to her throne. The rumor proved to be true. Mr. Blunt's reports and a study of the earlier dispatches of Minister Stevens convinced Mr. Cleveland that the Hawaiian monarchy had been subverted by the active aid of Mr. Stevens and through the intimidation caused by the presence of an armed naval force of the United States. Note 19, Page 332 Having assured himself of this the President felt at his duty as he expressed it to undo the wrong and to restore the status existing at the time of our forcible intervention. Note 20, Page 332 It was here that the President made a second blunder and as it proved a most humiliating one for him. He forgot in the first place the wise tradition that in the foreign policy of the United States there should be no break and that in essentials a change of administration should cause no change in the attitude of the State Department toward other countries. Note 21, Page 332 There was more practical consideration. Whether or not the provisional government of Hawaii could have held its own against the Queen's forces in the preceding January without the presence of American Marines there was no doubt that it was now quite able to sustain itself. It had an efficient force of some 1200 well-drilled troops, nearly all Americans and Englishmen. It was supplied with artillery and it enjoyed the support of the responsible residents of Hawaii. Note 22, Page 333 Hence to restore the Queen would require something more than a curt request from President Cleveland. But with his innate obstinacy the President resolved to make the attempt and the unpopularity of such a course only strengthened his resolve. Recalling Mr. Blunt whose cherlish manners had made him thoroughly disliked, Mr. Cleveland appointed as Minister to Hawaii Mr. Albert S. Willis of Kentucky, a gentlemen of intelligence and judgment. Mr. Willis, however, was specifically instructed to bring about the restoration of the Queen and a naval force was stationed at Honolulu to give point to his instructions. On his arrival the new minister sent to President Dole a formal request that he relinquish to the Queen her constitutional authority. President Dole replied by a courteous but firm refusal. Here was an impasse which could be broken through by nothing short of armed force. With the guns of American ships of war be turned upon men of American blood in order to re-enthrone a Polynesian Queen who had broken her coronation oath and had sought to govern irresponsibly. Mr. Willis hesitated, yet he might under his instructions have taken even this last step had not the unexpected obstinacy of the Queen herself deterred him. She was asked whether if replaced upon the throne she would agree not to punish those who had deposed her. Note 23, page 334 This question she met with an indignant negative. Not punish them. Most assuredly she would punish them. The leaders, Mr. Dole, Mr. Thurston and their associates must be executed at once. She would have their heads and their families must be vanished. Here spoke not merely the Queen who felt herself in all respects a sovereign and who had been deprived of power and publicly humiliated. Something of the implacable hatred of an insulted woman found voice in the sharp answer which she made to Mr. Willis. For the annexationists in the zeal of their self-justification had not been satisfied merely to assail the public acts of Liliokalani. They had tried to smurter private life as well. And Mr. Stevens in his dispatches to the State Department repeating the scabrous gossip of the foreign clubs in Honolulu had declared the Queen to be unchaste. Hence the indignation with which Liliokalani refused to promise any amnesty. She would be Queen without conditions or she would not be Queen at all. One may well admire her high spirit and her womanly indignation but her persistence made further effort on her behalf impossible. Mr. Willis sent his report to President Cleveland who afterwards asked Congress to take action. Congress however, like the vast majority of the American people was most antagonistic to what the President had done in the Hawaiian Affair. Therefore it took no action at all and in due time the Republic of Hawaii had to be formally recognized by the United States. Mr. Cleveland's interference had not only failed to restore the Queen but his withdrawal of the annexation treaty had deprived her and also the pretty young Princess Keulani of the liberal income which that instrument had guaranteed to them. Furthermore the President at the very outset of his administration had incurred a vast amount of odium just when he most needed the harmonious support of all who had ever been his friends. Already a serious crisis had arisen. The condition of the treasury to which illusion has been made soon began to affect the prosperity of the country. Foreign investors were steadily selling American securities thus causing a general decline in prices. This movement had begun during the latter part of the Harrison administration but it was now perceptibly accelerated although the business of the country was fairly good although the crops were wonderful and the general industries not idle there existed nevertheless something like a vague premonition of disaster her pervasive distress to which no name was given. The most obvious reason for this feeling seemed to be a lurking doubt as to whether the government could continue to meet its obligations in paying gold upon the demand of all its notes forced as it was by the Sherman law to purchase more than two tons of silver bullion every month. Most Republicans insisted that the lack of confidence arose from a dread of the tariff changes to which the party now in power was pledged but whatever the cause commercial and financial activity languished the country exhibits all the symptoms of a patient suffering from low fever said a writer in the nation and this very well describes the situation up to the end of June. After the 26th of that month however this low fever assumed the form of a delirium. The government of India on that day suspended the free coinage of silver at its mince. That such a measure was certain to be taken had been well known to students of finance yet the announcement at once precipitated a panic the like of which had not yet been seen in the United States. The value of the silver dollar which had long been falling dropped from 67 cents to less than 60 cents. Individuals all over the country began collecting gold and hoarding it having lost their confidence in government notes. Banks called in their loans and refused new discounts. In this the lead was taken by those Canadian banking houses which for the purpose of moving the crops were accustomed to lend money to American customers in the Northwestern cities such as Milwaukee, Detroit, Minneapolis and St. Paul. Business therefore came almost to a standstill and before long the weaker banks headed the long list of failures and suspensions which occupied whole columns in the daily press. A chain of shaky banks nearly 50 in number organized by one Zimri-Dwiggins in the West came down in a single crash. The gold reserve in the Treasury for the first time fell below the traditional minimum and sank to less than 97 million dollars. Many prophesied that the country would soon be forced to a silver basis. Four days after the demonetization of silver in India President Cleveland issued a proclamation Note 25 Page 336 Summoning an extra session of Congress to meet on August 7th. In the proclamation he spoke of the distressing condition of the country as largely the result of a financial policy which the executive branch of the government finds embodied in unwise laws, laws which must be executed until repealed by Congress. This meant of course that the President intended to press for the repeal of the purchasing clause in the Senate. The proclamation had but slight effect in calming public anxiety. It was known that the number of silver men in both houses of Congress were a very large one, and many persons doubted whether these would consent to the repeal of a measure so likely to bring about the very situation which they earnestly desired. Hence all through July the failure still continued, mines were closed, factories shut down, and laborers were discharged. Before Congress met, the savings banks put in force the clause which requires 60 days notice from depositors desiring to draw money. The effect of this was to create what came to be known as a currency famine. Until then the general public had feared less gold should not be paid upon demand, but now the belief spread rapidly that no money of any kind would long remain in circulation. Hence whereas men had previously hoarded gold there now began a frantic rush of silver, paper money, in fact any kind of circulating medium. Of course this movement if not checked would have led to a panic so tremendous as to cause a universal crash, and therefore in New York most of the banks that were members of the clearing house resorted to a strong and quite unprecedented measure. They declined as a rule to cash checks drawn by their depositors except for very small amounts. Depositors were told that they had usually made their deposits in the form of checks and that for the present therefore they must themselves employ the same medium of exchange. In other words instead of drawing money they received certified checks payable through the clearing house. If a depositor insisted upon receiving cash it was given him but he was informed that he must at once withdraw his account. Large employers of labour were provided with the money necessary for them in making up their payrolls and in other cases where good reasons for drawing cash it was paid out but otherwise checks were not directly honoured. To sustain the weaker banks the clearing house issued loan certificates. This plan was put into effect on August 3rd and on the following day currency of every kind was at a premium ranging from 1 to 2%. The money brokers who had foreseen the action of the banks had for several days been quietly accumulating a stock of cash and they now proceeded to cash the checks that the discount mentioned. An enormous business of this sort was done. A well known brokerage firm near the head of Wall Street bought currency at a premium of 1 half of 1% and sold it at a premium of 3%. Great bundles of paper money were stacked up behind the counters and all day long the exchange went on. In no other way could checks be readily converted into money. Even those drawn by the assistant treasurer of the United States at the sub-treasurer in New York in payment of pensions were not accepted at their face value. On August 8th the premium on currency rose to 3% while for the first time since January 1st 1879 the banks themselves paid a premium for gold. By August 11th the currency famine was at its height and it was estimated that at least 1 million dollars in cash was paid out daily by the money brokers to holders of certified checks. The country was swept from one end to the other for coin and notes and even from Canada there was sent to New York a consignment of nearly a million dollars in small bills and fractional silver. Oddly enough silver was now taken as readily as gold while paper money was preferred to either. On August 5th a firm of money brokers advertised for silver dollars offering a premium of $7.50 per thousand. Note 26, page 339 Many persons bought and hoarded Bank of England notes are French and German gold. The special session of Congress opened on August 7th in the midst of these unusual occurrences. For the first time since 1853 when Pierce was president the Democratic Party was in control of the executive and legislative branches of the government, presidency, Senate and House of Representatives. Under President Hayes both Senate and House had been Democratic for a short time. During Mr. Cleveland's first administration his party had the presidency and the House but now it was in complete possession and was therefore undividedly responsible. In the House the Democrats had 219 members the Republicans 124 and the populace 12. Note 27, page 339 In the Senate there were 44 Democrats, 36 Republicans, 5 populace and 8 vacancies. The weakness of the Democrats lay in the slenderness of their majority in the Senate and in the fact that on financial questions there existed a great divergence of opinion among them in both houses. The President's message was sent to Congress on August 8th. It was a clear, concise and convincing statement of what he held to be the cause of an alarming and extraordinary business situation. The decision of the Sherman Act of July 14th 1890 Between July 1890 and July 1893 he said the gold coin and gold bullion in the Treasury had decreased more than $132 million while during the same period the silver coin and silver bullion had increased more than $147 million. Note 28, page 340 Unless government bonds are to be constantly issued and sold to replenish the imported gold only to be again exhausted, the operation of the silver purchase law now in force leads in the direction of the entire substitution of silver for the gold in the Treasury and this must be followed by the payment of all government obligations and depreciated silver. At this stage gold and silver must part company. Given over to the exclusive use of a currency greatly depreciated according to the standard of the commercial world we could no longer claim a place among the nations of the first class. The President therefore recommended the repeal of the Sherman Act. Mr. Wilson of West Virginia who soon came to be regarded as the administration's spokesman in the house introduced a bill carrying out this recommendation and the debate upon it began on August 11th. At once it became evident that the question was not to be decided by a purely party vote. Other lines of cleavage rapidly developed. A large group of Democratic representatives were opposed to repeal unless in place of the Sherman Act there should be substituted a still more radical measure intended to do something for silver. A majority of the Republicans stood with the President. Consistency in fact if nothing else would have made this necessary for Mr. Wilson's repealing bill was almost identical in language with a like bill offered in the preceding congress by Mr. Sherman himself. Note 29, page 341. Yet there were also a good many silver Republicans and these combining with the silver men among the Democrats and the entire body of populists made a formidable opposition. This fact explains why the special session of Congress and the President's message didn't nothing immediately to relieve the financial situation. It was on the day when the debate began that the premium on currency reached its highest figure. The debate was very interesting. Mr. Wilson's argument for repeal was weighty and represented the position of conservative expositors of finance. Mr. Reid of Maine, the Republican leader, spoke at some length and in a blandly philosophic tone. He mentioned the existing business depression and seemed to give in his adhesion to the cyclic theory of panics. Great panics, he remarked, seemed to occur at long intervals but with a sort of cosmic regularity. Who shall say just why they come? Minor panics, curious, interesting phenomena of the business world. Nothing could have been more beautifully detached than Mr. Reid's whole tone and manner, though as he neared the end he made it clear that to his mind the advent of the Democratic Party to power had, in this particular instance, Mr. Grover of Ohio had no philosophic doubts. In a burst of declamatory eloquence he charged the collapse of prosperity to a dread of Democratic domination and the menace of free trade. He drew a picture of the country after the election in November. One by one the furnaces went out. One by one the mines closed up. One after another the factories shortened their time. Why did they do this? Was it a mere senseless stampede? Was it a Wall Street panic? Was it an unintelligent curtailment of the business of the country? I say not. Where is there an intelligent man today if he were a manufacturer of the Democratic Party and power, the menace of its possession, the threat of its mere existence under that platform, and confiding as human nature does in the belief that a great political party will do as it says, a violent assumption I admit in the present instance. What one of you at the head of an industrial institution would carry on your business? The Republican leaders, however, while casting the blame for the measure for repeal. The allied silver men were led by Mr. Richard P. Bland of Missouri who had grown gray in the advocacy of a free or use of the white metal. He was the author of the Bland Allison Act of 1878, note 30, page 342, and his activity in behalf of Silver had never ceased so that he had won for himself the popular nickname of Silver Dick. In the debate now in progress he had answered Mr. Wilson on August 12. His arguments were those with which all men were familiar, and while they were listened to with respect they were neither new in substance nor especially forcible in the form of their presentation. Four days later, August 16, the discussion was enlivened by the participation in it of a remarkable figure who now for the first time drew to himself the attention of men of every party throughout the United States. It was Mr. William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska. Mr. Bryan at this time was a young man of 33, the son of an eminent lawyer and judge whose profession he had followed. In 1890 he had accepted a Democratic nomination for Congress in a district where no other Democrat was willing to stand, the contest being considered hopeless. Without financial aid from the State Committee of his party Mr. Bryan had made a spirit at Canvas and had astounded everyone by converting a Republican majority of 3,000 into a Democratic majority of 7,000. In 1892 he had been re-elected and he now appeared as the ableist of Mr. Bland's lieutenants in opposing unconditional repeal. The time allotted to each speaker had by agreement been limited to one hour. But when Mr. Bryan's period expired he had so engaged the attention of the House that by unanimous consent his time was indefinitely extended and he continued speaking for nearly two hours longer to the admiration of all who heard him. This admiration was no doubt partly due to Mr. Bryan's command of the Arts of the Orator to his active presence, his pleasing manner of delivery and his clear, vibrant and beautifully modulated voice yet making all allowance for these adventitious aides the speech which he then delivered still remains perhaps the most forcefully persuasive exposition of the argument for silver that has ever been presented before deliberative body. Its rhetoric never obtruded itself in the form of garish tropes or adjectival excess. It was the subtler and more effective rhetoric which gives to undisputed facts the exact coloring that the artist in words desires to apply and which insensibly leads the listener to accept the facts and the deductions from those facts as of precisely equal value. Mr. Bryan's argument briefly summarized was to the effect that there existed neither gold enough nor silver enough for either to form the sole basis of the world's metallic money and that to discriminate against the use of either was to contract the currency everywhere. To demonetize silver was to augment artificially the value of gold and thus to lower the price of all commodities when measured in gold while increasing the burden of the debtor class who must pay their debts in a kind of money more valuable and hence more difficult to earn than that in which the debt had been originally contracted. He held that the United States should make a free use of silver and now free coinage of it at some ratio and he declared the ratio of 16 to 1 to be a just one. Retaining it the parity of the gold and silver dollars could still be maintained. He quoted Lord Goshen's dictum at present there is a vicious circle states are afraid of employing silver on account of the depreciation so the depreciation continues because states refuse to employ it and he flung at the Republicans the following citation from a speech of Mr. Blaine the destruction of silver as money and establishing gold as a sole unit of value must have a ruinous effect on all forms of property except those investments which yield a fixed return in money. These must be enormously enhanced in value and must gain a disproportionate and unfair advantage over every other species of property. Note 31, page 344 as against the proposal to repeal unconditionally the Sherman Act Mr. Bryan said the main objection which we heard last spring was that the Treasury, Sherman notes were used to draw gold out of the Treasury but the objection is hardly important enough for consideration while the Treasury notes have been used to draw out gold they need not have been used for this purpose for we have 346 million dollars worth of greenbacks with which gold can be drawn so long as the government gives the option to the holder. While all of the Treasury notes were destroyed the greenbacks are sufficient to draw out the 100 million dollar reserve three times over and then they can be reissued and used again. To complain of the Treasury notes while the greenbacks remain is like finding fault because the gate is open when the hole fence is down. Mr. Bryan's effort won him the sincere applause of party friends and foes alike but it could not prevail to defeat the administration's measure. The power of a new president is very great and perhaps the power of a new speaker is even greater. Mr. Charles F. Crisp of Georgia who had succeeded Mr. Reed and now occupied the Speaker's chair was or had been an advocate of free silver coinage but he frankly accepted the policy of the president and did all he could to press the repeal bill to a final vote. This was taken on August 28th when Mr. Wilson's measure passed the House by a vote of 239 to 108. Here was apparently a triumph for the president yet the triumph was not unalloyed. During the contest a proposal had been made to reenact the old bland Allison law of 1878 and this proposal had been lost by a vote in which the majority of Democratic representatives had opposed the policy of Mr. Cleveland so that he was sustained only by the aid of the Republicans. The repealing bill now went to the Senate where it was introduced by Mr. Vores of Indiana which declared it to be the policy of the United States to use both gold and silver as standard money and to coin both gold and silver into money of equal intrinsic and exchangeable value such equality to be secured through international agreement. The object of this amendment was to win the votes of those who like Senator Lodge were theoretical by metalists and also to make it clear that the use of silver was not to be discontinued but in the Senate it was stubbornly resisted and both the populists and the silver advocates belonging to the older parties threatened to talk the bill to death. As the Senate rules provided for no restriction of debate and as each Senator might talk as often and as long as he desired this threat was a most serious one. Prodigious feats of oratory were performed by the recalcitrant Senators. Mr. Allen of Nebraska made what was doubtless the longest speech in the history of legislative bodies for 14 hours without interruption resting himself by sending volumes of history or statistics or poetry to be read from the desk as part of his address. Other Senators especially the Republicans took a humorous view of the whole situation. Senator Hale and Senator Chandler told fish stories and exchanged jokes. Other Senators discourse upon current topics having not the slightest relevance to the order of the day. In fact the proceedings degenerated into undignified and most discreditable farce. On September 25th several influential Senators representing the administration went privately to Vice President Stevenson who presided over the Senate and urged him to break the deadlock. By refusing to recognize those Senators who should thereafter rise to speak for purposes of pure obstruction the debate might be brought to a close and a vote taken. Such a course would be contrary to all American Presidents. It would be almost revolutionary. Yet it was in accordance with the dictates of common sense that a minority should not be allowed permanently to prevent a majority from enacting legislation, least of all in so serious a crisis and when every day's delay was so ruinous to the business of the country. There was recent English precedent for such action as they asked. In the absence of a rule providing for a closure the Speaker of the House of Commons Mr. Arthur Peale, after an almost interminable period of obstruction on the part of the Irish members, had refused to entertain dilatory motions and on his own responsibility had put the question to the House. Note 32, page 347. But Mr. Stevenson lacked the courage to carry out a coup like this. He sat there day after day quite helpless in his chair, often unable to preserve more than a mere semblance of order and decorum. His were not the audacity and the dominant vigor of a reed. It may be too that his secret sympathies were with the silver men as his subsequent political career would seem to show. At any rate he would not accept the suggestion made to him nor would he even promise to compel senators to speak to the question before them. He would do nothing whatsoever and so the administration senators carried word to the President that the affair seemed hopeless. But the President knew well enough that in the last resort he could force the repeal bill through the Senate. Every President has influences at his command which if he be inclined to use them make it possible for him to impose his will upon a congressional majority of his own party and sometimes even upon a majority of the opposition. When President Johnson was at the very ebb of his popularity in 1867 and when House and Senate were overriding his vetoes and treating his recommendations with contempt, he once said to a personal friend, even now if I really wish anything very much indeed, I can get it done. Mr. Cleveland was still new in office and the vast patronage at his disposal was still practically untouched. He had rebuffed by his order of May 8 those senators who had importuned him on behalf of their constituents and friends. Now he had only to show himself a little more complacent to listen a little more patiently to say yes instead of no and the thing would be done. It would be merely a reversion of the variable practice of his predecessors from Lincoln, note 33, page 348 down to Harrison. Yet to one of Mr. Cleveland's temperament and in view of the higher tone of public opinion such a course could be justified only by the existence of a supreme emergency. Such an emergency was undeniably at hand. The government was threatened by the necessity of a partial repudiation of its debts by the impairment of its credit and by the loss of its financial honor. Still the president held his hand. The majority at last tried to wear out the minority by a plan to prevent adjournment until a vote upon the bill should have been taken. One session lasted continuously for three whole days and nights. Note 34, page 348 during which time haggard and blear-eyed men talked and talked while others slept with their heads upon their desks. But this physical test proved as interesting to one side as to the other and the plan was given up. The senate had now been considering the bill for two long months and the end appeared no nearer than it had in August. Then at last the president very quietly made a move so quietly that few perceived it. But on October 29th one of his supporters came to him to express discouragement. There was really no chance at all of anything being done. The silver men would never yield a vote to be taken. Why Mr. President said he there is Senator Blank whom I have just seen and he says that this bill won't pass till hell freezes over. The president looked up with just a half perceptible gleam of interest. Did Senator Blank say that? He asked. Then please say to Senator Blank with my compliments that hell will freeze over in exactly twenty-four hours. And on the following day the filibustering mysteriously ceased and the Sherman Act was repealed by a vote of 48 to 37. But the measure so earnestly advocated by the president had been adopted by the help of Republican votes. Note 35, page 349. The House promptly concurred in the Voray's amendment and the bill was signed and became law on November 1st. Mr. Cleveland had now been in office for only eight months and already his party was divided and unwilling to be led. He had forced the passage of one measure of immense importance, but in doing so he had made a host of enemies while he had depleted his available sources of influence both moral and material. And the terror fight was still to come. End of chapter 7 Chapter 8 of Twenty Years of the Republic 1885 to 1905 by Harry Thurston Peck This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Storm and Stress Part 1 Apart from events of a political character, the most memorable occurrence that took place during the years of Mr. Cleveland's second term was the Columbian Exposition in Chicago which was opened by the president on May 1st, 1893 and was closed to the public on October 31st. From several points of view this magnificent revelation of American capacity and versatility deserves to be considered in any record as to do with the intellectual and aesthetic development of the United States. Its inception no less than its successful elaboration must remain one of the enduring civic glories of the city of Chicago and because of it, Chicago became known all over the civilized world as the most vitally American if not the greatest city of the Western Hemisphere. The plan for a world's fair to commemorate the quadricentenary of the first landing of Columbus when it formed in 1889. That the site of the exposition should be in or near the city of New York was at first regarded as a matter of course. A great many persons in New York wished it though New York collectively did not wish it very much. There is never anything which New York collectively wishes very much. Yet with a sort of uninterested generosity its wealthy citizens subscribed the sum of 5 million dollars to defray the cost of the affair and measures were taken to assure the opening of a Columbian exposition in October 1892, the anniversary month of America's discovery. But when Congress was asked to approve this plan and thus to give the celebration a national character it appeared that other cities then New York had claims which they were anxious to submit. St. Louis contended for the honor though half heartedly. Many thought that Washington as the nation's capital deserved the most consideration. But the people of Chicago fairly hurled themselves into the contest. They longed intensely for the opportunity to accomplish something sufficiently stupendous to satisfy their own ambition, their own love of bigness, their civic pride and most of all their vivid and spectacular but very genuine patriotism. They harped upon their city's nearness to the center of population. They claimed the exposition not merely on behalf of their own state but of the entire west. They pledged themselves to do anything and everything that would be necessary to make it triumphantly successful. They laughed with a large amused contempt at New York's pitiful five millions. Their own estimates at the very least were twice that sum and before long they spoke of 15 millions as barely adequate to realize their magnificent ideal. In the end they and their supporters fairly carried Congress by storm and the exposition was given to Chicago. Here long it was declared and as the event showed truly that not less than 20 million dollars would have to be expended. Note 1 page 351 The very hugeness of the sum, the colossal daring of the conception which seemed to the conservative east almost a frenzy served only to exhilarate the people of Chicago and nerve them to surpass all that they had hitherto imagined. In New York there was a certain feeling of relief because the exposition had gone elsewhere. The enthusiasm of Chicago seemed to the Manhattanese a bit of patabinity an amusing exhibition of provincialism. Chicago's promises were rated as mere wind. Of course some kind of a huge rary show would be given on the borders of Lake Michigan but its bigness would be equaled only by its crudity. How superbly and with what overwhelming completeness the metropolis of the west transformed this mocking criticism into wondering admiration the whole world came to know when on the lake side a rough unkempt and tangled stretch of plain and swamp became transmuted into a shimmering dream of loveliness under the magic touch of landscape gardener and architect and artist. No felicity of language can bring before the eye that never saw them those harmonies which consummate art brooding lovingly over nature evolved into that maze of beauty. Note 1 of the 12 million human beings Note 2 page 352 who set foot within the court of honor the crowning glory of the whole could fail to be thrilled with a new and poignant sense of what both art and nature truly mean. The stately colonnades the graceful arches the clustered sculptures the gleaming domes the endless labyrinth of snowy columns all diversified by greenery and interlaced by long lagoons of quiet water here were blended form and color in a symmetrical and radiant purity such as modernized at least had never looked upon before. It was the sheer beauty of its wonderful ensemble rather than the wealth of its exhibits that made this exposition so remarkably significant in the history of such undertakings and especially in its effect upon American civilization. So far as the display within its buildings was concerned this had been equaled several years before in Paris as it was afterwards surpassed in both Paris and St. Louis. Upon that side indeed the American artist would far less in need of education than was commonly supposed. The importance of the Columbian exposition lay in the fact that it revealed to millions of Americans whose lives were necessarily colorless and narrow the splendid possibilities of art and the compelling power of the beautiful. These possibilities and this power could never have been forced upon their understanding in any other way than by a demonstration so impressive as to stultified denial. The far reaching influence of the demonstration was not one that could be measured by any formal test but a study of American conditions was certainly reveal an accelerated appreciation of the graces of life and a quickening of the aesthetic sense throughout the whole decade which followed the creation of what Mr. H. C. Bonner most felicitously designated as the white city. The year 1894 is one to be long remembered in American history. In it those elements of dynamic discontent at long been gathering strength half unperceived now loomed upon the political horizon with the black and sullen menace of a swelling thunder cloud within whose womb are pent the forces of destruction. For years by bargain and by compromise the day of reckoning had been postponed but now both compromise and bargain were impossible and the nation had to face however fearfully the issues which would no longer down. The events of 1894 must of necessity be narrated in succession yet the reader should remember that they took place simultaneously and that each of them had a very definite relation to the others. It had been expected by the president and his immediate supporters that the repeal of the Sherman act wouldn't once revive prosperity by restoring confidence to the business world. Such however proved not to be the case. The premium on currency had to be sure disappeared as early as September 6 and the list of failures and suspensions was gradually curtailed but there was no general revival of commercial activity. If the country had previously shown the symptoms of financial fever it now exhibited a condition of extreme debility. The income of the government was far from satisfactory and the secretary of the treasury in his estimates for the coming year anticipated a deficit of 28 million dollars as against a surplus of some 2 million dollars the fiscal year just ended. This unfavorable condition of affairs was ascribed by the democrats to the incubus of the McKinley tariff legislation while the republicans continued to assert that the business of the country was at a standstill because of a general distrust of democratic rule and a feeling of uncertainty as to what action the party now in power might take with reference to the tariff. It seemed indeed an unpropitious time for entering upon a revision of the revenue system. Many democrats would have been glad to wait yet in the face of their explicit party pledges delay would have convicted them of insincerity. They had carried the election chiefly on the tariff issue. Their platform had said of the McKinley law we promise its repeal as one of the beneficent results that will follow the action of the people in entrusting power to the democratic party. Finally some new tariff measure was necessary in order to secure additional revenue for the treasury. The schedules of the McKinley act had in part been framed for the purpose of reducing the revenue and preventing the accumulation of another huge surplus. This they had accomplished only two successfully and therefore a revision was imperative as a matter of finance. In the face of all this it was impossible to take any backward steps or to hesitate and seek refuge in delay. Furthermore the president as always was in favor of an aggressive policy. His party had been divided by the silver controversy but on the tariff question he felt sure of its support. Hence when the regular session of Congress began on December 4th the president's message spoke with confidence and vigor of new tariff legislation as both an opportunity and a duty. After a hard struggle tariff reform is directly before us. After full discussion our countrymen have spoken in favor of this reform and they have confided the work of its accomplishment to the hands of those who are solemnly pledged to it. Nothing should intervene to distract our attention or disturb our effort until this reform is accomplished by wise and careful legislation. The president outlined the sort of tariff measure that seemed to him desirable. It should give to American manufacturers free raw materials thus enabling them to produce as cheaply as the foreigner and hence to enlarge the market for American made goods. In general the tariff charges should be reduced upon the necessaries of life. Finally the president announced that a measure such as he had in mind had been already framed and would be promptly submitted to the Congress. This measure was not to be unduly radical not providing as yet for a tariff for revenue only. The country could not in a moment cast aside every vestige of the protective system. We cannot close our eyes to the fact that conditions have grown up among us which injustice and fairness call for discriminating care in the distribution of duties and taxation. On December 19th Mr. Wilson, the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means reported to the House the bill to which the president had made allusion in his message. It was officially styled an act to reduce taxation to provide revenue for the government and for other purposes. But popularly it was known as the Wilson Bill. The Republicans at once denounced it as free trade legislation. Yet an analysis of its provisions as originally reported showed plainly enough that while it was distinctly a step in the direction of free or trade it was on the whole a very conservative measure. In the first place it removed entirely the duties on wool, on coal, on iron ore, on lumber and on sugar both raw and refined. It made rather moderate reductions in the duties on woolen goods, cottons, linens, silks, pig iron, steel billets, steel rails, tin plate, china, glassware and earthenware. A number of minor and miscellaneous articles received new schedules. The most noticeable feature of the bill was its treatment of raw materials as just described. Here lay the point of departure from Republican tariff legislation which in taxing raw materials had made American protectionism a thing unlike the protectionism of other leading nations. The Wilson bill in providing for the free entry of wool, coal, iron ore, lumber and sugar adopted a principle recognized by scientific economists while it adhered closely to the recommendations of President Cleveland's various messages and to the promise made in the Democratic platform of 1892. The remission of the duty on wool was the boldest assertion of the new policy for the duty on wool was the one and only tariff that had been of practical advantage to many American farmers. Its repeal was bitterly opposed by the wool growers of Ohio and other states whom Senator Sherman estimated at a million souls and the value of their annual product at $125 million. Note 3, page 357. Free iron ore was opposed by the interest that had secured control of the western ore beds but it was of distinct advantage to the eastern manufacturers. Free coal affected very few sections of the country. In New England and on the Pacific coast consumers might get their supply of coal from the adjacent mines in Canada rather than from the more distant coal fields of Pennsylvania and West Virginia but the country at large must still use American and not imported coal. The same thing was true with regard to lumber. The question of the tariff on sugar however was somewhat more complex. During the years preceding 1894 the refining of sugar in the United States had gradually become monopolized by the American sugar refining company oftener spoken of as the sugar trust of which Mr. H. O. Havemeier was the head. This corporation was one of the most powerful of all those to which public attention had been directed and it was one of the most unpopular. The interests of this corporation would be served by admitting raw sugar free thus giving the trust the benefit of cheap material and by attacks upon refined sugar which came from other countries. This was precisely what the McKinley Act had done enormously increasing the profits of the trust. The Wilson bill as reported to the house provided for the admission of raw sugar free in accordance with a general theory as to raw materials but it also admitted refined sugar free thereby depriving the sugar trust of any special advantage and leaving it to stand upon its own legs. So much for the distinctive features of the new tariff measure in its original form. The rest of its schedules were lower than those of the McKinley Act but in the main quite as high if not higher than those of the tariff act of 1883 passed by Republican Congress. In fact taken as a whole the Wilson bill so far from being an essence of free trade measure was one that would have been regarded in the years before the Civil War as a piece of rigorous protective legislation. It embodied however as has been explained the general principle of free raw materials while still it dealt considerably with the many interests which had grown up under the shelter of the 32 tariff acts which the Republicans had passed between 1860 and 1890. The Wilson bill was very well received by the Democrats in the house and by the party as a whole. Little change was made in the original draft during the five weeks when it was under consideration by the representatives but many Democrats and some Republicans from the south and west eagerly advocated the insertion in the bill of a clause providing for a tax on incomes. This would yield it was said a substantial revenue and wipe out the anticipated deficit and most of all it would make the possessors of large portions contribute to the government a some proportionate to their wealth. There was a strong and very widespread feeling that many of the richest persons in the country had so successfully dodged their taxes as to have secured a practical exemption from any taxation whatsoever. Secretary Carlisle had suggested laying a tax upon certain classes of corporations but the house adopted instead a tax of 2% upon all incomes of more than $4,000 the tax to remain in force until January 1st 1900. This clause was adopted on January 24th by a vote of 204 to 140 and the bill as a whole received the approval of the house on January 1st by a vote of 182 to 106 61 members not voting. When the result was announced by the speaker it was received with a burst of Democratic cheering and Mr. Wilson was showered with congratulations by his followers and friends but after the bill reached the senate affairs took a decidedly different turn. The Democratic majority in the upper house was a very small one and its close cohesion had already been destroyed while there were many reasons why a tariff measure such as the Wilson bill should encounter serious opposition there. These reasons may be indicated briefly as springing 1st from personal opposition to President Cleveland and 2nd from the fact that the senate unlike the house was controlled by powerful financial interests which were ably represented on the floor. The personal animosity toward the president which did not at once find open expression was in part an inheritance from his first administration. Note 4, page 359 in part a result of the masterful way in which he had forced the repeal of the Sherman Act and to a large degree it represented the traditional antagonism which most senators entertained toward every president who has not had congressional experience sufficient to make him understand and properly respect the usages, the prerogatives and the prejudices of the senatorial body. In various ways senators of the United States should be above the president. They are elected not by a direct vote of the people but by the legislatures of the several states and therefore they are not directly influenced by the popular will. Their term of office is longer than the presidential term of office and a senator who is either a man of real distinction or a master of political management is certain to be elected for term after term so that in very many instances a seat in the senate is held by members of the senate. Finally, the ramifications of so-called senatorial courtesy traverse party lines and create among the members of the senate an esprit de cause which is often stronger than the dictates of party loyalty. As to the interests other than political interests which at times controls the action of individual senators, these may be sufficiently divine from what has been set forth in the preceding chapter. Note 5, page 1 of the public life. It was something more than ominous that the Wilson tariff bill after passing the House by a majority of 76 and after having been referred by the senate to its finance committee should have been held back by that committee for almost two months. When reported March 20th it had been so clipped and trimmed as to exhibit a very curious yet in the open senate the measure fared still worse. As might have been expected the Republicans fell upon it tooth and nail but acting in entire harmony with them were certain democratic senators who seem to have forgotten altogether the solemn pledges which their national convention of 1892 had given to the country. For most among these were the blandly inscrutable senator Gorman of Maryland and the newly elected senator Bryce of Ohio. The two appeared upon the democratic side of the senate as the unavowed yet most efficient agents of the protected interest and their object was plainly to modify and mutilate the Wilson bill in such a way as to deprive it of any real significance and meaning. As its schedules were discussed Messrs. Bryce and Gorman played upon the local interests of little knots of democratic senators so that amendment after amendment was made each one restoring a part of the remitted duties. In all 634 changes in the House measure destroying entirely its original character. Coal, iron ore, lumber and sugar were removed from the list altogether leaving wool and copper the only raw materials to be let in untaxed. The action of the senate upon the sugar schedule led to a most deplorable scandal. The House had put all sugar both refined and raw upon the free list thereby giving governmental aid neither to the domestic producer. The two senators from Louisiana however having in mind their sugar growing constituency insisted that raw sugar must be taxed. Without their votes the bill could probably not be carried at all so close was the division. Furthermore other senators believed that such a duty was necessary as a revenue measure. Note 6 page 361. Since the funds in the treasury were low and the receipts from the income tax were available for many months. Hence the senate imposed a duty upon raw sugar of 40% ad valorem equivalent to about 1 cent a pound. But a duty on raw sugar without a countervailing duty on refined sugar would have been a serious blow to the sugar trust. All the powerful influences at the command of this corporation were immediately brought to bear upon the senate. Here was a direct issue between one of the most notorious of trusts on the planet. The Democratic platform had spoken up trusts and combinations as a natural consequence of the prohibitive taxes which prevent free competition. Would Democratic senators in the face of this declaration impose a prohibitive tax at the bidding of a trust whose monopoly controlled one of the necessities of life? The debate upon the subject soon waxed hot. While it was in progress ugly rumors began to fly abroad. The certificates of the sugar trust fluctuated in value every day as the senate seemed first favorable and then unfavorable to its interests. The story was at first whispered and then published all over the country that certain senators were buying and selling sugar certificates speculating that is in sugar on the basis of their own official action. So great an outcry went up and such sweeping charges were made and investigation was instituted by the senate itself and investigation only have heartedly pursued. Probably no senator really wished to smirk the reputation of a fellow senator. Yet if only to pacify the public something had to be done at once. Senators were questioned by the special investigating committee but was slight result save in one striking instance. Mr. Key of Pennsylvania most characteristically admitted that he had speculated in sugar his speculations had been guided by his official knowledge of the senate's action. With even greater effrontery he justified what he had done adding as an afterthought that his financial interest in the affair had not in the least degree influenced his course on the floor of the senate. Other senators were less impudent if not less culpable. Definite knowledge could not be had it must come if at all from New York brokerage firms through which the speculative senators had sent their orders to the graph. There was some difficulty about getting this evidence and in the end nothing was accomplished save to leave a taint upon the names of several senators and to discuss the country with a whole tear of controversy. One very instructive feature of this investigation was found in the testimony given to the committee by Mr. Henry O. Habemeyer the president of the sugar trust. Mr. Habemeyer was asked about the relations of his trust to the great political parties and state campaign funds. Did it contribute to the funds of both parties? Yes, said Mr. Habemeyer with cheerful frankness we always do that. In the state of New York where the Democratic majority is between 40,000 and 50,000 we throw it the trust contribution their way. In the state of Massachusetts where the Republican party is dominant they probably have the call. Wherever there is a dominant party wherever the majority is very large that is the party that gets the contribution because that is the party which controls the local matters. The importance of this admission was obvious when one remembers that what Mr. Habemeyer vaguely alluded to as local matters meant the election of senators and representatives to Congress and of judges to the state judiciary. Mr. Habemeyer further remarked that the practice of dividing money between the two political parties was the practice of every corporation and firm and trust wherever you may call it. This illuminating discourse of Mr. Habemeyer was on the whole the most valuable contribution to knowledge made by the Senate committee when it finally reported. Note 7, page 364. But meanwhile the trust had its way. Refined sugar was taxed one-eighth of a cent a pound with an additional duty of one-tenth of a cent on refined sugar imported from countries giving an export bounty. This tax, minutely significant though it may appear, was ample to continue and confirm the sugar trust and its supremacy. The fractional duty of one-eighth of a cent a pound meant to the treasury of the trust not less than twenty million dollars of profit every year. Note 8, page 364. After months of wearisome delay with frequent scenes of disorder and in decorum the Senate finally on July 3rd allowed the mutilated tariff bill to pass by a scat majority of five votes thirty-nine to thirty-four with twelve senators not voting. During these proceedings President Cleveland had watched the course of the Senate with a very natural indignation. In his message of the preceding December he had said success can only be obtained by means of unselfish counsel on the part of friends of tariff reform and as a result of their willingness to subordinate personal desires and ambitions to the general good. The local interests affected by the proposed reform are so numerous and so varied that if all are insisted upon the legislation embodying the reform must inevitably fail. As the event showed there had been no unselfish counsel in the Senate personal desires and ambitions had not been subordinated. Local interests had been most greedily insisted upon. It was now evident that the legislation would inevitably fail so far as it professed to embody a reform unless the Senate could be induced to rescind some of its amendments. The bill went back to the House for its concurrence. Mr. Wilson, rising in his place on July 7, urged that as altered and amended it not be passed. He spoke with force and eloquence and then took the unusual step of reading to the House a personal letter addressed to him by the President on July 2 anticipating the action of the Senate. It was an extraordinary letter and the fact of its being read was still more extraordinary. For thus the executive was made to criticize the action of one House of Congress in a letter practically written to be read before the other House. From a party point of view a Democratic President was arraigning Democratic Senators before both Democratic and Republican representatives. The most significant sentences of the letter were the following. My public life has been so closely related to the subject that I have so longed for its accomplishment and I have so often promised its realization to my fellow countrymen 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. 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 terror great or small is a like a violation of Democratic principles and Democratic good faith. 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 an ability to manage the government and they are apprehensive that efforts to bring about terror reform may fail but they are much more downcast and apprehensive in their fear that Democratic principles may be surrendered. Every true Democrat knows that this bill in its present form is not the consummation from which we have long looked. Our abandonment of the cause are the principles upon which it rests means party perfidity and party dishonor. Note 9, page 366 that President Cleveland should have permitted such a letter to be read at such a time has seemed to many the clearest possible evidence of his incompetence as a party leader. It was most certainly a gauge of defiance to the Senate, a body already inimical to him. It violated to some extent the proprieties of executive courtesy toward a branch of the national legislature. It was certain to give the bitterest offense to Senators of his own party. What then could the President hope to gain by what was on his face a serious indiscretion? The answer to this question is probably to be found in the remark of an English student of Mr. Cleveland's political career. As this observer wrote in 1896, Mr. Cleveland was possessed of an enduring faith in the common sense of the nation. He had always acted on the rule that the people were capable of understanding the truth if it was clearly and frankly put before them. Note 10, page 366 This does, beyond all doubt, sufficiently explain why, as President, Mr. Cleveland so often sent to Congress long messages advocating measures which he knew very well would not be considered for a moment by that body. His arguments were in reality addressed not to the Senators and Representatives, but to the entire nation. And so his letter to Mr. Wilson by the very unusual circumstances under which it received publicity was not by any means a peevish plaint uttered in a moment of irritation, but rather a well-considered disclaimer of responsibility for the action of the Democratic Senators. It was an appeal from the politicians to the people, but the effect of it in the Senate was to seal irrevocably the fate of the Wilson Bill as a measure of true reform. Although the President had named no names in his accusation of party profidity and dishonor, the shaft had gone unnervingly to its proper mark. Senator Gorman, stung by those pungent words, brought the subject before the Senate with a show of virtuous indignation. Senator Hill defended the President but Mr. Gorman, having prepared himself for battle, went into the whole question on its personal side, July 23rd. After some satirical remarks directed against Mr. Wilson for having made public what he, Senator Gorman, assumed to be a private letter, he went on to say that Mr. Cleveland's charges were wholly disingenuous. He asserted that the President had been consulted with regard to the Senate amendments and had given them his approval. In corroboration of this statement, Mr. Gorman called upon two other Democratic Senators, Messers Vest and Jones, to bear him out on what he had just said. In short he raised a question of veracity between the President and himself. Whatever view the Senate took of this personal controversy, its opposition to Mr. Cleveland's wishes now became solidified and irrevocable. The House refused to concur in the Senate's amendments and the bill was sent to a conference committee of both Houses. In conference, the Senate's representatives refused to yield a single point. The House could take the bill precisely as it left the Senate or the bill could fail, leaving the McKinley tariffs still in force. In the end, the House was forced to accept the amendments in their entirety and to pass the bill which Mr. Cleveland had stigmatized as involving perfidy and dishonor. Note 11, page 368. The predicament of the President was a cruel one. He could not put his signature to the bill, he could not veto it and make the professions of his party utterly ridiculous. And so he let it become a law without his signature, August 28th giving his reasons for so doing in a letter to Mr. Catchings of Mississippi. The Wilson Act was, he said, in some of its provisions better than the existing tariff law. It affected an average reduction of duties which left them less by 11% than those of the McKinley tariff. It provided for the admission of the Treasury will. The tax on incomes would relieve the Treasury. But then he went on to speak of the sinister influences which had marred the measure as a whole. The war against those influences had only just begun. Tariff reform will not be settled until it is honestly and fairly settled in the interest and to the benefit of a patient and long-suffering people. I take my place with the rank and file of the Democratic Party who refused to accept the results embodied in this bill as the close of the war, who are not blinded to the fact that the livery of Democratic tariff reform has been stolen and worn in the service of Republican protection and who have marked the places where the deadly blight of treason has blasted the councils of the brave in their hour of might. The trust and combinations, the communism of Pelf, whose machinations have prevented us from reaching the success we deserved should not be forgotten nor forgiven. Humiliating as this lamentable fiasco was to the section of his party which had been steadily loyal to the president, there still remained a no less disappointing sequel. Many who felt chagrin over the defeat of genuine tariff reform had comforted themselves with the remembrance that at least the section of the Wilson bill establishing an income tax had been saved. This section had indeed proved to be the most popular of any in the bill as the majorities given it in both houses very clearly showed. Men recalled the dictum of Secretary Fessenden who in 1864 declared that the ability to pay increases in much more than arithmetical proportion as the amount of income exceeds the limits of reasonable necessity. To the western and southern Democrats and also to the populist an income tax seemed perhaps a thing of greater immediate importance than a revision of the tariff, the more so as it was bitterly opposed by eastern capitalists. In the Senate, Mr. Hill of New York had attacked it with an energy and force most unusual in him. This income tax said Mr. Hill is unconstitutional because it is a direct tax and a direct tax not based upon the population can be levied only by the several states and not by the federal government. It is odious because it is a war tax and has never been imposed in time of peace. Note 12, page 369. It exempts incomes of $4,000 and less and therefore represents class legislation distinguishing between the rich and the poor. It is a purely sectional measure because this tax will bear more severely upon the east than upon the west. Note 13, page 370. Finally, its administration is necessarily offensive for it establishes that sort of inquisition into the individual citizens' private affairs which amounts practically to espionage. End of Chapter 8, Part 1