Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/549

Rh you are well aware, it was not the tariff question which drove the Independents from the Republican party in 1884. But then the tariff policy of the party was professedly not what it is now. For many years it was freely admitted by the Republicans that the tariff, originally intended to meet the financial needs of the war period, and adapted to a very different internal-revenue system, was full of unjust and offensive features, and that it must be revised and reduced in its rates. One Republican platform after another, one Republican President after another, one Republican Secretary of the Treasury after another, joined in this admission. There is scarcely a Republican leader of note who did not advocate revision and reduction at some time and in some way. A tariff commission appointed under the very last Republican Administration and containing the most pronounced Republican protectionists strongly recommended an average reduction of tariff rates of 20 to 25 per cent., as demanded by the public interest. This was the teaching we heard in the Republican school. But now, when the Democrats attempt to do in a very moderate way what the Republicans had for years been promising to do, we are told that, unless this attempt be stopped, the country will go to ruin. The very men who constantly declaim about the “magnificent past” of the Republican party, give us to understand that if the policy of tariff reduction advocated during that “magnificent past” by Republican platforms and statesmen had been carried out, distress and misery would have been the lot of the American people.

It is a singular spectacle. For years we have been told that, indeed, high protective duties were necessary while our manufacturing industries were in the feeble infant state, but that the protective duties would be less needed as the manufacturing industries grew older and stronger. Yet the more those industries cease to be