Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/384

360 temporarily repelled in the Presidential election of 1888, tariff reform achieved a signal triumph in the Congressional elections of 1890, and formed the most prominent issue in the Presidential election of 1892 which put the Democratic party in full possession of the National Government. The time for its realization seemed to have come.

Mr. Wilson of West Virginia, who possessed and deserved the full confidence of the President, was made chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means of the House of Representatives. Himself a man of superior ability, of statesmanlike breadth of view and of noble aspirations, he had, in framing and carrying through the tariff bill, to contend with the lack of those qualities in other men's minds. There were among the Democrats in Congress a good many who professed to be in favor of tariff reform and who fully recognized the pledge of their party to abolish or reduce tariff duties to that end, but who wished to spare the protection given to the industries carried on in their own districts or States. They would reform every thing except the things in which they were themselves interested, politically or otherwise. This is one of the greatest difficulties the systematic reform of a high tariff has to encounter in a popular assembly. When the game of mutual concession and dicker once begins, there is no telling where it will end. The result is usually a legislative patchwork without any scientific symmetry or unity of purpose. Thus the tariff which issued from the deliberations of the House was by no means a faultless or consistent measure. Henry Clay would have considered it a tariff sufficiently protective to satisfy his views. But it embodied, at least in a measure, the rule of free raw material and an approximately corresponding reduction of the duties on manufactured articles. It was a long step toward the realization of the principles which Mr. Cleveland had advocated as the essence of tariff reform.