Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/79

Rh out their money, the poor as well as the rich. The tax-gatherer was present everywhere. He followed every man; he followed every woman and child into every relation of life. The merchant, the farmer, the manufacturer, the banker, the railroad man, the physician, the lawyer, the clergyman, the teacher, the laborer, met him at every step. From the city home to the log cabin he sat down with every family at every meal. Tax, tax, tax from morning till night. For three years the people had borne all this, not without bending under the constantly in creasing burden; but they bore it with grim resolution, for their country was dear to them. After many vicissitudes of war, days of hope and days of gloomy despondency, the promise of final triumph was at last appearing on the distant horizon. Grant was hewing his bloody road through the Virginia wilderness toward Richmond. Sherman moved upon Atlanta, preparing his great march to the sea. The country gathered itself up for a supreme effort. The government called aloud for still more men and still more money. That was the time of the “We're coming, Father Abraham!” The people were willing for any sacrifice.

Under these circumstances it was that Congress largely increased the internal-revenue taxes and passed the compensating tariff of 1864. Had anybody—after the general prosperity enjoyed and the universal progress made under the low tariff of 1846—proposed anything like the tariff of 1864 as a measure merely intended to promote domestic industry, as an economic policy, the idea would have been covered with ridicule and contempt as one unworthy of consideration. Had anybody predicted at that time that the tariff of 1864, that huge jumble of imposts piled up helter-skelter, would remain the basis of the economic policy of the republic for more than twenty-five years after the end of the civil war, he would