The Bennington banner. [volume] (Bennington, Vt.) 1858-1894, 1892-01-22
WHY AN ovERsHADO ING ISSUE

only a subordinate position. Isn't the
Republican party in danger of becoming
a party of one idea ?''
Such question is natural enough to
those who remember the small part that
the tariff played in the political contro-
versies OF the war period. In those days
the Republican party was a party of one
idea, emphatically. Its one thought was
to subdne the Rebellion and reunite the
country, and all its energies were de-
voted to that object There were other
reasons, too, why the tariff was not the
conspicuous and engrossing issue that it
is to-day.
When the long and disastrous expert
ment with the tariff for revenue only
was ended by the adoption of the Morrill,
protective tariff in 1860 and 1861, no
body imagined that protection and free
trade would very soon again become a
mooted question before the people. Ever
since 1916 the Nation had had low,
non-protective tariff. 1t had produced
just as its opponents had predicted, I'M
precedented popular distress and dis
aster, eliminating in the terrible panic
of 1857. Business was PROSTATE. Thou
sands and thousands of working people
were idle, or employed at wages that
barely kept soul and body together.
Crowds fought like wild beasts for
crust of bread around the doors of free
soup houses in New York. Warehouses
were chol1ed with foreign goods, but no
body could buy them. Our merchant
navy, that for years had been the pride
of the Nation, was vanishing from the
seas. Above ALL the Federal treasury
was practically bankrupt, and the
Government of 3O,OOO,OOO people was
only able to borrow money by paying an
exorbitant premium.
This was the condition of the country,
its people and its industries in the clos
ing years of the free trade period, when
the Morrill, protective tariff was finally
passed, and signed by President Blu
chanan. The United States had had ii
years of tariff for revenue only. 1t
had given the free trade theory fair
trial, and had ended by repudiating it.
Nobody dreamed in 1860 that in ten or
fifteen short years this same false and
foolish notion that had been so en-
phatically rejected would dare to raise
it's head again.
1t was ten or fifteen years before the
free trade idea came prominently into
public notice. Free trade never had
had much real strength in the North.
Its most ardent advocates were the
Southern slave-holding planters, who
forced their principles upon the Demo
cratic party in direct contradiction to
the teachings of Jefferson and Jackson.
When these planters started their Re-
bellion they made free trade one of the
corner stones of the COnfederacy and
slavery the other. From 1861, for
several years, they were absent from the
Tails of Congress, and the free trade
cause in the National Capital was much
depressed. Whom they came back at
first they were in only insignificant
minority. They failed to capature the
Democratic National Convention of 1872,
though they were assisted by Carl
Schurz and few backsliding Republic
cans. But the Democrats carried the
House of Representatives i'll 1874, and
the effect was Immediately apparent in
the Democratic National platform of
1876, which demanded that the tariff
should be "Only for revenue"
From that time onward the old South
ern influence and the free trade proga-
ganda have risen and fourished side by
side. Northern Democrats under the
lead of Randall offered a stubborn re-
sistance, but with the death of the great
Pennsylvania and the incoming of
President Cleveland, backed by the great
New York importing interests, Southern
ascendency became complete. So abso-
lutely is the Democratic party domi-
mated to-day by Southern men brought
up in the old free trade traditions of the
Southern planters that, though this year
there is a clear majority of Northern
members i'll the House, no Northern man
is able to command respectable sup
port for the Speakership.
In 1860 it seemed as if the policy of
free trade, or its synonym, a tariff for
revenue only, were forever dead and
buried, so far as the American people
were concerned. A year later the belief
deepened, as the Southern Shareholders
in their bitter chagrin at their lost SUI
premacy, left the Union and founded the
Confederacy, with free trade as a corner
stone. But another generation has risen
since then in the Northern States that
knows nothing of the calamitous results
of tariff fer revenue only, and the men
who went out of the Union in '61 control
the popular branch of the National Con-
gress. If the tariff is a greater issue
than it was from 81 to '7G, it is because
it is being assailed with a vehemence
that was unknown in that earlier period.
The Republican party is rallying all its
forces to the defence of the tariff as it
would do and has done to the defence of
its other principles. But if the Republi-
can party is party of one idea, il is so