CHAPTER II

RETURN TO NORMAL CONDITIONS

With the coming in of Mr. Hayes the whole air of politics seemed to

change. Democratic critics of the administration were inclined to

dwell with a good deal of acidity upon the flagrant inconsistency of

the President’s course in first using the questionable governments

of Louisiana and South Carolina to get his office and then forthwith

repudiating them and bringing about their immediate downfall by

withdrawing the federal troops upon whose presence and support they

relied for their existence; and his friends could urge only that the

constitution provides that presidential electors shall be “appointed” by

each State “in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct,” and

that it might with perfect consistency be argued that the legislatures

of the southern States could commit to their returning boards the right

to choose presidential electors while at the same time maintaining

that those boards ought not to be sustained in the virtual selection

of state governors and legislatures as well. But, in any case, whether

consistent or inconsistent, the President’s action had brought grateful

peace. Almost at once affairs wore a normal aspect again. The process of

reconstruction, at least, had reached its unedifying end, and the hands

of political leaders were free to take up the history of the country

where it had been broken off in 1861. Instead of the quick, resistless

despatch of party measures from session to session by congressional

majorities which even the President’s veto could not check or defeat,

there had come a breathing space in which no party was supreme and the

slow and moderate ways of compromise and accommodation were once again

vouchsafed the country, at last quite out of breath with the pace to

which it had been forced in its affairs. Not for fourteen years, from the

elections of 1875 to those of 1889, were either Democrats or Republicans

to control both Congress and the Executive. There was leisure from

passion; men could look about them deliberately and without excitement

and note how the country had changed.

It was no longer the country of 1861. Sixteen years, mixed of war which

forced industry to a quick, almost abnormal development and of peace that

came like a release of energies cramped, pent up, uneasy, had brought

something like an industrial revolution with them. The South was of a

sudden added as a modern economic force to the nation. Her old system

of labor, which had shut her in to a virtual isolation, was destroyed;

she was open at last to the labor of the world and was to enter with all

her resources the industrial life from which she had so long held off.

The great Appalachian region which stretched its mighty highlands from

Pennsylvania through Maryland, the Virginias, Kentucky, Tennessee, and

the Carolinas full seven hundred miles into Alabama and Georgia, and

which spread its broad surfaces of mountain, valley, and plateau one

hundred and fifty miles by the way upon either hand, geologists knew to

be an almost unbroken coal field, it might be thirty-nine thousand square

miles in area. Upon its skirts and in the broken country to the east and

west of it iron also abounded, and mineral deposits which no man had

looked into. The world still needed the southern cotton and tobacco, and

before the first crude processes of reconstruction were over the cotton

fields were once more producing almost as much as they had yielded in

1860, the year of greatest abundance ere the war came on,—so readily had

free labor taken the place of slave. The industrial development of the

South had been joined to that of the rest of the country, and for the

first time since the modern industrial age set in capitalists turned to

her for investment and the enterprises that bring wealth and power.

[Illustration: A TYPICAL SCENE IN THE APPALACHIAN MOUNTAINS]

And what was for the South as yet but an exciting prospect and confident

hope was for the North already a reality. The war had been a supreme

test of economic vitality, and the States of the North and West had

emerged from it stronger than they went into it. Almost every industry

that yielded the necessaries of modern life and action had felt and

responded to its quickening compulsion; and when peace came manufacturers

but looked about them for wider markets, better and cheaper processes,

a broader scope of operation. Artificial stimulation in the shape of

heavy tariff duties had been added to the natural stimulation of the time

and of the rapid and healthy growth of the nation. Congress had taxed

almost every article of use in the country to support the war, and had

added to the innumerable direct taxes which it imposed an enormously

expanded system of duties on imports. It had done so in part to offset

the direct taxes, to enable the manufacturers, who had to pay large

sums to the government on the articles they made, to keep the market

nevertheless against the importers; but it had made the duties much

higher than that consideration taken alone made necessary. It had raised

them to a point that made profit, very great profit, certain to accrue to

the manufacturer. No considerable body of manufacturers asked for such

“protection” that did not get it, and as much of it as they asked for,

though it reduced the revenues of the government to grant it. Hardly a

month went by while the war lasted that Congress did not add a new duty

or increase an old one, and every industry was nursed to make the most

of itself in the home markets, until its undisputed monopoly there as

against foreign manufactures gave it wide margins of profit of which to

avail itself in underselling competitors in the markets of the world.

[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE MAIN BUILDING AT THE PHILADELPHIA

CENTENNIAL EXHIBITION]

The country got visible proof of its extraordinary material progress

at its Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. The last year of General

Grant’s presidency was the centennial year of the independence of

the United States, and the anniversary was celebrated by a great

international industrial exposition at the city of Philadelphia, where

the Congress had sat which took counsel for the young republic at its

birth. All the greater commercial and industrial nations were represented

in its exhibits. Foreign governments responded very promptly to the

invitation to lend their aid in securing its success, among the rest the

government of Great Britain, whose defeat in arms the great fair was

meant to celebrate. The presence of her official commissioners made it a

festival of reconciliation. America’s own bitter war of civil revolution

also was over, and a time of healing at hand. The thronging crowds at

Philadelphia, the gay and spacious buildings, the peaceable power of the

world’s workmen exhibited upon every hand spoke of good will and the

brotherhood of nations, where there was no rivalry but the rivalry to

serve and to enrich mankind.

It was significant for America that objects of beauty marked everywhere

among those exhibits the refinement and the ennobling art of the world.

Throughout all the long hundred years in which they had been building a

nation Americans had shown themselves children of utility, not of art.

Beauty they had neglected. Everything they used showed only the plain,

unstudied lines of practical serviceability. Grace was not in their

thought, but efficiency. The very houses they built, whether for homes

or for use in their business, showed how little thought they gave to the

satisfaction of the eye. Their homes were for the most part of wood and

the perishable material hardly justified costly ornament or elaborate

design; and yet the men of the colonial time, keeping still some of the

taste of an older world, had given even their simple frame dwellings a

certain grace and dignity of line, and here and there a detail, about

some doorway or the columns of a stately porch, which rewarded the eye.

Builders of the later time had forgotten the elder canons of taste

and built without artistic perception of form even when they built

elaborately and at great cost. The same plainness, the same hard lines

of mere serviceability were to be seen in almost everything the country

made. The things to be seen at Philadelphia, gathered from all the world,

awakened it to a new sense of form and beauty. Foreign governments had

generously sent priceless works of painting and sculpture over sea to

give distinction to the galleries of the Exhibition. Private citizens

and local museums also had freely loaned their chief art treasures.

Everywhere there was some touch of beauty, some suggested grace of

form. Visitors poured by the million across the grounds and through

the buildings of the Exhibition, out of every State and region of the

country, and the impressions they received were never wholly obliterated.

Men and women of all sorts, common and gentle alike, had from that day

a keener sense of what was fitted to please the eye. The pride of life

and of great success that came with the vision of national wealth and

boundless resources to be got from the countless exhibits of farm and

factory had in it also some touch of corrected taste, some impulse of

suitable adornment. Men knew afterwards that that had been the dawn of

an artistic renaissance in America which was to put her architects and

artists alongside the modern masters of beauty and redeem the life of her

people from its ugly severity.

[Illustration: HORTICULTURAL HALL AT THE PHILADELPHIA CENTENNIAL

EXHIBITION]

That great fair might also serve to mark the shifting stress of the

nation’s life. Its emphasis was henceforth, for at least a generation,

to rest on economic, not upon political or constitutional, questions.

The changing character of public affairs had been indicated as early

as the presidential campaign of 1872. That campaign had witnessed not

only the emergence of the “Liberal Republican” party, made up upon the

questions of political amnesty and a thorough reform of the civil service

of the government, but also the creation of a “Labor Reform” party whose

programme said little or nothing of the ordinary political issues of

the day and spoke mainly of the relations of capital and labor, of the

legal limitation of the hours of daily work, of the need of a currency

which should render the people less subject to the power of the banks,

of the control of the railways and the telegraph lines by the federal

government, of the disposal of the public lands. The convention of the

new party had been made up chiefly of trades union bosses and political

free lances, but it had brought delegates together out of seventeen

States and was an unmistakable sign of the times. The workingmen of the

country were about to bestir themselves to make their power felt in the

choices of government and law. In 1876 an “Independent National” party

came upon the field, to make the issue of legal tender notes by the

government, in place alike of gold and of silver, the chief point of its

protest against the programmes of the two regular parties. To the country

it was known as the “Greenback” party. The notes which it demanded

should be issued were to be practically irredeemable, being convertible,

not into gold or silver, but “into United States obligations merely.”

It was practically repeating the demand of the Labor Reform party of

four years before for “a purely national circulating medium, based on

the faith and resources of the nation, and issued directly to the people

without the intervention of any system of banking corporations,” in order

that there might be established “a just standard of the distribution of

capital and labor.”

On all hands there was manifest a growing uneasiness because of the

apparent rise of monopolies and the concentration of capital in the hands

of comparatively small groups of men who seemed to be in a position to

control at their pleasure the productive industries of the country;

because of the power of the railways to determine by discriminating rates

what sections of the country, what industries, what sorts of products and

of manufactures should be accorded the easiest access to the markets;

because of the increase in the cost of the necessary tools of industry

and of all manufactured goods through the operation of the tariff,—the

inequitable clogs which seemed to many to be put by the law itself upon

the free and wholesome rivalries of commerce and production. The farmers

of the West and South, no less than the workingmen of the industrial

East, had begun, close upon the heels of the war, to organize themselves

for the protection and advancement of their own special interests, to

which the programmes of the political parties paid little heed. Between

1872 and 1875 the local “granges” of a secret order known as the Patrons

of Industry had multiplied in a very significant manner, until their

membership rose to quite a million and a half and was spread over almost

the entire Union. It was the purpose of the order to promote by every

proper means the interests of the farmers of the country, though it was

no part of its plan to agitate questions of politics, put candidates

for office into the field at elections, or use its gathering power to

determine the fate of parties. Politicians, nevertheless, found means

to use it,—felt obliged to use it because they feared to let it act for

itself. Its discussions turned often on questions of transportation, upon

the railways and their power to make or ruin; it was but a short step in

such a field from an association for mutual protection and advice to a

political party organized for the control of legislation.

[Illustration: IN YELLOWSTONE PARK. GRAND CAÑON, POINT LOOKOUT, AND GREAT

FALLS]

“Grangers” were not always to be held off, therefore, by their prudent

leaders from using their numbers and their ready concert of action to

further or defeat the ambitions of particular groups of politicians; and

even while their granges grew other organizations of farmers came into

existence whose aims were frankly and openly political. About the time of

Mr. Hayes’s accession to the presidency independent associations began

to make their appearance in the South and in the West, under the name of

the “Farmers’ Alliance,” whose common object it was to oppose monopoly

and the power of money in public affairs in the interest of those who

had neither the use of capital nor the protection of tariffs. The first

“Alliance” made its appearance in Texas, to prevent the wholesale

purchase of the public lands of the State by private individuals. The

organization spread into other southern States, and with its extension

went also an enlargement of its programme of reform. Almost at the same

time a “National Farmers’ Alliance” was established in Illinois which

quickly extended its organization into Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa,

Kansas, and Dakota. Many sorts of reform commended themselves to the

leaders of the movement, north and south: chief among them, government

control of the means of transportation, the entire divorce of the

government from the banks, and a paper currency issued directly to the

people on the security of their land,—some escape from the power of the

money lenders and of the great railways, and a war upon monopolies. These

were vague purposes, and the means of reform proposed showed the thinking

of crude and ignorant minds; but politicians felt with evident concern

that new, it might be incontrollable, forces had begun to play through

the matters they handled, and that it must presently be harder than ever

to calculate the fortunes of parties at the polls. They perceived how

difficult and delicate a task it must prove to keep the tacit pledges of

the protective system to the manufacturers and give the free capital of

the country the proper support of government and yet satisfy the classes

now astir in these new associations of laborers and farmers, whose

distress was as real as their programmes of reform were visionary.

[Illustration: LOGGING IN THE MINNESOTA PINES.]

There was a significance in these new movements which did not lie

upon the surface. New questions had become national and were being

uncomfortably pressed upon the attention of national party leaders

because the attitude of the country towards the national government had

been subtly changed by the events of war and reconstruction. The war

had not merely roused the spirit of nationality, until then but half

conscious, into vivid life and filled every country-side of the North

and West with a new ardor for that government which was greater than the

government of States, the government upon which the unity and prestige of

the nation itself depended. It had also disclosed the real foundations

of the Union; had shown them to be laid, not in the constitution, its

mere formal structure, but upon deep beds of conviction and sentiment. It

was not a theory of lawyers that had won when the southern Confederacy

was crushed, but the passionate beliefs of an efficient majority of the

nation, to whom the constitution was but a partial expression of the

ideals which underlay their common life. While the war lasted the forms

of the constitution had been with difficulty observed, had, indeed,

again and again given way that the whole force of the nation might run

straight and unimpeded to meet the exigencies of the portentous struggle.

Mr. Lincoln had wielded an authority known to none of his predecessors.

There had been moments when it seemed almost as if all constitutional

rules were suspended and law superseded by force in order that the

contest for nationality might not halt or be hindered. And when the war

was over the process of reconstruction showed the same method and temper.

No scrupulous care was taken to square what was done in the South with

the law of the constitution. The will of Congress operated there like

that of an absolute parliament, even while the lawyers of the houses who

supported the measures of reconstruction were protesting that the States

they were handling like provinces were still members of the Union. The

internal affairs of the humbled States were altered at the pleasure of

the congressional leaders, and yet it was said that they had not been put

forth from the pale of the constitution.

[Illustration: GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS]

It was inevitable that the whole spirit of affairs should be profoundly

affected by such events. A revolution had been wrought in the

consciousness and point of view of the nation. Parts had shifted and

the air had changed. Conceptions were radically altered with regard to

Congress, with regard to the guiding and compulsive efficacy of national

legislation and the relation of the life of the land to the supremacy of

the federal law-making body. A government which had been in its whole

spirit federal had, almost of a sudden, become national, alike in method

and in point of view. The national spirit which the war had aroused

to bring this about had long been a-making. Many a silent force which

grew quite unobserved from generation to generation, in quiet times of

wholesome peace and mere increase of nature, had been slowly breeding

the thoughts which had now sprung so vividly into consciousness. The

very growth of the nation, the very lapse of time and uninterrupted

habit of united action, the mere mixture and movement and distribution

of populations, the mere accretions of policy, the mere consolidation of

interests, had been building and strengthening new tissue of nationality

the years through, and drawing links stronger than links of steel about

the invisible body of common thought and purpose which is the substance

of nations. When the great crisis of secession came men knew at once

how their spirits were ruled, men of the South as well as men of the

North,—in what institutions, in what conceptions of government their

blood was fixed to run; and a great and instant readjustment took place,

which was for the South, the minority, practically the readjustment of

conquest and fundamental revolution, but which was for the North nothing

more than an awakening.

There had been no constitutional forms for such a business. For several

years, consequently, Congress had been permitted to do by statute what,

under the older conceptions of the federal law, could properly be done

only by constitutional amendment. The necessity for that gone by, it

was suffered to embody in the constitution what it had already enacted

and put into operation as law, not by the free will of the country at

large, but by the compulsions of mere force exercised upon a minority

whose assent was necessary to the formal completion of its policy. The

result restored, practically entire, the forms of the constitution; but

not before new methods and irregular, the methods of majorities but not

the methods of law, had been openly learned and practised, and learned

in a way not likely to be forgotten. It was not merely the economic

changes of a new age, therefore, that inclined laborers and farmers

to make programmes of reform which they purposed to carry out through

the instrumentality of Congress; it was also this new conception of

the supremacy of the federal law-making body, of the potency of all

legislation enacted at Washington. The country was turning thither for

all sorts of relief, for assistance in all parts of its life.

And yet other changes had come upon the government at Washington which

rendered it a less serviceable instrument of use than it had once been.

Nothing had become more emphasized during the reconstruction period

than the virtual supremacy of the houses over the President in all

matters outside the field of war and foreign affairs,—in foreign affairs

even, when they chose. No President since General Jackson had been the

real leader of his party until Lincoln; and Lincoln’s term had made no

permanent difference in the practices established since Jackson’s day. It

had been a time apart. In war the Executive was of course at the front

of affairs; Congress but sustained it in the conduct of exigent business

which, in the very nature of the case, it could not itself undertake.

Parties, too, were silent; the nation had put ordinary questions of

policy aside. No man could say how Mr. Lincoln might have ruled the

counsels of his party in times of quiet peace. With Mr. Johnson in

the presidency, Congress and the Executive had swung violently apart.

General Grant had not brought them together. He was no party man and no

statesman, had been bred to affairs of another kind, let constructive

suggestion alone, made no pretence of political leadership. Under the

strong will of Mr. Thaddeus Stevens a real primacy in affairs had

been created for the men who led upon the floor of the houses, and old

tendencies had been confirmed.

During the first days of the government, while the old order held and

English traditions were still strong, the President had been the central

figure in affairs,—partly because delicate questions of foreign policy

pressed constantly for solution, partly because the early Presidents were

chosen from the ranks of actual party leaders, because of their influence

with public men, their hold upon opinion, and their experience in public

business. Their messages were of the first consequence in the guidance of

legislation and the formation of opinion out-of-doors; their spokesmen

and friends usually spoke for the President’s party as well as for the

President himself on the floor of Congress. Even then, however, there

had been signs of a new order coming in. Neither the President nor the

members of his cabinet had had access to the floor of Congress since Mr.

Jefferson decided not to meet the houses in person, as his predecessors

had done. It was the theory of constitutional lawyers that Congress

and the Executive were meant to be sharply separated and distinguished

in function, in order that each might check and balance the other in

ideal accordance with the principles of M. Montesquieu; and there were

oftentimes men in the houses whose gifts and impulse of initiative were

greater, more efficient, more serviceable than the President’s. Mr.

Clay had been notable among such men. While he was Speaker of the House

of Representatives it became evident that the speakership could easily

be made the chief place of power in the management of parties; and so

long as he remained in Congress the whole country knew that he, and no

President the Whigs were likely to elect, must be the real leader of his

party.

That General Jackson dictated the policy of the Democrats while he was

President all the world perceived; but his successors were not men of

his stamp. Affairs, moreover, were presently turned from their normal

course by the extraordinary pressure of the slavery question. Upon

that perplexing matter, so disputable, so full of heat, apparently so

impossible of definitive settlement, always holding a crisis at its

heart, parties made no confident stand. Definite leadership seemed out

of the question, until Mr. Douglas came and brought a revolution on. All

things waited upon the slow movement of moral, social, economic forces,

upon the migrations of population, upon the insensible shiftings of

sentiment, upon change and circumstance. Not until the war came, with

issues which needed no definition at the hands of the politician, with

tasks which called, not for debate, but for concentration and energy,

did the organization of party power in Congress take the shape it was to

keep through the next generation,—the new generation which should conduct

the war to its close and then attempt to set the policies of peace

afoot again. Then, with Congress purged of the southern Democrats and

all organized opposition cleared away, the Republican leaders equipped

Congress for effective mastery. The Senate, indeed, kept its leisurely

rules, still chose its committees by ballot, and declined to put itself

under the whip of rigid party discipline as the House did, which seemed

to regard itself as meant to be an administrative, not a deliberative

body. The House put itself into the hands of its leaders for action.

Its leaders were the chairmen of its principal standing committees

and its Speaker. The Speaker appointed the committees. In determining

the membership of those which were to handle the chief matters of its

business he could determine also the policy they were to urge upon the

House. For the House put itself very absolutely into the hands of its

committees. Individual initiative told for little against them.

The first Speaker of the war time, Mr. Galusha Grow, of Pennsylvania, was

a man cast for the rôle of leader, quick, aggressive, confident alike in

opinion and in purpose, a thorough partisan, and yet honest and open and

ready for responsibility, a man who would use the committees for mastery;

and Mr. Schuyler Colfax, who succeeded him, in the second Congress of

the war time, was equally well qualified to keep the management of the

House in hand, his good nature and easy tact being as influential as his

confident initiative in keeping legislation to the paths he had marked

out. Both, men acted in close co-operation with Mr. Stevens and the other

chief masters of the majority upon the floor. The conferences of a few

men decided always what the composition of committees should be, the

course of legislative action, the time and part allotted to debate. The

necessity for action was constantly pressing upon Congress throughout

those anxious years; no man ventured to stand long in the way of the

public business; and by the time the war was over the House had been

converted into a most efficient instrument of party rule. Mr. Johnson

learned what its mastery was, how spirited, how irresistible; General

Grant looked to its leaders for initiative in affairs. The Speaker and

the little group of party managers drawn about him for counsel were

henceforth to be in no small part the framers of the policy of the

government.

[Illustration: GALUSHA AARON GROW]

The change was for a long time not observed by the country at large,

because the two parties offset each other in the houses and neither

could take entire command of affairs. For fourteen years (1876-1890)

neither party during any one session controlled both the houses and the

presidency, except for a brief space of two years (1881-1883) when the

Republicans, with a Republican President in the chair, had, by the use of

the Vice President’s casting vote in the Senate, a majority of a single

vote in each house. So scant a margin was not a margin of power, and the

Speaker happened for the nonce to be of the older type, not cast for

leadership.

That long deadlock of the houses was of much more serious consequence

than the mere postponement of a full application of the new methods

of party leadership and legislative management. So long as it lasted

no change could be made in the laws passed in support of Republican

supremacy and negro suffrage in the South. The country had turned away

from the Republicans, as the elections to the House showed afresh every

two years, but the majority of the nation and the majority of the States

were by no means one and the same, and the Senate came only for a little

while into the hands of the Democrats, while a Republican President

was in the chair. Democratic majorities, accordingly, did not avail

to repeal the “Force Acts” and the federal law for the supervision of

elections which put the southern political leaders in danger of the

federal courts and kept men of the President’s appointment at the polls

in the South to act in behalf of the negroes and the Republican managers.

Though the white men of the South were at last in control of their state

governments, federal law still held them off from excluding negroes from

the exercise of the suffrage by any fair or open method which should

set aside without breach of law what reconstruction had done. They were

driven, if the incubus of that ignorant and hostile vote was to be lifted

from their affairs, to resort to covert, tricky, fraudulent means which

brought their own deep demoralization.

Every device known to politicians, every plan that could be hit upon

that politicians had never before been driven to resort to, was made use

of to reduce or nullify the negro vote. It was a great advantage to the

men who had regained their power in the South that the whole machinery

of elections, at least, was again in their hands. They had never before

made such use of it. The older traditions that surrounded the use of

the ballot in the South were of the most honorable sort. But the poison

of the reconstruction system had done its work,—no man any longer found

it hard to learn methods of mastery which were not the methods of law

or honor or fair play. The new election officers found many excuses for

rejecting or ignoring the negroes’ voting papers. Voting places were

often fixed at points so remote from the centres of population that only

a small proportion of the negroes could reach them during the hours for

voting; or were changed without notice so that only the white voters who

had been informed could find them readily. In some cases separate ballot

boxes were used for the several offices to be filled at the elections, so

lettered that the illiterate negroes distinguished them with difficulty

and so shifted in their order from time to time that the sequence in

which they stood was constantly being changed, and no vote was counted

which was not put into the right box. In districts where the negroes

mustered in unusual numbers too few voting places were provided, and the

voters were prevented from casting their ballots rapidly by premeditated

delays of all sorts, so that the full vote of the district could not be

cast.

[Illustration: ELBRIDGE GERRY]

The southern legislatures hastened to adopt the device long ago

originated by Mr. Gerry, of Massachusetts, and so divided the voting

districts of the States as to segregate the negroes within a few

districts, whimsically drawn upon the map in such a way as to seek

out and include the regions in which they were chiefly massed. The

“shoe-string district” contrived by the law-makers of Mississippi, which

ran its devious way across the State for three hundred miles with a

width of but twenty, became known the country over as a type of what was

being done to cut the negroes off from political power in the South.

Where such shifts and expedients failed of their desired result or could

not be made use of actual fraud was practised. The less scrupulous

partisans of the white party managers folded tissue ballots within their

regular voting papers and overcame the negro majority by multiple voting.

Dissuasion, too, and all the less noticeable means of intimidation,

played their quiet part the while in keeping the negroes away from the

polls, and the negro vote fell off by the thousand. There was presently

nothing left of the one-time party organization of the Republicans in

the South except that the federal office holders appointed by Republican

Presidents still essayed to play an influential part among the negroes,

and hold them to their party allegiance.

Slowly cases tried under the various Enforcement Acts which had been

meant to secure the negroes against interference and intimidation in

the exercise of their civil rights crept up, by appeal, to the Supreme

Court of the United States and began one by one to be reached on its

interminable docket; and in each case the court declared the powers

Congress had assumed in those Acts clearly incompatible with the

constitution. The right of the negroes to assemble and to bear arms, for

example, which Congress had sought to protect and which southern white

men had repeatedly interfered with, was a right which they enjoyed, the

court declared, as citizens of the States, not as citizens of the United

States, and it was not competent for Congress or the federal courts to

punish individuals who interfered with it. The power conferred upon

Congress by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, to

secure the negroes equality of civil rights with the whites, was, it

decided, a power given to be exercised in restraint of the States, not

against individuals, as the Act against the “conspiracies” of the Ku Klux

had used it, and the States, not the federal government, must punish

those who sought to destroy that equality. The legislation which General

Grant had put so energetically into execution was unconstitutional and

void. But it was 1882 before that sweeping conclusion was reached; the

Acts had been executed long ago and their consequences were complete.

Only the thought of constitutional lawyers and the course to be pursued

by the federal government for the future were cleared by the belated

decisions.

More and more the attention of the country, and even of politicians,

was being drawn away from the South to the forces of change which

were playing through the whole nation, to the determination alike of

policy and of party fortunes. The four years of Mr. Hayes’s term in the

presidency, with their restful discontinuance of party legislation,

afforded not only a time of calm in which thoughtful men could look

about them, but also a clear stage upon which it quickly became evident

that new scenes were being set. It was significant that the first

summer of Mr. Hayes’s reign of peace was marked by labor disturbances

of a magnitude and difficulty hitherto unknown in America. On the 14th

of July, 1877, strikes began among the employees of the Baltimore and

Ohio, the Pennsylvania, the Erie, and the New York Central railways, the

chief trunk lines between East and West, which for a time assumed almost

the proportions of an armed insurrection. Thousands of miners at the

coal mines of Pennsylvania left their work along with the railway men,

until there were presently, it might be, a hundred thousand men not only

idle but bent upon mischief also, determined to hold the business of

the railways at a standstill and prevent at all hazards the employment

of others in their places. Not until troops of the United States had

been called out to aid the militia of the States was order restored

and the property of the railway companies secured against pillage and

destruction. Railway traffic had been held still in a sort of paralysis

for two long weeks; property whose value was estimated at ten million

dollars had been destroyed; and the country had been given a startling

demonstration of the power of the labor organizations.

[Illustration: BLOCKADE OF ENGINES AT MARTINSBURG, VIRGINIA]

[Illustration: BURNING OF THE ROUND HOUSE AT PITTSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA]

Such outbreaks were undoubtedly a sign of the times and showed very

plainly the new, unregulated economic forces which were in a future near

at hand to exercise a potent influence on politics and the plans of

parties. But they were at least gross, tangible, susceptible of being

handled by counter force and sheer authority. There were subtler economic

forces than these at work, harder to handle, more to be feared. Ideas

were rapidly gaining ground in the ranks of all parties which seemed

likely, if unchecked, to break party lines athwart in novel confusion

and turn the government away from some of its oldest, best established

lines of policy. They chiefly concerned the currency. Congress had met

the extraordinary expenses of the war by measures which had in fact

revolutionized the traditional financial policy of the government. Taxes

had not yielded enough, loans could not be had fast enough, and early

in 1862 it had begun the issue of notes from the Treasury of the United

States which were for the time irredeemable, but which were nevertheless

made legal tender in the payment of debts. Late in 1861 (December 28th)

the banks of the country had suspended specie payments. The paper of the

government became almost the only currency, and its bulk rose steadily

from million to million. War and the depreciation of the currency brought

in their train an inflation of prices. Farmers had been getting little

profit from their crops when the war began. The cost of transporting

them to market over the railways had lifted the cost of their production

quite to the level of what the merchants would give for them. Many

planters used their corn for fuel. But the war made grain exceedingly

valuable. The purchases of the government alone changed the whole face

of the market. Money was once more easy to get, the paper money of the

Treasury, and could be used at its face value as well as gold itself to

pay the mortgages off which the older time of stress had piled up. The

“greenbacks” of the government became for the agricultural regions of the

North and West a symbol of prosperity.

Conservative constitutional lawyers had doubted from the first the

legality of these issues. Every serious student of the times in which

the constitution had been framed, and of the dominant motives of its

framers, was convinced that one of the chief objects of the statesmen who

led the convention of 1787 had been to put government in America once

for all upon a solid footing of sound financial policy. The constitution

explicitly forbade the issue of paper money by the States, and the right

to issue it was not to be found among the enumerated powers granted to

Congress. It was known to have been intentionally omitted; and in 1869

the Supreme Court had decided that the treasury issues of the war time

were, as legal tender, unconstitutional and void. For a little while it

had looked as if the law of the constitution was to be made a permanent

bar to financial experiment. But the decision of the court had been

reached by only a single vote, changes in its _personnel_ occurred almost

immediately, and in 1870 the decision was reversed. Congress was at

liberty to make what experiments it pleased.

Thoughtful public men saw, nevertheless, that the business interests

of the country rendered it imperative that by statute, if not by

constitutional compulsion, specie payments should be resumed by the

government, the redundant currency of the country contracted, and money

transactions put once more upon foundations that would hold fast. Gold

had been made the single standard of value in the United States by an

Act of Congress passed in 1853. That Act had said nothing about the

silver dollar of the earlier coinage, because it had in fact passed out

of circulation. The Act of 1873 had simply recognized that fact and

dropped the 412½ grain silver dollar from the list of coins. An Act of

January 14, 1875, had provided for the resumption of specie payments

by the government on the 1st of January, 1879. Every promise of the

government was on and after that date to be redeemable in gold. By 1876

an extraordinary fall had taken place in the value of silver. It had

been coming in augmented quantities from the mines; Germany and even

the states of the Latin Union, associated by treaty for the express

purpose of maintaining a stable ratio between gold and silver in their

exchanges, had suspended the coinage of silver; the demand for it had

greatly fallen off at the very time that its quantity had increased,

and the price of silver bullion fell as it had never fallen before. The

real functions of money, the real laws of its value, the real standards

of its serviceability, its real relations to trade and to industry have

always been hidden from the minds of men whose thought in such matters

has not been trained by the actual experiences of the open markets

of the world, in actual exchange, or in the actual direction of the

financial operations of governments. The coincidence of high prices

and eager markets with floods of paper poured from the Treasury of the

United States, coupled with the indisputable fact that the return to

slacker demand, lower prices, and a greater scarcity of money had been

accompanied by a considerable contraction of the redundant currency and

by laws which were soon to bring about a return to specie payments, a

turning back from “cheap” money to “dear,” confused the thinking even of

some men who had long been in contact with public affairs; and those who

could not go quite the length of the “Greenbackers” turned to silver for

relief.

Gold was not abundant enough, they said, to serve as the sole basis of

the country’s expanding business, get the farmers’ crops to market, or

settle the varied balances of trade. Silver was both cheaper and more

abundant. The obligations of the United States had been made payable “in

coin”; why must they be paid in the dearest of coins? Why could they

not be paid in the old silver dollar of 412½ grains, until 1873 the

undisputed standard silver dollar of the national coinage? It was in

part the suggestion of the owners of the silver mines of Colorado and

Nevada, no doubt, who had influential spokesmen in Congress; but they

alone could have created no determining opinion in the matter. The real

force of the sentiment came from the uneasy economic conditions of the

country. The farmers found themselves at the mercy of the railways in

getting their crops to market; prices had fallen; money was not easy to

get as it had happened to be when abundant issues of paper came pouring

every month from the government’s treasury; the gold which Congress

had sought to make the sole basis of the country’s business was in the

hands of the great eastern bankers; the railways were in the hands of

the capitalists of the East, whom the bankers served. If the bankers

set themselves against every proposition to provide an irredeemable

paper currency again or even a fresh coinage of silver, there was

the more reason to believe that paper or silver was the only real

“people’s” money. The sentiment grew within Congress and without and

concentrated itself upon the question of a silver coinage. Reason had not

established it and reason could not check or dislodge it. It took hold

upon Republicans and Democrats alike, and within a year of Mr. Hayes’s

accession to the presidency had won majorities in both houses which were

large enough to override the President’s veto.

[Illustration: RICHARD P. BLAND]

Mr. Bland, of Missouri, introduced in the House a bill which provided

for the free and unlimited coinage of silver into standard dollars of

412½ grains at the mints of the United States at the pleasure of those

who presented silver bullion which they wished so converted. The finance

committee of the Senate, under the leadership of Senator Allison, of

Iowa, when the bill reached them, substituted for it a measure which

provided for the monthly purchase by the Treasury of not less than two

million dollars’ worth of silver bullion and its coinage into standard

silver dollars which should be legal, tender, without restriction of

amount, in the payment of all debts. The Secretary of the Treasury was

authorized at his discretion to expend as much as four millions monthly

for the purpose. The House accepted the measure which Mr. Allison’s

committee had substituted for its own. Mr. Hayes vetoed it, but the

houses passed it over his veto, February 28, 1878. The majority for it

was as decisive in the Republican Senate as in the Democratic House.

Specie payments were resumed on the 1st of January, 1879, as the Act

of 1875 directed, but silver had been added to gold. The Secretary of

the Treasury made his purchases of silver bullion at its market value

in gold, of course; its price fell in spite of the Bland-Allison Act,

because it was governed, as every man of experience in such matters knew

it must be, by influences as wide as the markets of the world; and the

monthly coinage steadily yielded more than two million coined dollars of

the fineness prescribed by Congress, though the Secretary of the Treasury

confined himself always to the expenditure of the minimum sum fixed by

the Act. Not many of the coined dollars themselves got into the currents

of trade. The Act had authorized the Secretary to issue certificates in

their place to those who did not wish the actual silver, and the coins

steadily accumulated in the vaults of the Treasury, some thirty millions

a year.

[Illustration: WILLIAM B. ALLISON]

This was the only legislation of importance, apart from the routine

business of the government, that a Republican Senate and a Democratic

House could agree upon. All party purposes of necessity stood in

abeyance. Mr. Hayes had as little political authority as Mr. Johnson had

had. He had been chosen, as Mr. Franklin Pierce had been twenty-five

years before, from outside the ranks of the authoritative leaders of his

party. He had no real hold upon the country. His amiable character, his

lack of party heat, his conciliatory attitude towards the South alienated

rather than attracted the members of his party in Congress. They had been

accustomed to see the fight forced for coercion and supremacy in the

South, as for the execution of every other party purpose, and the zest

for strong measures was still upon them. The President, besides, would

not listen to them in matters of appointment to office, as General Grant

had listened, to his undoing, but went calmly about to have his own way

in dispensing the patronage. The Democrats did not like him because he

seemed to them incapable of frank, consistent action. He withdrew the

troops from the southern States to let politics there take their normal

course, and yet he appointed the one-time members of the discredited

returning boards to federal offices, as if to console them for their

loss of power. He was not aggressive enough to draw a party of his own

about him, and yet he had a character too firm, too self-respecting, too

deeply touched with a sense of individual responsibility to accept advice

which his own judgment did not approve. He went his own course and kept

affairs at their quiet poise, awaiting a change of weather. The second

Congress of his term was Democratic in both branches and made trial of

every expedient known to parliamentary strategy to force upon him a

repeal of the statutes which gave federal supervisors and marshals powers

of oversight and arrest at the southern polls; but the President was too

stout a partisan to consent and stood fast against them. All things stood

as they were until the elections should come again.

[Illustration: CHESTER ALAN ARTHUR]

Mr. Hayes was not nominated for a second term. Determined efforts were

made in the Republican nominating convention, which met June 5, 1880, at

Chicago, to nominate General Grant again and return to the party’s old

régime; but they were defeated, and Mr. James A. Garfield, of Ohio, was

named as the party’s new candidate for the presidency, Mr. Chester A.

Arthur, of New York, as its candidate for the vice presidency. Neither

of the candidates could claim especial eminence. Mr. Garfield had won

high rank and enviable distinction as an officer of volunteers in the

war, had become a member of the House when the struggle had but just

passed its central crisis at Gettysburg, and had served continuously

there until chosen a senator of the United States in the very year of his

nomination for the presidency, without making himself felt except for

his attractive personality, his serviceable confidence and courage as a

parliamentary leader, and his power as an orator. But he stood within

the intimate counsels of his party as Mr. Hayes did not. Mr. Arthur

had been collector of the port of New York, but had stood for the most

part aside from national politics, a lawyer and managing servant of his

party within the State rather than a conspicuous figure in its general

counsels. They were not men to catch the enthusiasm of the country.

But the party that was back of them had gathered again some of its old

momentum; the Democrats had no policy to propose which seemed vital or of

the new age that had come in, and presented as their candidates only an

attractive soldier, General Winfield Scott Hancock, and Mr. William H.

English, a successful business man of Indiana, who had been no politician

since Kansas was admitted to the Union. Though the Democratic voters

mustered strong at every polling place and fell but a little more than

nine thousand behind the Republicans in a total vote of more than nine

millions, they carried no States north of Mason and Dixon’s line except

New Jersey, Maryland, California, and Nevada, and Mr. Garfield was chosen

President by a majority of fifty-nine in the electoral college (214-155).

[Illustration: WINFIELD SCOTT HANCOCK]

[Illustration: WILLIAM H. ENGLISH]

The only note of new questions sounded in the campaign came from the

convention of the “Greenback-Labor Party,” in which reformers of the more

radical sort had united. It had declared, turning to what seemed for the

moment the chief question of the day, that “all money, whether metallic

or paper, should be issued and its volume controlled by the government,

and not by or through banking corporations, and, when so issued, should

be full legal tender for all debts, public and private.” It had demanded

that the greenback notes of the war time “should be substituted for the

notes of the national banks, the national banking system abolished, and

the unlimited coinage of silver, as well as gold, established by law.”

But for the present the country preferred to make choice, not among new

parties, but between the old, which it knew, and the programme of the new

party got but a few more than three hundred thousand votes out of the

nine millions cast. The Democrats not only failed to get the presidency

but also lost their majorities both in the House and in the Senate,

though by a margin so slender that the Republicans were to find that they

could make little confident or aggressive use of their advantage.

[Illustration: JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD]

The transition from Mr. Hayes to Mr. Garfield seemed but a natural

exchange of a man who did not lead for a man who had a real hold on the

affections and the allegiance of his party and could stand at its front

to make policy; but it had scarcely been made when the air seemed to fill

with ominous signs of sinister disquiet. The poisonous influences which

had long been gathering about the system of appointments to office, the

spirit of intrigue and of personal aggrandizement, the insistent scheming

and dictation of members of the houses to force their preferences and

the arguments of their private interest upon the acceptance of the

President, the brazen, indecent clamor of the meaner sort of partisans

for preferment, seemed of a sudden to work with fatal violence upon

affairs. Mr. Garfield asserted a will of his own in the matter, and the

two senators from New York, Mr. Roscoe Conkling and Mr. Thomas Collier

Platt, resigned their seats, as if upon some weighty quarrel in matters

of state, because he would not heed their wishes and choose their nominee

in naming a collector for the port of New York. Office seekers swarmed

about the President with quite unwonted arrogance, and before he had been

four months in his uneasy place of authority one of the crowding throng

whom he had disappointed wreaked foul vengeance upon him. On the morning

of the 2d of July, 1881, as he passed through a railway station at

Washington on his way to the seaside to seek a much needed respite from

the harassments of those first months of bitter wrangle and discord, he

was shot by Charles Jules Guiteau, a man maddened by disappointed vanity

because he had not obtained the office he sought. For eighty days the

President lingered between life and death, but death conquered, and on

the 19th of September the end came. On the 20th Mr. Arthur took the oath

as President.

[Illustration: THOMAS COLLIER PLATT]

Thoughtful men had looked about them, the while, to see what this new

and sinister thing meant. Some part of its explanation lay upon the

surface. It might, no doubt, fairly be ascribed, in part at least, to the

sharp factional split that had shown itself in the Republican ranks in

the convention which had nominated Mr. Garfield. The “stalwarts” of the

party, whom Mr. Conkling had led, and who had fought desperately in the

convention to secure the renomination of General Grant, were of the older

temper of the party, had hated Mr. Hayes very cordially for his mildness

and lack of partisan vigor, and were bent upon carrying Republicans

back to the methods which others saw had discredited them in their day

of power. They had been defeated by the “halfbreeds” of the convention,

as they contemptuously designated their opponents within the party, and

Mr. Garfield was in their eyes the representative of the halfbreeds.

Mr. Conkling had supported him in the campaign, despite his feeling of

personal defeat, and Mr. Conkling’s friends felt sure that his eloquence

and personal influence had availed as nothing else could have availed to

keep the State of New York to its allegiance to the Republicans in the

election. His generosity in that matter they deemed worthy of reward.

But Mr. Garfield would yield him no special consideration; and, because

the President held himself resolutely at a balance as between faction

and faction in his use of the patronage and pointedly ignored the wish

of the stalwarts in his appointment to the collectorship of the port of

New York, Mr. Conkling had flung out of the Senate and appealed to the

legislature of New York for re-election, as a demonstration of power

against the President. He had failed. The legislature would not so rebuke

the President. But factional bitterness had been wrought to the highest

pitch, and the tragedy of the President’s death seemed to the country an

object lesson in its consequences.

[Illustration: CHARLES JULES GUITEAU]

The attention of the country was fixed at last, with painful intensity

of interest, upon the character and influence of the civil service.

Not a little of the true nature of the existing system of appointments

to office had been laid bare by Mr. Conkling’s extraordinary act of

self-assertion. The use of appointments as rewards for party services

did not, it seemed, bind partisans together, after all, as the advocates

of the spoils system claimed, or compact and discipline parties for

aggressive and successful action. Worked out through its detail of local

bosses, senatorial and congressional “influence,” personal favors, the

placating of enemies and the full satisfaction of friends, it must always

menace the successful party itself with factional disruption. Guiteau,

the assassin, had said that he fired his shots for the “stalwarts,” that

Mr. Arthur, their friend, might be President; and those murderous shots

still rang in the ear of the country like a startling confirmation of

all that the advocates of civil service reform had said. Congressmen saw

opinion at last set steadily, irresistibly towards radical measures of

reformation, with a force and certainty it had never shown before, and

Democrats and Republicans found one more question upon which opinion

beating upon them as it did, they must agree. In August, 1881, while the

President lay dying, various local associations which had been formed

to agitate the question of the reform of the civil service were drawn

together, in a meeting held at Newport, Rhode Island, into a National

Civil Service Reform League, whose first act was to express its hearty

approbation of a bill for the reform of the service which Mr. Pendleton,

of Ohio, had introduced the preceding year in the Senate.

[Illustration: ROSCOE CONKLING]

The bill would no doubt have lain almost unnoticed on the docket of the

Senate had not Mr. Conkling’s arrogance and Guiteau’s madness of bitter

passion disposed all the country to consider what must be done. Mr.

Pendleton was a Democrat, but he spoke only for himself and for other

men of like conviction in the matter, not for his party, in the bill in

which he proposed a return to the system of competitive appointments

which Congress had authorized in 1872 and abandoned in 1874. Neither did

he speak for the party in power, who regarded such a measure as a mere

curtailment of its political influence. Even the tragedy of 1881 did

not shake the politicians from their stubborn hostility. For almost two

years the bill lingered and made no progress, despite the unmistakable

evidences of opinion out-of-doors. But the elections of 1882 sufficed

to bring it to life. In the Congress chosen in 1880 the Republicans

predominated, by a bare majority, too small to use, in both houses. But

the elections of 1882 put into the House a Democratic majority of more

than eighty and aroused the Republicans to a sudden sense of their

responsibility to the public opinion of the country. The Senate, changing

by States, not by the sweep of the popular vote, remained in their hands;

their majority there was even increased. In the existing Senate they had

had to rely on the casting vote of the Vice President for their majority;

in the new Senate they were to command a serviceable majority of four.

But they read the signs of the weather with as keen an apprehension as

if they had lost both Senate and House. The Democrats, on their part,

were ready to enhance their growing credit with the country by showing

themselves willing advocates of reform. On the 6th of January, 1883,

accordingly, before the new Congress met, the Pendleton bill passed both

houses by large majorities, almost as if without serious dissent; and Mr.

Arthur signed it at once with hearty approval.

It provided for appointments to office by competitive examination and for

the constitution of a Civil Service Commission which should be charged

with the execution of its provisions, the establishment of proper tests,

the conduct of examinations, and the careful enforcement of the rules of

eligibility. It did not include all classes of the civil service, but it

at least took rank and file, all clerical offices and all offices not

of special trust and confidence, out of the reach of the politicians,

and began a reform which the President could, under the terms of the Act

itself, extend at his pleasure. Mr. Arthur sought to have it administered

efficiently and in thorough good faith, for it had his sincere approval.

He had shown from the first a dignity, a tact, a firmness, a sense of

public duty in the administration of the great office so unexpectedly

thrust upon him which had filled the country not less with surprise than

with deep satisfaction. His selection by the Republicans for the vice

presidency had given even stout partisans uncomfortable misgivings. He

had been known in New York as of the group of office-holding politicians

rather than as a man devoted to the larger kind of public service;

his company had been that of the petty managers of the party’s local

interests, more interested in patronage than in public questions, a

“stalwart” who took his cue from larger men. But the presidency brought

his finer qualities to light. His messages and state papers read like

the productions of a man of unusual capacity, information, and literary

power. He seemed to make his chief appointments with a view to the

efficiency of the public service rather than with a view to political

advantage. He dealt with the bills sent to him by Congress in a way that

lacked neither courage nor discrimination. Faction was quieted and the

course of affairs ran cool again, with an air in which men could think.

There was need for dispassionate thinking. Each year disclosed more

clearly than the year which had preceded it the altered temper of

the times, the questions of industrial development, of the relations

between capital and labor, of tariff readjustment, and of currency

reform which must take precedence of the older questions of politics, of

constitutional privilege and civil rights, which had cut the former lines

of cleavage between parties. The tariff duties which had been adjusted to

the conditions and financial necessities of the war time were now piling

up in the Treasury balances too large to be used. Obviously something

must be done to ease the country of the unnecessary burden. Democrats

and Republicans could not easily agree upon such a question. It was an

old question in a new guise and had always separated Democrats from the

Whigs from whom Republicans took their traditions in such a matter.

The first approaches to reform were made very slowly, therefore, very

guardedly, with a handsome show of careful consideration but very little

show of action. In the winter of 1881-1882 a commission was appointed to

travel through the country and take testimony with regard no less to the

local than to the national conditions of trade and industry, for the

purpose of supplying Congress with trustworthy data upon which to act

in reducing the duties. Its report was in due course made, and an Act

was passed which effected a reduction of duties which was in substantial

accord with its recommendations. But the majority of the commission had

been made up of stout protectionists, and the changes in the tariff which

it recommended made little difference either in the revenues or in the

incidence of taxation.

It began to be plainly evident, moreover, that the tariff question was

but a part of that general question of the development of trade and

industry which year by year grew so various, so complex, so difficult to

set justly apart in its elements. The country was undoubtedly prosperous.

The South, especially, was showing how it could respond to the economic

stimulation of the time, to the general development of the resources

of the country, now that its corrupt governments, with their negro

majorities, were lifted from its shoulders. But the very expansion of

industry, the very growth and cumulative productiveness of capital made

difficulties of their own,—difficulties novel, unlooked for, in the

handling of which statesmen were without experience or precedent and even

men of business without standards of judgment. Capitalists were effecting

a novel concentration of their power, through corporate association,

through united lines of railway, through extensive combinations in

industrial undertakings which created a sort of league to control both

the output and the prices. And laborers, finding that they had to deal

no longer with individual employers, but with powerful groups of men

whom they never saw and could speak with only through their agents,

themselves drew together in leagues, larger than the old trades unions,

in order that workingmen as well as employers might wield the power of

wide combination. Even laborers of different occupations drew together.

So long ago as 1869 a society had been formed in Philadelphia, upon the

initiative of a sagacious tailor, one Uriah Stevens, to unite workingmen

of different occupations for their mutual benefit and protection, not

only in respect of their relations with their employers, but also in

respect of their relations with one another and the general advancement

of their interests. Before statesmen saw what new questions were before

them it had grown into a “Noble Order of Knights of Labor,” whose

membership was numbered in figures which exceeded one hundred thousand. A

new economic force had come upon the field.

[Illustration: AN OBSERVATION CAR ON THE PACIFIC RAILROAD]

Financial disaster, a time of sharp stringency when men looked to their

investments, regretted their loans, questioned every adventure of

business, and stood dismayed to see the prosperity of the country of a

sudden checked, it might be destroyed, added its thrill of excitement

and of apprehension to bring the thought of the country to an imperative

reckoning upon economic questions. As in 1873, so again now it was the

too rapid development of railways, their too desperate competition

for earnings which were at best insufficient to support them, and the

reckless speculation of those who dealt in their stocks that brought the

sudden contraction of values on, and then panic and ruin. The country

was growing very rapidly alike in population and in the increase of

wealth and the multiplication of resources. The census taken in 1880

had shown that the population had, within the preceding ten years,

increased more than thirty _per cent._, from 38,558,371 to 50,155,783.

It was estimated that the actual wealth of the country had within the

same period increased quite forty-five _per cent._, from $30,068,518,507

to $43,642,000,000. Nothing had lagged. Agriculture, manufactures,

commerce, the products of the mines and of every industry that added

to the resources of the country and made it rich and quick with energy

showed a sound and wholesome growth commensurate with crowding numbers

and the zest of hopeful enterprise. But the construction of railways had

outrun all reason in the attempt to keep pace with the country’s growth.

The total railway mileage of the United States had been increased from

52,914 to 93,671 within the decade. New lines had bid against the old for

patronage by sharp reductions in the rates of carriage; rates had fallen

below the actual cost of the service; and while ruinous competition cut

away profits, speculation in railway securities in the stock market

completed the mischief. That speculation had reached its highest point of

reckless adventure in 1880. After that the prices of railway securities

began to decline, at first only a little, then very sharply, and in May,

1884, the inevitable crash came. As usual, some firms upon the Street

suffered not only ruin but dishonor also, among the rest the firm of

Grant and Ward, in which General Grant had been a silent partner. He

had known nothing of the dishonorable transactions of his partners, but

the disgrace and ruin in which they involved him touched his last days

with humiliation and with a deep sadness which he could not shake off.

Unscrupulous men had played upon him in business as they had played upon

him in politics, and men’s minds went always backwards to find his time

of glory.

Financial crisis did not, of course, touch the real resources of the

country; its business went forward without fatal embarrassment, and

those who took the large view of affairs perceived that its prosperity

was not in fact seriously checked by what had happened in Wall Street.

But Wall Street was, none the less, the seat of credit, and acute

disturbances in its market could not go by without consequences which all

the country felt. Business could not, for a little while, move with as

confident a spirit as before. It was evident, too, that in undertakings

both great and small the friction between laborers and employers grew,

not less, but greater, as if some unwholesome influence were at work to

clog the productive processes of the time. Workingmen promptly adapted

to their own use against employers the “boycott” which Irish agitators

had originated to work the ruin of those who opposed their radical

programmes of social and political reform or who stood out for the

privileges of the hated land owners. Individuals or companies who would

not yield to the dictation of the labor organizations in any matter,

whether of employment, wages, or hours of work, they sought to cut off

from all patronage and business by terrorizing all who dealt with them

or approached their places of business; and the courts were forced to

execute, sometimes very harshly, the law against conspiracy, fitting

formulas originated in an age gone by to circumstances more difficult

to form their judgments upon than any a past age had produced. It added

a little, too, to the sense of disquietude created by the crisis in the

money market and the chronic disorders of industry that unprecedented

and disastrous floods occurred, in the summer of 1884, in the valley of

the Ohio, breeding distresses and tumults in the city of Cincinnati which

put the place for six days together almost at the mercy of mobs.

The country got from every quarter a disquieting sense of lax government,

deranged business, bad management in affairs, and the dissatisfaction

and anxiety which such impressions produced inevitably operated to

discredit the party in power. Some radical change in leadership began to

seem desirable. Opinion more and more wearied of the stale grounds of

preference upon which parties and candidates were chosen at the polls.

The Republicans had held the presidency ever since the war, and both

houses of Congress until 1875, not because they met new questions with

new policy, but because, in a day now gone by, they had been the party of

the Union and had saved it. Tenure of power through a whole generation,

as if by prescriptive right, had worked its own demoralization, as was

inevitable among men who made no new plans and had no new impulse of

reform. Mr. Hayes had been upright, public spirited, inclined to serve

the country unselfishly and in the interest of sound policy; Mr. Arthur

had come out of the unpromising ranks of office holders and local

party managers and yet had shown himself a man of elevated ideals in

administration; but observant lookers on got the impression, none the

less, that the lax morals and questionable practices of General Grant’s

day were still to be found beneath the surface of the public business at

Washington. Men everywhere believed that the fibre of the party in power

was relaxed and that new blood must somehow be got into the government

before it could be made secure against the bad methods and the vicious

standards of action which had got possession of it. It was not an issue

as between parties that was shaping itself in the public mind, but

rather a desire to choose new men, whichever party should prove ready

to supply them,—the newer, the less identified with the party policies

of the generation then passing away, the better. Upon that desire the

presidential campaign of 1884 turned. Had the Republicans named a man of

such qualities as to make the country feel sure of him as an instrument

of integrity and sensible rectification in public affairs, no doubt he

would have been chosen President; but they did not name such a man.

The Democrats did, and won. Mr. Grover Cleveland, whom the Democratic

convention put forward, was a new man in the field of national politics,

but had proved his quality in public service in the State of New York

in a way which had, within the past two or three years, attracted the

attention of the whole country. Twenty years before, when he was but a

youth of twenty-six, he had been chosen district attorney for the city of

Buffalo (1863); in 1871 he had been made sheriff of his county, and ten

years later mayor of Buffalo; in 1882 he became governor of the State. In

that year the tide of popular reaction against the Republicans had run

very strong, and Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, as well as New York, had

preferred Democratic to Republican governors; but the reaction had been

more marked and extraordinary in New York than anywhere else. In 1880,

the year Mr. Garfield was chosen President, the Republicans had carried

New York by a safe margin of more than 21,000 votes; and yet in 1882, but

two years later, Mr. Cleveland had been preferred to an unimpeachable

opponent by a plurality of 190,000.

He was of the open and downright sort that all men who love strength must

always relish. Business men felt that they could trust him because he had

had business of his own to manage as a lawyer of assured and increasing

practice and knew the business interests of the State and meant to guard

them. Plain men instinctively trusted him, because they felt sure that

they understood him, seeing that he was no subtile politician but a man

without sophistication like themselves. He had early been drawn into

politics and had followed it with a wholesome relish, finding zest in its

comradeships with men of action and resource, men of quick wits and ready

expedients, as well as in the sense of action and of service which it

brought into his own life. A long apprenticeship in affairs, with local

politicians for associates and fellow counsellors, made it very clear

to him how men were to be handled and combined and gave him that close

acquaintance with the personal side of party combination which is the

surest basis of political sagacity among those who lead; and yet, though

he knew men of all sorts intimately and at first hand, as Lincoln did,

and met them every day in close, sympathetic association, he kept his

own principles and point of view unconfused. He was the son of a rural

pastor. His father had not had the means to give him a college training,

but the lad had got the better training of a Christian household,

had brought away from his quiet home standards of right action and a

steadfast, candid conscience which told more and more upon the courses of

his life as he matured. His associates found candor and courage to be

the most characteristic qualities of the man. There was something very

satisfactory in the simplicity and frankness with which he went about

his duties when in office, without question as to his obligations as a

public servant or misgivings as to the effect of what he did upon his

personal fortunes. “The affairs of the city,” he said, when he became

mayor, “should be conducted as far as possible upon the same principle

as a good business man manages his private concerns”; and the voters of

the city found, with not a little satisfaction, that he acted upon that

principle with extraordinary watchfulness and vigor. They dubbed him the

“veto mayor” before his term was out, so frequently did he check the

extravagance and the ill considered plans of the city council with his

sharp, unhesitating executive negative. As governor the same qualities

shone even more conspicuous in him. Courage, directness, good sense,

public spirit, as if without thought of consequences either to himself or

to his party, made him at once a man whom all the country marked when he

came to that great post.

[Illustration: JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE]

There were men in the Republican ranks in New York who had played the

chief parts of protest against the tendencies of their party. They

meant to reform it, if they could, and so save it, but to oppose it if

they could not bring it to a new way of action, a new and better choice

of leaders. They sent strong spokesmen to the Republican nominating

convention of 1884, and when that convention would not heed them they

urged the Democrats to nominate Mr. Cleveland and give independent

voters a chance to cast their ballots for a man of their own temper and

principles in affairs. The Democratic convention took their advice, and

for the first time in twenty-eight years a Democrat was chosen President.

The candidate whom the Republicans had preferred was as brilliant a

leader as any party had had for a generation; but the country did not

want brilliant leadership; it wished for mere solidity of character and

for a new and better point of view in the man it should put into its

highest office; and it could not satisfy itself with Mr. Blaine. Mr.

James G. Blaine was a man turned of fifty-four; Mr. Cleveland was but

forty-seven. The one had been known through a whole generation as a man

who by sheer force of natural gifts, eloquence, audacity, charm, had

made his way to the front in the national counsels; the other had come

but yesterday into view, not as a leader in counsel, but as a man of

right action in practical public business. But some deeply unpleasant

impressions had got abroad concerning Mr. Blaine, and had worked very

powerfully upon those who were beyond the reach of his personal charm;

and when the Republicans nominated him for the presidency the distrust

those impressions had bred cost him the election, with such a man as Mr.

Cleveland for opponent. He had played a great part in legislation. Three

successive times before they lost control of the House of Representatives

(1869-1875) the Republicans had made him Speaker, and he had used the

power of that great office to make himself master of party action in the

lower house, after the manner of the later Speakers, but with a personal

hold upon the members of the House such as no man had enjoyed since Henry

Clay. There were rumors that he had used his power also to obtain favors

from certain railway and mining corporations and enrich himself. Nothing

was proved. When the charges made against him were looked into with

careful and impartial scrutiny they turned out to have very disputable

foundation. He had engaged in transactions which no doubt left his hands

clean, but hardly, it seemed, his conscience. There had been too little

of the high punctilio of a nice sense of honor in many of the things he

had done. Republicans who had grown critical and uneasy in such matters

were convinced that, whatever might be said in defence or justification

of Mr. Blaine, he was, at best, not entirely free from the taint that

had seemed to fall upon almost every leader of the party who had played

a prominent part in Congress during the last, bad days of the period of

reconstruction, when the power they wielded was touched with high-handed

lawlessness and the government they administered with the spirit of

spoilsmen.

The result of the election turned upon the vote of New York. No strong

tide of popular preference ran for the Democrats such as had heartened

them in 1882. Every northern and western State except Connecticut, New

Jersey, Indiana, and New York cast its votes for Mr. Blaine; could he

have carried New York, he would have been elected, and he lost it by only

the very narrow margin of 1,149 votes. In the thought of the New York

voters it was one thing to vote for a governor, quite another to vote

for a President. The national prestige of the Republican party was not

lost; only the steadfast determination of a few men to rid it, if they

could, of its older leaders gave the vote of the State to Mr. Cleveland.

Their task called for not a little moral courage in the performance. They

were in principle and by preference, not Democrats, but Republicans,

and what they were about to do filled their one-time party associates

with contempt and bitter resentment. They were dubbed pharisees, who

must needs prove themselves a saving and holy remnant, truer than their

fellows; “mugwumps,” big chiefs, who would not take their cue from

common men but must signalize their valor apart. They accepted the name

“mugwump” very cheerfully. It was a name whimsically borrowed from the

language of the Algonquin Indians, was native American, accordingly,

and had no sting that they flinched under either in its first or in its

ironical meaning. They were led by men who cared little what names they

were called by if only they satisfied their principles in what they did:

men like Mr. Carl Schurz, who had led the revolt of the Republicans of

Missouri twelve years before; men like Mr. George William Curtis, as much

statesman and orator as man of letters, with whom politics was not a game

of power but a career of duty. It was the good fortune of such men that

there were others in goodly numbers who were as indifferent as themselves

what jibes were uttered against them provided they won and kept their

character in the fight they had entered upon. And they did win. No doubt

the Mugwumps made Mr. Cleveland President. He was a man of the sort they

most desired, not touched with the older sophistications of politics,

his face set forward, his gifts the gifts of right action. They trusted

him and believed that he would purify the civil service and bring in a

new day in which parties should concentrate their purposes on practical

questions of the present.

Mr. Cleveland’s task as President was both delicate and difficult. He

did not come into power supported by the warm enthusiasm of a people,

as General Jackson had come, though no one doubted that he was the

people’s, not a party’s, President. His popular majority over Mr. Blaine

was but 23,000. Three hundred and twenty-five thousand votes had been

cast for the candidates of the Greenback and the Prohibitionist parties,

to which many men had turned for the nonce because they could not bring

themselves to vote for Mr. Blaine and would not vote for a candidate

of the Democrats, and in their extremity what to do threw their votes

away. Out of a total popular vote of more than ten millions, therefore,

Mr. Cleveland had lacked an absolute majority by more than three

hundred thousand. The congressional elections had given the Democrats

a strong working majority again in the House, but the Senate was still

Republican. And yet the new President’s party wished and expected him

to recast the administration of the government in its behoof, as if it

were already in its ascendency, and the Mugwumps bade him disregard

party, put partisan considerations aside in his appointments to office,

and make the government at Washington, as he had made the government at

Albany, a sound instrument of public business. It was inevitable that he

should disappoint both his party and the leaders of the independents.

Fortunately he knew his own mind and was not rendered timid by the

difficulties of his task. He accounted himself, not an independent, but a

Democrat. His allegiance to his party was of the staunch and loyal sort.

He thoroughly believed in its principles and held himself bound to serve

it in every legitimate way compatible with the public service. He was a

sincere believer in the reform of the civil service which the Mugwumps

made so prominent a part of their creed and programme; but he thought

it no breach of the principles of that reform to refuse reappointment

to Republican officials whose statutory term of four years had expired

and to put Democrats in their places, to ask for the resignation of

Republican officials whose offices brought them into relations of

confidence with the administration, or to dismiss those out of the rank

and file who showed themselves disposed to use their offices for partisan

purposes. He thought it right and wholesome and an act of sound policy to

change a civil service which was exclusively Republican in every rank,

and which had been exclusively Republican throughout a whole generation,

a service in which Democrats had been virtually proscribed, into a

service mixed of men of both parties, and a clear matter of traditional

right to put Democrats in every chief post of trust.

The thorough-going politicians of the Democratic party were disappointed

to the pitch of dismay to find that Mr. Cleveland meant to make no clean

sweep of the offices and set his face like flint against the doctrine

that appointments to office were the spoils of victory in a presidential

contest. Thorough-going reformers were equally disappointed to find that

he did not intend to adopt their principles with their own uncompromising

austerity. “They are to be treated with respect,” Mr. Blaine had written

to Mr. Garfield of the reformers, in 1880, “but they are the worst

possible political advisers, ... foolish, vain, without knowledge of

measures, ignorant of men, ... pharisaical, but not practical; ambitious,

but not wise; pretentious, but not powerful.” Mr. Cleveland knew too much

of the sterling character and wide experience of the particular group of

reformers who had made his election possible to utter so superficial a

judgment about them, or to feel anything but the profoundest respect for

their motives and for their sagacity as men of action. He stood very near

them in his own hopes and purposes, and felt no touch of Mr. Blaine’s

resentful contempt for them. But he was a practical man of affairs and

knew better than they did both the limitations and the theoretical

weakness of their programmes. They stood outside the public service as

critics; dealt with principles, not with men; were serviceable in the

formation of opinion, but not in the conduct of government. The conduct

of government they still left to professional politicians and to men who

made public life their constant object, as they themselves did not; and

Mr. Cleveland understood the public men whom they condemned more justly

than they did,—understood them by reason of lifelong association with

them, and knew that their qualities were better, their gifts a great deal

more serviceable than men who had no dealings with them supposed them

to be. Those who came into direct conference with him and learned to

know at first hand his principles of action found nothing so strong, so

imperative in Mr. Cleveland as his sense of justice, his sense of right

and of fair dealing. He had, they found, a big conscience open to the

airs of all the various world, approachable by all sorts of men, whether

of thought or of affairs. He felt as much bound to meet the reasonable

expectations of the right-minded politicians of his party as to come

up to the requirements of the reformers. He knew the practice of party

government as his critics did not, and felt at liberty to act upon the

immemorial understandings of government in that kind wherever he could

do so and yet not violate principles of sound administration. He meant

to use the principles of the civil service reformers for the purpose of

making the government pure and efficient, but not for the purpose of

taking it out of the hands of parties as an instrument of policy. It

was a reform which he perceived could not be brought on upon a sudden

impulse, but must be worked out through the processes of politics as they

stood.

It was his conduct of administration and his attitude towards Congress

rather than large questions of policy or of party management that held

the attention of the country throughout the four years of his term.

The House kept its Democratic, the Senate its Republican majority,

and party legislation was still out of the question. All energy and

initiative seemed for the time summed up in the President. His quality

was as unmistakable as General Jackson’s, and yet he had none of General

Jackson’s blind impetuosity or mere wilfulness. His individuality was

the more marked because he stood apart from the houses as a power set to

check and criticise them. He had never been a member of a legislative

body. From first to last his experience in public service had been that

of an executive officer. He held very literally, therefore, to the theory

that Congress and the President were not so much associated as offset

in the structure of the government, and was inclined to be a strict

doctrinaire in the exercise of a complete independence of congressional

suggestion. What most attracted the attention of the country, aside

from his action in the matter of appointments to office, was the

extraordinary number of his vetoes. Most of them were uttered against

pension bills great and small. Both Democratic House and Republican

Senate were inclined to grant any man or class of men who had served in

the federal armies during the civil war the right to be supported out

of the national Treasury, and Mr. Cleveland set himself very resolutely

to check their extravagance. He deemed it enough that those who had

been actually disabled should receive pensions from the government, and

regarded additional gifts, for mere service, both an unjustifiable use

of the public money and a gross abuse of charity. When the Senate sought

to revive against him the principles of the Tenure of Office Act, which

had been passed to thwart Mr. Johnson but suffered to lie forgotten

so long as Republicans were in the presidency, and inquired into his

reasons for certain removals from office, he met it with an assertion of

his constitutional rights as Executive as imperative as General Jackson

would have uttered, and put that matter once for all at rest. Both houses

learned to respect his intelligence, his conscience, his unhesitating

will with a touch of fear such as they had felt towards no other

President they could remember.

The new tenor of reform and of individual responsibility he had brought

into affairs seemed in some measure to touch Congress also and to dispose

it to apply itself to important matters of business which had too long

waited to be dealt with, and which could be handled without partisan

heat. The most important of these was the establishment of a fixed order

of succession to the presidency, in case of the death or disability of

both the President and the Vice President. A bill amending the law in

that matter had been formulated in the Senate as long ago as the summer

of 1882, and since that time had twice been adopted by the Senate; but

the House had failed to concur. As the law stood the succession fell

to the president _pro tempore_ of the Senate or, if he could not act,

to the Speaker of the House of Representatives. But there were times,

falling between the sessions of a Congress whose term had expired and the

sessions of the Congress chosen to succeed it, when there was neither

a president _pro tempore_ of the Senate nor a Speaker of the House.

There had been such a season while Mr. Arthur was President. There had

been an anxious summer when, had death or serious disability overtaken

him, there would have been no one to take up the duties of the chief

office of the nation. Another season of the same sort came during the

very first year of Mr. Cleveland’s presidency. Mr. Hendricks, who had

been chosen Vice President with Mr. Cleveland, died in November, 1885,

and there was a brief interval during which there was no one between

the President and a legal lapse of the presidential functions. At its

first session, therefore, the Congress which had been chosen at the

time of Mr. Cleveland’s election passed an Act which placed the heads

of the executive Departments in the line of succession, in the order

of the creation of their several offices, should they possess the

qualifications of age and of birth within the United States prescribed

by the constitution in respect of the President and Vice President: the

Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of War,

the Attorney General, the Postmaster General, the Secretary of the Navy,

the Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary of Agriculture (January 18,

1886); and a matter of much anxiety was happily settled.

[Illustration: THOMAS ANDREWS HENDRICKS]

The leaders of the two parties were at last ready also to agree upon a

final settlement of the mode of counting the electoral votes. It was

manifestly imperative that the recurrence of such a situation as had

been brought about in 1876 by the double electoral returns from South

Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana should be prevented by some provision

of law which should determine once for all whence the authoritative and

final decision should emanate as to the validity of disputed votes, but

not until now had the heat of that contest been sufficiently dispelled

to enable politicians to come to an agreement in the matter. An Act

became law on the 3d of February, 1887, which provided that the decision

should rest with the States themselves from which the votes came, and

Congress should undertake to judge of matter in dispute only when there

was in any State such a conflict between two tribunals of appeal as made

it necessary that some outside authority should intervene. In such a case

the decision of the houses should be reached by concurrent resolution.

It took much debate and many conferences to frame the law to the

satisfaction of both houses; but it was felt at last that agreement was

necessary, and all sensible men hailed the result with gratification.

There were questions also of business and of economic relief which the

houses found it possible to agree upon before Mr. Cleveland’s term was

out. By an Act of the 4th of February, 1887, known as the Interstate

Commerce Act, railway corporations operating lines which passed from

one State to another were forbidden to make discriminations in their

rates as between different shippers or to enter into any combination

with competing companies for the purpose of sharing earnings or of

“pooling” freight receipts in a common fund to be proportionally divided;

and a commission of five persons, to be appointed by the President,

was constituted which was given very extensive judicial and mandatory

powers for the enforcement of the Act. In the following year an Act

was passed which excluded Chinese immigrants from the United States.

The Interstate Commerce Act had been introduced by Senator Reagan,

of Texas, so long ago as 1884, and had been pressed for three years

before obtaining majorities in both houses. Its advocates spoke in the

interest of the farmers and of all small shippers,—of all who had felt

the power of the railways a burden upon them. It was not disputed that

the railway companies had granted lower rates of carriage to the greater

manufacturers and producers whose shipments were large, or that they had

favored one section of the country at the expense of another; and it was

manifest that their discriminations had fallen very heavily upon small

farmers and men in the smaller ways of trade and manufacture. There was

decided satisfaction throughout the country, therefore, that steps had

at last been taken to protect the rank and file. The law which excluded

Chinese immigrants had been passed at the urgent solicitation of the men

of the Pacific coast. Chinese laborers had poured in there, first by

hundreds, then by thousands, finally by hundreds of thousands, until the

labor situation of the whole coast had become one almost of revolution.

Caucasian laborers could not compete with the Chinese, could not live

upon a handful of rice and work for a pittance, and found themselves

being steadily crowded out from occupation after occupation by the

thrifty, skilful Orientals, who, with their yellow skin and strange,

debasing habits of life, seemed to them hardly fellow men at all, but

evil spirits, rather. For years together the laborers of the coast and

all who wished to aid them had demanded of Congress the exclusion of

the Chinese. Failing of aid from that quarter, riot had become their

almost habitual means of agitation and self-defence—riot which sometimes

went the awful length of wholesale slaughter in wanton attacks upon the

Chinese quarters of the towns. San Francisco had found the matter a

veritable menace to government itself. Congress had passed an exclusion

bill in 1879, but Mr. Hayes had vetoed it. Negotiation with China had

been tried, but she had refused to agree to the exclusion of her people

by her own act and consent; and an end was at last made of the matter by

the Act of 1888.

Such Acts were but the first fruits of radical economic changes and the

rapid developments of trade, industry, and transportation. The laborers

and men whom great combinations of capital were in danger of crushing

or driving to the wall were making themselves more and more heard and

heeded in the field of legislation. The Knights of Labor, who but the

other day had numbered only a few more than a hundred thousand, now

mustered six hundred thousand strong. What was more significant, airs,

not of agitation merely, but of anarchy also were beginning to stir, in

a country which until now had been known and envied the world over as

a land in which men reverenced “the laws themselves had made,” acted

under government as under their own self-control, and kept opinion

always within the paths of peace. The cities were filling up with

foreigners of the sort the Know Nothings had feared; men who had left

their homes dissatisfied not merely with the governments they had lived

under but with society itself, and who had come to America to speak

treasons elsewhere forbidden. For many a long year their incendiary

talk had fallen without effect upon the ears of workingmen in America,

and politicians had been wont to boast that men born in America and men

trained in America’s school of labor and politics would never listen to

it. But the air of the industrial regions of the country had sensibly

thickened with the vapors of unwholesome opinion in these last years

of unlooked for concentrations of capital and unparalleled growths of

corporate power. They still showed themselves most in cities where

discontented men and women out of the proletariat of European countries

most congregated. The country had startling evidence of the strength and

audacity of the anarchist leaders in a great meeting held in May, 1886,

in the Haymarket at Chicago, which seemed part of a concerted plan not

only to preach but also to practise defiance of law, and which ended

in the most serious conflict with the police an American city had ever

witnessed. But the infection was spreading outside the cities, too.

It began to be seen, when once the matter was laid bare, that men of

American training, as well as foreigners, had begun to take the taint

of anarchistic sentiment. Even the Knights of Labor were touched with

it, despite the conservative influence of their leaders, and nothing but

the sharp reaction of opinion caused by the Chicago riot, the country

through, checked its quiet spread. Vast organizations like that of the

Knights of Labor held loosely together at best; anarchism is the negation

of organization; and in proportion as it became anarchistic the great

order suffered disintegration and decay. A new order, the American

Federation of Labor, sprang up to take its place, and the scene changed

very rapidly as one agitation succeeded another. But no one could say

that the scene grew more quiet or gave hopeful signs of peace as it

shifted.

[Illustration: THE ANARCHIST RIOT IN CHICAGO, ILLINOIS. A DYNAMITE BOMB

EXPLODING AMONG THE POLICE]

To Mr. Cleveland it had become evident that not a little of the

economic trouble of the time had its root and source in the operation

of the tariff. There, it seemed to him, lay the foundations of those

economic preferences of one set of men or one section of the country

over another which were so deeply irritating the farmers of the South

and West, the laborers of the cities and of the centres of manufacture,

and the advocates of free competition. Protective tariffs deliberately

extended the favors of the government to particular undertakings; only

those who had the capital to take advantage of those favors got rich

by them; the rest of the country was obliged to pay the costs in high

prices and restricted competition. Such had time out of mind been

Democratic doctrine, and every sign of the times seemed a demonstration

of its truth. But not every man who called himself a Democrat accepted

that creed. The Democratic party had been out of power for twenty-four

years; the war had broken its ranks and confused its principles; there

were men in it now who would never have been in it had it been, that

long generation through, a party of action instead of merely a party

of opposition. Notable among such men were Mr. Samuel J. Randall, of

Pennsylvania, and the group of members who stood with him in the House of

Representatives. These men were avowed protectionists, and Mr. Randall

had from 1876 to 1881 been the acknowledged congressional leader of

his party. He had during those years been Speaker of the House, and by

consequence master of its action in all points of legislation. Leadership

in that kind passed away from him when Mr. Cleveland became President in

1885, and Mr. Carlisle, of Kentucky, became Speaker, a Democrat of the

older type; but Mr. Randall’s power was not gone. He still, it turned

out, held the balance of power and controlled the action of the House

in the matter of the tariff. Both in the Congress which preceded Mr.

Cleveland’s election and in that which followed it Mr. Morrison, of

Illinois, had introduced proposals for the reform of the tariff which

were neither radical nor disregardful of vested interests, and had

pressed them upon the House with arguments which lacked neither force

nor the backing of opinion out of doors. An increasing surplus was being

steadily piled up in the Treasury; the rates of duty which yielded the

redundant revenue had been laid in time of war to meet extraordinary

expenses; many of the articles which carried the burden of the tax were

necessary to people of every rank and economic condition, notably wool

and woollen goods; relief could be obtained by reductions which were not

likely to damage any industry, or to deprive it of any advantage which

it was not abundantly able to dispense with. But Mr. Randall led some

forty Democrats, who sat for constituencies in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New

York, California, and New Jersey, who voted against every reduction,

by whatever argument supported, and the rest of the party, though they

numbered one hundred and fifty strong, could carry nothing against them.

[Illustration: SAMUEL JACKSON RANDALL]

It was this situation which Mr. Cleveland determined to change, if

plain speaking could change it. In December, 1887, he addressed to the

new Congress chosen in 1886 a message which passed all other subjects

by and spoke only of the tariff. He asked Congress to put theoretical

questions for the nonce aside. “Our progress towards a wise conclusion,”

he said, “will not be improved by dwelling upon the theories of

protection and free trade.... It is a condition which confronts us,—not

a theory.... The question of free trade is absolutely irrelevant.” “Our

present tariff laws, the vicious, inequitable, and illogical source of

unnecessary taxation, ought to be at once revised and amended,” not

only, he maintained, because unused revenue was piling up, but also

because consumers were carrying an unjust burden. The message ran strong,

imperative in every sentence, and the air was cleared upon the instant.

It was the only voice of courage and decision that had been heard upon

that matter in a generation; and Mr. Randall’s minority fell into line

as if confused. They had felt the compulsion of a leader’s will,—were

not converted, but disciplined. The Committee of Ways and Means of the

House, under the leadership of Mr. Mills, of Texas, its chairman, at once

prepared a bill which attempted a systematic revision of duties, general

though not radical, a measure not of free trade but of carefully planned,

conservative reduction such as the President had desired; and it passed

the House with only four Democratic votes cast in the negative.

The Republican Senate rejected it,—even proposed higher duties in its

stead; and the existing law stood unamended. But the issue had been made

up. Mr. Cleveland had given his party a distinct, unmistakable policy

with which to go to the country in the presidential campaign of 1888.

It accepted the issue under protest; but it accepted it. Mr. Cleveland

had not taken counsel with the congressional leaders of his party before

uttering his imperative message; had asked advice, indeed, of no one; had

acted wholly upon his own conclusions as to what was necessary for the

relief of the country. His action in the matter had filled the leading

politicians of his party with dismay, its rank and file with confusion.

He had been warned that to attack the protected interests of the country

might cost him his re-election; but that consideration had not moved him.

He believed that his party could win upon such an issue at the polls,

but he would not wait to make any nice calculations on that subject; he

would at least do his party the service of putting it in the right. The

country relished his courage, whatever timid politicians thought of it.

He stood for the moment the indisputable master of all action within the

Democratic party. Its nominating convention nominated him as of course

for a second term. The Republicans nominated General Benjamin Harrison,

of Indiana, grandson to William Henry Harrison, whom death had taken

untimely away to make Mr. Tyler President; and the two parties went to

the country on the issue Mr. Cleveland had made.

[Illustration: BENJAMIN HARRISON]

The Democrats were defeated. The popular vote for Mr. Cleveland, indeed,

exceeded that for his opponent by some one hundred and ten thousand,

but Mr. Harrison had a majority of sixty-five in the electoral college

(233-168). New York and Indiana had turned again to the Republicans.

No northern States except Connecticut and New Jersey had voted for the

Democratic candidates. Even the control of the House of Representatives

was lost by the Democrats; the congressional elections gave the

Republicans a working majority of about twelve. The tariff system had

come to seem to that generation of voters very like a fixed part of the

law of society, of the national life itself; Mr. Cleveland had not given

them time enough to adjust their thought to the change he urged. There

had been nowhere any sharp reaction of opinion, but everywhere in the

North reaction enough to shift the balance of power once again from the

Democrats to the Republicans.

On the 4th of March, 1889, Mr. Cleveland quietly gave place to Mr.

Harrison and the government passed once more in all its branches into the

hands of the party which had made the policy of the last twenty-eight

years. But it was not the same government it had been when that party

met its first serious check in 1875. It had steadied the judgment of

the country in respect of parties to have a Democratic President for

four years, and that President a man like Mr. Cleveland, compact of

frankness, conviction, and force, no mere partisan but a man of the

people, with the spirit of service strong upon him. The people had for a

long time endured the deterioration of affairs under the later Republican

administrations because they doubted the capacity and the principle of

the Democrats. They had now learned at least that a change of parties

in the administration meant no jeopardy to the government itself. The

choice between parties had become once more a choice between policies

merely, and affairs wore a normal aspect again,—such an aspect of peace

and businesslike quiet as they had not worn since the painful shock of

the Kansas-Nebraska Act. One by one the statutes which had marked the

era of war and reconstruction had disappeared from the statute book:

some because annulled by the Supreme Court, others by expiration, still

others by repeal. Even the Tenure of Office Act had been quietly repealed

after Mr. Cleveland’s refusal to submit his reasons for removals to the

Senate’s scrutiny and review.

In 1888 the legislature of Massachusetts had adopted a method of

balloting at elections borrowed directly from Australia, indirectly

from England itself, which, as it spread from State to State, gave a

noteworthy impetus to the purification of elections. The main features

of the reform were, the facilitation of independent nominations for

office outside fixed party lines, the official printing of the ballots

to be used, their distribution to the voters only by sworn officers of

election, and the isolation of the voter while preparing his ballot,

in order perfectly to protect his privacy and independence. Opinion

approved the change at once, and legislature after legislature hastened

to adopt what opinion unmistakably demanded. It was one of the signs

of the times. Opinion was slowly freeing itself as much as possible not

only from the older party prejudices, but also from the too inquisitive

management of politicians.

The foreign affairs of the government stood as they had stood when

Mr. Cleveland came into office. The hostility of the Senate to his

administration had rendered it impossible for him to bring any matter

of negotiation to a satisfactory conclusion. The only matters of

capital importance it had fallen to him to consider had concerned the

fishing rights of the United States on the two coasts of the continent.

Dissatisfied with the operation of those clauses of the Treaty of

Washington which dealt with the Canadian fisheries, Congress had

instructed the President in 1883 to give the required notice to Great

Britain of the desire of the United States to abrogate them, and on the

1st of July, 1885, pursuant to Mr. Arthur’s notice, they had gone out of

effect. In February, 1888, under Mr. Cleveland, a new treaty regarding

the fisheries had been negotiated; but the Senate had rejected it. The

question which arose on the other side of the continent concerned the

rights of the United States over the seal fisheries of the north Pacific.

The United States claimed that the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867

had brought with it the right to protect the seals of Bering Sea against

capture or destruction, having brought with it exclusive jurisdiction

over that sea. England denied the right and the jurisdiction; but the

government passed out of Mr. Cleveland’s hands before the matter could be

brought to a definitive formulation and issue. It passed to Mr. Harrison

along with all other pending questions of policy and administration.

_Authorities_ now begin to grow scarce. Mr. Edward Stanwood’s

_History of the Presidency_ still affords an excellent sketch

of political conditions; Edward McPherson’s _Handbook of

Politics_ still records the chief political happenings; Mr.

Francis Newton Thorpe brings his _Constitutional History of the

United States_ down through this period; Appleton’s invaluable

_Annual Cyclopaedia_ makes careful record of events; and the

more serious magazines of the country, such as _The Atlantic

Monthly_, _The North American Review_, _The Forum_, _The

Nation_, _The New Princeton Review_, _The Political Science

Quarterly_, and the _Quarterly Journal of Economics_ furnish

reviews and discussions of almost all the principal public

transactions of the time. _The New Princeton Review_ contains

an exhaustive Record of Events (1885-1888), which, after 1888,

is continued in _The Political Science Quarterly_, in which

_The New Princeton Review_ was merged. Mr. S. S. Cox’s _Three

Decades of Federal Legislation_ covers the years down to 1885;

Mr. Hugh McCulloch’s _Men and Measures of Half a Century_

runs a little way into the period of this chapter; Mr. John

Sherman’s _Recollections of Forty Years in House, Senate, and

Cabinet_ covers all of it; and the collected _Works_ of Mr.

George William Curtis shed excellent light on many of the more

serious questions of the times. Mr. John Clark Ridpath has

prepared _The Life and Works of James A. Garfield_ in such a

way as to afford some guidance in the history of the time.

Mr. A. S. Bolles’s _Financial History of the United States_

(to 1885), Mr. Carroll D. Wright’s _Industrial Evolution of

the United States_, Professor F. W. Taussig’s _Tariff History

of the United States_ (to 1883) and _Silver Situation in the

United States_, and Mr. David A. Wells’s _Recent Economic

Changes_ are our chief authorities on matters fiscal,

financial, and economic. Mr. C. Juglar has written _A Brief

History of Panics_; Mr. H. Lambert a sketch of _The Progress of

Civil Service Reform in the United States_; Mr. C. B. Elliott

a recital of the principal facts with regard to _The United

States and the Northeastern Fisheries_; and Mr. Eugene Schuyler

a treatise on _American Diplomacy_, which is an excellent

manual of the larger international concerns of the country. Mr.

Henry Jones Ford’s _Rise and Growth of American Politics_, Mr.

Lauros G. McConachie’s _Congressional Committees_, and Miss M.

P. Follett’s _Speaker of the House of Representatives_ still

serve us in explaining congressional influence and procedure

and party action.

The _sources_ here, as in the last chapter, are _The

Congressional Record_, the various series of _Documents_

published by House and Senate, the _Messages and Papers of the

Presidents_, the _Statutes at Large_, and the newspapers and

other periodicals of the time.