With the opening of the debate on the Mills Bill, in April, 1888, there began "the first serious attempt since the war to reduce toward a peace basis the customs duties imposed during that conflict almost solely for purposes of revenue." Mills and William L. Wilson, who had been a college president in West Virginia, bore the burden of advocacy of a reduction of the revenue to the extent of $50,000,000. They were opposed by a united Republican party, both frightened and gratified because the issue had been made so clear. It was charged that the Committee on Ways and Means had drawn up the bill in secrecy, and that a majority of its Democratic members were Southerners who knew nothing of the needs of manufactures. The danger to American labor from the competition of the pauper labor of Europe was urged against it. It was asserted to be a pro-British measure, and stories were circulated of British gold, coming from the Cobden Club, a free-trade organization, to subvert American institutions. The Democratic organization drove the bill through the House of Representatives in spite of all resistance. In the Senate, with the Republicans in control, the bill never came to a vote, and was used to manufacture campaign materials for the campaign then pending. Many of the advisers of Cleveland had urged him to withhold the tariff message, lest he arouse the enemy and defeat himself, but he had risked personal and party defeat in order to get an issue definitively accepted—the first issue so accepted in politics since 1864.
The Mills Bill fiasco was the most important party measure of Cleveland's Administration, yet it served only to accentuate the difficulties in tariff legislation which had been experienced in 1883, and to provide an issue for the campaign of 1888. The laws that were passed between 1885 and 1889 were generally non-partisan in their character and were of most influence when they helped to readjust federal law to national economic problems. The Federal Government was unfolding and testing powers that had existed since the adoption of the Constitution, but had not been needed hitherto in an agricultural republic. The change that forced the resort to these powers came largely from the completion of a national system of communication.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
For the election of 1884, consult, in addition to Stanwood, J.F. Rhodes, "The National Republican Conventions of 1880 and 1884" (Scribner's Magazine, September, 1911), and "Cleveland's Administrations" (Scribner's Magazine, October, 1911). There is an annotated reprint of the "Mulligan Letters" in Harper's Weekly (1884, pp. 643-46). The biographies of Blaine by Hamilton and Stanwood should be examined, as well as the sketches of Cleveland (who left few literary remains), by J.L. Williams, G.F. Parker, and R.W. Gilder. Among partisan party histories, the best are F. Curtis, The Republican Party, (2 vols., 1904), and W.L. Wilson, The National Democratic Party (1888). J.H. Harper recounts details of the Mugwump split in his history of The House of Harper (1912). The standard compilation on the pension system, which has not yet received adequate treatment, is W.H. Glasson, Military Pension Legislation in the United States (in Columbia University Studies, vol. XII). C.F. Adams and W.B. Hale published useful essays on the pension system in World's Work, 1911. H.T. Peck begins his popular Twenty Years of the Republic (1907) with the inauguration of Cleveland in 1885. Consult also Sparks, Dewey, Andrews, and the Annual Cyclopædia.
CHAPTER IX
Five statutes that received the signature of Grover Cleveland are documentary proof of the new problems and the changing attitude of the National Administration during the eighties. They indicate that the chief function of the National Government had ceased to be to moderate among a group of self-sufficient States and had come to be the direction of such interests as were national in importance or extent. On February 4, 1887, the Interstate Commerce Law was passed in recognition of a transportation system that had become national; and four days later the Dawes Bill, providing that lands should be issued to Indians in severalty, marked the disappearance of the wild Indian from the border. In 1889 a Department of Agriculture, with a seat in the Cabinet, and a law for the survey of irrigation sites in the Far West, mark the interest of a nation in the prosperity of its whole area and population; while laws of 1889 and 1890 admitting six new States extended the chain of commonwealths for the first time from ocean to ocean. A process that had been under way since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock had culminated in the occupation of the whole breadth of the continent.
The first continental railroad, the Union Pacific, chartered in 1862 and finished in 1869, was admittedly a national project. Its purpose was to bind the Pacific Slope to the East in a period when sectionalism was a menace to national unity. Its opening was the first step in the completion of an intricate system of lines extending to the Pacific. Direct federal aid was given to the road in the form of land grants, right of way, and a loan of bonds.
Other continental railroads were authorized in the later sixties. In 1864 a Northern Pacific, to connect Lake Superior and Puget Sound, made its appearance. In 1866 the Atlantic & Pacific was given the right to run from a southwestern terminal at Springfield, Missouri, to southern California. In 1871 the Texas Pacific was designed to connect the head of navigation on the Red River, near Shreveport and Texarkana, with Fort Yuma and San Diego. Additional lines with continental possibilities received charters from the Western States,—the Denver & Rio Grande, the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fé,—and received indirectly a share of the public domain as an inducement to build. Congress stopped making land grants for this purpose in 1871, but not until more lines than could be used for twenty years had been allowed.