The Dawes Bill was signed formally on June 6th by President Grant. As it stood its most important features were a 10 per cent reduction on articles manufactured from cotton, wool, iron, paper, glass, and leather, and an increase of the free list by such articles as hides, jute, and paper stock, and a reduction on coal, salt, lumber, and several other articles. All materials to be used in the construction of vessels built in the United States for the foreign trade were admitted free. At the same time a bill was passed removing entirely the duty on tea and coffee.
It had been a hard battle to get the bill through, but it was certainly a step toward more equable taxation. If the country had remained prosperous it is probable that in the next Congress the revenue reformers would have continued the work of equalization and distribution, but the country did not remain prosperous. The year 1873 saw a panic of wide extent, a panic caused by gigantic speculations in railways, in land securities, in booming schemes of every kind. Men spent everything they owned in roseate ventures and then borrowed all their hopeful neighbors would lend, and this madness followed only seven years after a war, which had cost the country perhaps 4000 millions of dollars! It was not a quick, sharp panic with easy recovery. Its shocks recurred again and again, and the desolation it spread dragged itself over several years. No time indeed for reform. But not so bad a time for those who had objected to the lowering of the duties in the bill of 1872. The falling off of revenue due to decreased importation was reason enough to them to make an effort to replace its provisions. They hurried on to this more rapidly than they would have done perhaps if in 1874 the general dissatisfaction with the Grant Administration intensified by the hard times had not caused the election of a majority of Democrats to the House. The protectionists, having only a short term of power left them, hastened to take advantage of it. We must have more revenue, they urged. The surplus of 1873 and 1874 is but $2,000,000. We shall have nothing for the sinking funds—we must put more taxes on tobacco and spirits, more duties on molasses and sugar, and we must restore the 10 per cent reduction on manufactured goods. It was urged by the tariff reformers that if revenue was wanted the repeal of the 10 per cent reduction would help but little—that the restoration of the duty on tea and coffee was the simplest and fairest—but the protectionists were determined to get back their 10 per cent, and they did it, though only after a hard fight and a close vote. And thus it happened that when the Republicans resigned to the Democrats in 1875, the majority in the House of Representatives, which they had held for fifteen years, they left behind them tariff schedules devised for war needs and enacted by them under a definite pledge of reduction when the war should be over and internal taxes removed.
CHAPTER IV
THE BUSINESS MAN TAKES CHARGE
The bill of 1875 took away from the tariff reformers of the Republican party practically all they had won in an eight years’ fight. The duties were again on a war basis, and while the need of revenue had been the plea for putting them back, everybody knew that the real victory was to the high protectionists. What could the Republican revenue-reformers do? The question came home with force now, for they were on the eve of a presidential campaign. It became still more difficult to answer with the appearance of the platform of the Democratic party, which for the first time in twenty years came out boldly on the tariff question. That it did so was due largely to the sagacity and fire of a young Southerner who was to play a large part in the coming struggles on the question—Henry Watterson, editor of the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal.
Mr. Watterson was what may properly be called a “born journalist.” His father before him had been an active newspaper man and almost constantly since he was sixteen, when he had edited a juvenile sheet whose political editorials had been copied all over Tennessee, he had been connected in one way or another with a newspaper. At eighteen he had written for Harper’s Weekly and The Times in New York. At twenty he was serving under Roger A. Pryor in Washington. After the war broke out he had not been able to resist the army, but even there he broke ranks once to establish at Chattanooga a semi-military daily which he called The Rebel, and which for a year he made the delight of the Confederate army. At the close of the war Mr. Watterson started a paper in Nashville, but in 1868 he was asked to take a position on the Louisville Journal—a paper made famous by George D. Prentice. He did so, and from the start his influence was magnetic. The paper grew in popularity and power until its editor, with good reason, was called the Dictator not only of his state but of his party. Politics was his element, and he fought for whatever cause he championed with a vigor, a wit, an eloquence that were the terror of his opponents. His opinions on the tariff were uncompromising. He had no patience with anything but “tariff for revenue only,” and he went to the Convention of 1876 resolved to have his way on that point, and he had it by writing in the plank himself. It was a very characteristic bit of Wattersonian literature:
Reform is necessary in the sum and modes of Federal taxation to the end that capital may be set free from distrust and labor lightly burdened. We denounce the present tariff levied upon nearly 4000 articles as a masterpiece of injustice, inequality, and false pretence. It yields a dwindling and not a yearly rising revenue.
It has impoverished many industries to subsidize a few.
It prohibits imports that might purchase the products of American labor.
It has degraded American commerce from the first to an inferior rank on the high seas.
It has cut down the sales of American manufacture at home and abroad, and depleted the returns of American agriculture—an industry followed by half our people.