“From 1789 to 1888, a period of ninety-nine years, there has been forty-seven years when a Democratic revenue-tariff policy has prevailed, and fifty-two years under the protective policy, and it is a noteworthy fact that the most progressive and prosperous periods of our history in every department of human effort and material development were during the fifty-two years when the protective party was in control and protective tariffs were maintained; and the most disastrous years—years of want and wretchedness, ruin and retrogression, eventuating in insufficient revenues and shattered credits, individual and National—were during the free trade or revenue-tariff eras of our history. No man lives who passed through any of the latter periods but would dread their return and would flee from them as he would escape from fire and pestilence; and I believe the party which promotes their return will merit and receive popular condemnation. What is the trouble with our present condition? No country can point to greater prosperity or more enduring evidences of substantial progress among all the people. Too much money is being collected, it is said. We say, stop it; not by indiscriminate and vicious legislation, but by simple business methods. Do it on simple, practical lines, and we will help you. Buy up the bonds, objectionable as it may be, and pay the Nation’s debt, if you cannot reduce taxation. You could have done this long ago. Nobody is chargeable for the failure and delay but your own administration.
“Who is objecting to our protective system? From what quarter does the complaint come? Not from the enterprising American citizen; not from the manufacturer; not from the laborer, whose wages it improves; not from the consumer, for he is fully satisfied, because under it he buys a cheaper and better product than he did under the other system; not from the farmer, for he finds among the employes of the protected industries his best and most reliable customers; not from the merchant or the tradesman, for every hive of industry increases the number of his customers and enlarges the volume of his trade. Few, indeed, have been the petitions presented to this House asking for any reduction of duties upon imports. None, that I have ever seen or heard of, and I have watched with the deepest interest the number and character of these petitions, that I might gather from them the drift of public sentiment. I say I have seen none asking for the passage of this bill, or for any such departure from the fiscal policy of the Government so long recognized and followed, while against this legislation there has been no limit to petitions, memorials, prayers and protests, from the producer and consumer alike. This measure is not called for by the people; it is not an American measure; it is inspired by importers and foreign producers, most of them aliens, who want to diminish our trade and increase their own; who want to decrease our prosperity and augment theirs, and who have no interest in this country except what they can make out of it. To this is added the influence of the professors in some of our institutions of learning, who teach the science contained in books, and not that of practical business. I would rather have my political economy founded upon the everyday experiences of the puddler or the potter, than the learning of the professor, or the farmer and factory hand than the college faculty. Then there is another class who want protective tariffs overthrown. They are the men of independent wealth, with settled and steady incomes, who want everything cheap but currency; the value of everything clipped but coin—cheap labor but dear money. These are the elements which are arrayed against us.
“Men whose capital is invested in productive enterprises, who take the risks of business, men who expend their capital and energy in the development of our resources, are in favor of the maintenance of the protective system. The farmer, the rice-grower, the miner, the vast army of wage-earners from one end of the country to the other, the chief producers of wealth, men whose capital is their brain and muscle, who aspire to better their condition and elevate themselves and their fellows; the young man whose future is yet before him, and which he must carve out with his hand and head, who is without the aid of fortune or of a long ancestral line—these are our steadfast allies in this great contest for the preservation of the American system. Experience and results in our own country are the best advisers, and they vindicate beyond the possibilities of dispute the worth and wisdom of the system.”
But the bill passed the House.
There were members enough on the Democratic side of carry it through, though by a perilously small majority.
The senate, however, could not be brought to an approval, and the Mills bill failed there.
That, however, was but the beginning of William McKinley’s victory. So strong a case had he made for protection that in 1888 his party leaders had been roused to appreciate the stupendous interests involved in the issue. They ceased to temporize, to avoid, to “trim.” They had been on the defensive for twenty years. They took in 1888 the aggressive, made protection the issue, named General Harrison as their candidate, and echoing William McKinley’s arguments in every school district of the nation, achieved a splendid victory.
But it was wholly due to the wisdom and foresight, the ability and eloquence of Major William McKinley, of Ohio.
Then came his crowning work. That was the measure which has taken its place in the history of the nation as “the McKinley Tariff Law.” It was adopted in May, 1890, and took effect October 6 of the same year.
There is no royal road to success, no short cut-off to eminence. Whatever is of great worth must cost great labor. William McKinley had put into his preparation for that work all the years of his adult life. He knew the subject as no other man in the nation knew it. And when, as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee at last he was commissioned to write a tariff bill, he gave himself wholly and utterly to the task. No laborer in the mills which his policy safeguarded put in so many hours daily as did William McKinley in the preparation of that great measure. He worked all day in Committee or on the floor of the House, consuming nervous force in a manner which would have utterly broken down a less magnificent physique than his own. And then every night he received representatives of various industries from all over the nation—from the farms, from the mines, from the mills, from the stores, from the offices of transportation companies. And they testified a thousand times that he knew their case far better than did they. Yet he heard them patiently, respectfully, discussed the schedules with them, and out of all the information he could gather produced that bill which stands for the highest expression of statesmanship any republic has ever known.