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positions. His appointees were chosen for their business qualifications. The demands of party leaders were made subordinate to public interests. He promoted the passage of a good civil service law. All bills passed by the legislature were subjected to the governor’s laborious personal scrutiny, and the veto power was used without fear or favour. The Democratic party had been out of power in national affairs more than twenty years. In the interval a great civil war had been fought, slavery had been abolished, and the Union reconstructed. Hew subjects of national concern had begun to awaken attention. Serious abuses had crept into the civil service, and some scandals of considerable magnitude had been exposed from time to time, pointing to the necessity of radical measures of reform. While the public mind was in a sensitive state on this subject (1884), the Republican party nominated
Grover Cleveland. (From a photo by B. J. Falk, Waldorf-Astoria, N. Y.) James G. Blaine for president, and the Democrats nominated Mr Cleveland. The latter was elected, gaining the vote of the state of New York by a plurality of 1047 in a total of 1,171,263. He took the oath of office and delivered the usual address 4th March 1885. He had never been in Washington City in a public capacity before. He had been known to the country at large only two years. He was a stranger to most of the men who stood around him at the ceremony of inauguration. Yet it was noticed that he entered upon his new duties with the same equipoise that he had shown in the humbler stations he had filled. When his brief inaugural address was finished, the older statesmen present felt that no apologies were needed for his being there, and that the executive branch of the Government was in safe hands. Mr Cleveland’s first term of four years was uneventful, but was marked by firmness, justice, and steady adherence on his part to the principles which he deemed salutary to the nation. He was especially concerned in promoting a non-partisan civil service. Congress had passed a law in
1883 to classify the subordinate places in the service, and to make entrance to it, and promotion therein, depend upon competitive examination of applicants, instead of mere political influence. The first test of the efficiency and permanence of this law came with the shifting of political power at Washington. The new president stood firmly by the new law. It applied only to places of the rank of clerkships, but the president was authorized to add others to the classified service from time to time. He added 11,757 during his first term. President Cleveland made large use of the veto power upon bills passed by Congress. The most important one vetoed was the Dependent Pension Bill, a measure of extreme profligacy opening the door, by the vagueness of its terms, to enormous frauds upon the Treasury. In 1887 there was a large and growing surplus in the Treasury. As this money was drawn from the channels of business and locked up in the public vaults, the president looked upon the condition as fraught with danger to the commercial community, and he addressed himself to the task of reducing taxation. About two-thirds of the public revenue was derived from duties on imports, in the adjustment of which the doctrine of protection to native industry had a large place. Mr Cleveland attacked the system with great vigour in his annual message of 1887. He did not propose the adoption of free trade. Yet he alarmed and exasperated the protected classes, among whom were many Democrats, and spurred them to extraordinary efforts to prevent his re-election. In the following year (1888) the Democrats renominated Mr Cleveland, and the Republicans nominated Benjamin Harrison of Indiana. The latter received a majority of the electoral votes and accordingly became president. Mr Cleveland retired to private life and resumed the practice of the legal profession in the city of New York. He had married, 2nd June 1886, Miss Frances Folsom, a daughter of a former law partner in Buffalo. Congress had passed a law in 1878 requiring the Treasury department to purchase a certain amount of silver bullion each month and coin it into silver dollars to be full legal tender. As no time had been fixed for this operation to cease, it amounted to an unlimited increase of a kind of currency that circulated at a nominal value much above its real value. Both political parties were committed to this policy, and strong passions were aroused whenever it was called in question. Mr Cleveland had written a letter for publication before he became president, saying that a financial crisis of great severity must result if this coinage were continued, and expressing the hope that Congress would speedily put an end to it. In 1890 Congress, which was now controlled by the Republican party, passed the McKinley Tariff Act, which repealed the duties on sugar, from which about $60,000,000 of revenue was derived. Simultaneously it passed a new Pension Bill that added $50,000,000 to the public disbursements. Another measure was enacted which nearly doubled the Government’s purchases of silver, to be added to the already vitiated currency. Steps had thus been taken which would change an annual surplus of $100,000,000 into a deficit of $70,000,000 as soon as the new laws should take full effect. In 1892 Mr Cleveland was nominated for president a third time in succession. The only other man in the nation’s history thus distinguished was General Jackson. Mr Cleveland was nominated against the unanimous vote and protest of the delegates in the Democratic National Convention from his own state, New York. This was something quite unprecedented. Mr Harrison was the opposing candidate. Mr Cleveland received 21 t electoral
