silver Republicans, chiefly from the newer states of the Far West; but this free coinage bill was lost in the House by a small majority. The explanation of this sudden re-opening of the question was that of party apprehension. In some of the Republican states of the Middle West, long relied upon as safe, the Farmers' Alliance had been spreading, and fomenting a demand for unlimited coinage of silver. A silver convention held at St Louis in the fall of 1889 had been attended by many delegates from this region as well as from the new silver-mining states whose increased power in the Senate was soon to be effective. It was feared, therefore, that a veto of a free coinage measure might array the West and South-West against the East and break up the party.
359. The customs duties upon which the fighting of the campaign of 1888 had turned was promptly taken up, and in The McKinley Tariff. the McKinley Tariff Act of the 1st of October 1890 the Republicans embodied their conceptions of protection to American industry. Some of the main features of this law were: the addition of agricultural products to the protected articles; the extension of the free list particularly the inclusion therein of raw sugar, which had been bringing in a revenue of $50,000,000 annually; the granting of compensating bounties to sugar planters to an amount of about $10,000,000 a year; and the raising of duties to the prohibitory point on many articles of general consumption which could be produced at home. Mr Blaine, then secretary of state, had just been active in promoting closer relations with South America wherein he hoped for an extension of American trade and he severely criticized the bill as it passed the House, because the free list opened wide the doors of American trade, particularly to sugar producing countries, without first exacting compensating advantages for our products in those markets. To meet this criticism a provision was finally added authorizing the president to impose discriminating duties where it was necessary to obtain the advantages of reciprocity.
360. This tariff, which passed on the eve of the Congressional elections of 1890, was immediately followed by such increases in prices and the cost of living that it was potent in bringing about the political revolution, or “land slide,” which swept the Republicans from power in the House of Representatives. The Republicans returned but 88 members as compared with nearly twice that number in the Congress which passed the McKinley Bill. The South sent but four Republicans; New England a majority of Democrats; and such strongholds of Republicanism as the Middle Western states of Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Kansas, hitherto responsive to the traditions of the Civil War, sent Democratic or independent delegations. Looked at broadly, the movement was a rural uprising, strongest in the South and Middle West, the old Granger areas, against forces which seemed to them to threaten their ideals of American democracy. But the movement was recruited, by the silver-mining states and discontented labour interests.
361. Farm products had not proportionally shared the general increase in prosperity. This convinced large portions of the Western Discontent. agricultural West that the currency system had too narrow a basis in gold, which was appreciating in value. Much of the Middle Western agricultural development had been made on borrowed Eastern capital, and it seemed to the farmer that the principal of his mortgage was in effect increasing with the rise in the price of gold, at the same time that his crops brought a smaller net profit. He did not give due attention to the effect of greatly increased production, as the new wheat lands were opened on such a grand scale; but he was keenly sensitive to increased freight rates and discriminations, to the influence of Eastern capitalists, banks, bondholders, trusts and railways upon Federal and state legislatures and judiciary, and to the large amount of railway lands, unproductively held by the companies, while the land hunger of the nation was exhibited in the rush to newly opened Indian lands, such as Oklahoma (1889) and parts of the Sioux reservation (1890). After the evidence of the power of this tide of Western discontent in the elections of 1890, those portions of it which were ripest for revolt combined in 1892 as the People's party or Populists, soon to prove an important political factor.
362. The Republicans meanwhile had been actively reducing the surplus. In 1892 the excess of revenue over expenditures Pensions. was ten million dollars; by 1893 only two millions. This was effected not only by the Tariff Act but by such measures as the Dependent Pension Act of 1890 (resulting in a list of pensioners of the Civil War which cost the nation $68,000,000 by 1893, over half of these pensioners having been added during Harrison's administration); the rapid construction of the new navy, raising the United States from twelfth to fifth in the list of naval powers; the repayment of the direct war tax to the states (1891) to the amount of fifty-one millions; and other appropriations such as those provided by river and harbour bills. The Democrats stigmatized this Congress as a “billion dollar Congress” from its expenditures, to which Speaker Reed replied that the United States was a billion dollar nation. In fact the Democrats when they regained power were not able greatly to diminish the cost of government.
363. The Democratic House in the Fifty-second Congress repressed obstructive Republican tactics by methods like those adopted by Speaker Reed, and contented itself with passing a series of bills through that body proposing reductions of the tariff in special schedules, including free wool and a reduction of the duty on woollens, free raw material for the cotton planters of the South, free binding twine for the farmers of the North and a reduced duty on tin plate for the fruit raisers. The new industries of the southern Appalachians prevented action on coal and iron. Of course these bills failed in the Republican Senate. A bloody strike on the eve of the election of 1892 in Homestead Strike. the great steel works at Homestead, Pennsylvania, where armed guards engaged by the company fired upon the mob which sought higher wages, was not without its adverse effect upon public sentiment in regard to the Republican tariff for the protection of labour.
364. During the campaign of 1892 the Democrats rejected a conservative tariff plank, denounced the McKinley tariff in violent language, and denied the constitutional power to impose tariff duties except for the purpose of revenue only. But Cleveland, who was renominated in spite of vigorous opposition from leading politicians of his own state, toned down the platform utterances on the tariff in his letter of acceptance. In their declarations upon the currency the Democrats furnished a common standing ground for the different factions by attacking the Silver Purchase Act of 1890 as a cowardly makeshift.
365. The People's party, in its national convention at Omaha (July 1892), drew a gloomy picture of government corrupted in The People's Party. all of its branches, business prostrated, farms covered with mortgages, labour oppressed, lands concentrating in the hands of capitalists. Demanding the restoration of government to the “plain people,” they proposed an expansion of its powers, to afford an adequate volume of currency and to check the tendency to “breed tramps and millionaires.” Among their positive proposals were: the free and unlimited coinage of silver at the legal ratio of sixteen to one; the expansion of a national currency issued directly to the people; the establishment of postal savings banks; government ownership of the railways, telegraph and telephone; restoration to the government of the lands held by railways and other corporations in excess of their needs; and a graduated income tax. In supplementary resolutions the Australian ballot system, which had spread rapidly in the past few years, was commended, as also were the initiative and referendum in law-making. Combining with the Democratic party in various states beyond the Mississippi, and with Republicans in some of the Southern states, they won large masses of voters in the West, and exerted an influence upon public opinion in that section beyond what was indicated in the returns, although General James B. Weaver of Iowa, their candidate for the presidency, received over 1,000,000 popular votes and 22 votes in the electoral college. The Republicans renominated President Harrison, though he lacked an enthusiastic personal following. They
