Whoever seeks to deprive us of them is a pestilent British free-trader and an enemy of the American workingman.” And thus the war tariff substantially remained. I will not recount in detail by what shifts a show was made of tariff reduction which left the protective duties almost untouched, and how these long years the Republican party promised tariff revision downward, until finally, after the election of 1888, which put the whole power of the Government into Republican hands, the leaders of the party declared that tariff revision meant revision upward. Whereupon the tariff of 1890 was made, the most monstrous this country has ever seen, one of the most monstrous ever enacted in any country. At the close of the civil war the tariff of compensations, which had been solemnly declared to be only a temporary war measure, averaged, on dutiable goods, 47½ per cent. To-day, twenty-five years after the war, the average has risen to 60 per cent. And this at a time of profound peace, not the slightest danger of a foreign conflict clouding our horizon, no internal taxation burdening our industries, no exigency in our National finances calling for higher revenues.
The first greeting this tariff received—nay, the greeting which broke forth as soon as it was certain that a tariff like this would become the law of the land—was a loud announcement of the higher prices the people will have to pay for almost every article covered by it. The voice of Mr. John Wanamaker, who is a large seller of goods of all kinds in Philadelphia, and also Postmaster-General of the United States, resounds sonorously in the chorus. “Tinware is advancing in cost,” says he to his customers in an advertisement published in the Philadelphia papers, “and very soon the manufacturers will have their way, and you and we will have to pay much more.” True, every word of it, and vigorously expressed.
