Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, February, 1885

The task which these distinguished Democrats assumed in New York Mr. Cleveland took up in Buffalo, and carried through with such impartial energy and courage that before the expiration of the first year of his term of office as Mayor, he was invited by the Democrats of New York to enter upon the larger stewardship of the State executive. He had been chosen mayor of Buffalo in 1881, by a majority of 3,500 votes. He was chosen Governor of New York in 1882 by a majority of nearly 200,000 in a total poll of 893,000 votes. His opponent was Mr. Folger, a leading Republican, who had sat with distinction on the bench of the highest State Tribunal in New York, and who died the other day as Secretary of the Treasury in the Cabinet of President Arthur; and it is an open secret that the tremendous overthrow of the Republican candidate was partially due to the machinations of the friends of Mr. Blaine who had been dropped for cause from the Cabinet of President Arthur with some emphasis in December of the preceding year. It was the calculation of Mr. Blaine that the defeat of the President’s candidate in the President’s own State of New York in 1882 would materially damage Mr. Arthur’s chances and strengthen his own of securing a Republican Presidential nomination at Chicago in 1884. It was a good calculation, but whether the retrospect of the gubernatorial campaign of 1882 in New York is as gratifying now to Mr. Blaine as it was two years ago may perhaps be doubted.

As Governor of New York, Mr. Cleveland has shown himself what he was as Mayor of Buffalo – rigidly honest, indefatigable, simple in his personal tastes and habits, disdainful of the silly state, and the petty parade of official importance into which too many public servants of the United States have suffered themselves to be seduced during the reign of King Mammon at Washington. It has been his custom to walk every morning from the Executive Mansion to the Governor’s Rooms in the Capitol at Albany, and to spend the day there, incessantly occupied, but always visible to those who have had any real occasion to see him. It will be a wholesome thing to see the Presidential office once more administered in this unostentatious fashion. Mr. Cleveland may be called a representative of the Young Democracy, since he will go into the White House a bachelor, like the last Democratic President, Mr. Buchanan, but a young bachelor, the youngest President indeed yet elected. In his fidelity to the traditions of Jefferson, who rode up to the Capitol on horseback to be inaugurated, “hitched his horse to a post,” took the oath and went about his business, Mr. Cleveland will be supported by the new Vice-President – ex-Governor Hendricks of Indiana, who represents the stanch and experienced Democratic leaders who have borne the brunt of the intense political warfare of the last quarter of a century with unwavering courage and signal ability. As a representative in Congress, as a senator of the United States, as Governor of the great Western State of Indiana, and as the Democratic candidate for the Vice-Presidency on the same ticket with Governor Tilden in 1876, Mr. Hendricks has linked his name with the best traditions, and drawn to himself the general confidence of his party. On the 6th of February, 1869, what is called a “concurrent resolution” (which may be passed without requiring the assent of the President) was introduced into the Senate under the “Reconstruction” legislation of 1868, directing the President of the Senate to deal in a particular manner with the vote of Georgia as “a State lately in rebellion” and to allow that electoral vote to be alluded to only if the counting or omitting to count it would not effect the decision of the election in favor of either candidate. The candidates were General Grant and Governor Seymour of New York. Mr. Hendricks, then a Senator from Indiana, sustained with memorable force and conviction the right of Georgia to her proper and unqualified voice in the election. One Republican Senator alone voted against the “concurrent resolution,” and that Senator, Mr. Trumbull of Illinois, is now a recognised leader of the Democratic party in the State which gave Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency. At the second election of Grant – Horace Greeley having died immediately after the choice of the electors – most of the votes given against General Grant were given to Mr. Hendricks; and in the Democratic Convention of 1876 Mr. Hendricks who was the second choice of a majority of the Convention after Governor Tilden, was eventually nominated, almost against his will, for the Vice-Presidency. He is a man of fine presence and dignified manners, who will preside with ability and tact over that Upper House of the national Legislature which stands as the fortress of Home Rule and State Rights, founded upon the ideal constituency of State sovereignty, and set more safely beyond the reach of the gusts of popular passion than the hereditary principle in Europe.

The first duty of the President Elect will be the selection of his Cabinet officers. Under the American system these officers do not sit in Congress, and, with the exception of the Secretary of the Treasury, they are simply agents of the Executive. But it is customary to select them from the most prominent and influential men of the party, and with reference to the party strength in different sections of the country. To recite the names of the men, any one of whom would be accepted by public opinion in the United States as a fitting Cabinet Minister of the new President, would really be almost to call the roll of the Democratic Senators, now thirty-six in number out of a Senate of Seventy-six members, and of the Democratic Chairmen of Committees in the House, which as newly elected will be Democratic by a majority of between thirty and forty votes. The names of Mr. Bayard of Delaware, the leading candidate after Governor Cleveland at Chicago; Mr. Thurman of Ohio, long the leading Democratic, with Senator Edmunds as the Republican, “law lord” of the Senate, and the author of an Act enforcing upon the great Pacific railway corporations their obligations to the Government, which it has been left for a Democratic Executive to carry into effect; General McClellan; Mr. Pendleton of Ohio, to whom the country chiefly owes whatever measure of reasonable Civil Service reform it enjoys; Mr. McDonald of Indiana, Mr. Lamar of Mississippi, Mr. Hewitt and Mr. Kernan of New York, Mr. Garland of Arkansas, Mr. Beck of Kentucky, Mr. Palmer of Illinois, have been already discussed in the open councils of the party, and intelligent Americans of all opinions will admit that a Cabinet framed of such materials would deserve and command universal confidence. There are many other active and experienced party men whom it might be troublesome to replace in one or the other House of Congress, but there need be no fear that the new President will be at a loss to find able counsellors to aid him in discharging his great trust.

The policy of the new Administration is involved and indicated in the traditions of the party. In our foreign relations the United States under a Democratic President will ask nothing of Europe except a cordial maintenance of treaties, an extension of commercial relations under equitable conditions, a full recognition of the accepted rules of international law, a sedulous exemption everywhere of the persons and property of American citizens from unnecessary annoyance by arbitrary power. The State Department under President Cleveland may be expected to be administered, not in the swash-bucklering and speculative fashion which the Republican supporters of Mr. Blaine extolled during the late canvass as brilliant and enterprising, but in the self-respecting, self-contained, and dignified spirit which controlled our foreign relations under ex-Governor Marcy of New York thirty years ago, and which so honorably distinguished the administration of the same department under ex-Governor Fish of New York from that of sundry other high officers of State in the time of President Grant.

Upon the Treasury Department will fall the responsibility of dealing wisely and firmly with the most important domestic issue inherent in the resumption of executive power by the party of the Constitution. This can hardly be more authoritatively stated than it was a fortnight ago by the Vice-President Elect, Mr. Hendricks, in a speech delivered by him to the people at Indianapolis after the election: —

The watchword of the party in this contest, as in the contest of eight years ago, has been reform – executive, administrative, and revenue reform; an honest construction of the laws, and an honest administration of them. The revenue now collected exceeds the wants of an economical administration by $85,000,000. Because of this the Democrats say: “Let there be revenue reform; let that reform consist in part in the reduction of taxation.” Is it not patent to every man that there ought to be a reform here? The Democratic party this year came before the country with a clear and straightforward statement of the reform they intended to accomplish. In the national platform they declared that reform they would have. It was, first, that the taxation shall not exceed the wants of the Government economically administered; second, that taxation shall be for public purposes alone, and not for private gain or advantage; third, that in the adjustment care shall be taken to neither hurt labor nor harm capital; and fourth, that taxation shall be heaviest on articles of luxury and lightest on articles of necessity.

For now a quarter of a century the “Party of Protection and Monopoly” has persistently transgressed the limits set to the Federal authority by the Constitution, and used the earnings of labor and of capital, in the form of excessive taxes, to fertilise and fatten private enterprises.

This must stop. And when this stops, the manufacturers of England and of Europe may make up their minds to meet the competing exports of the United States in all those markets of the world from which American exports have been excluded by American legislation ever since the Whig-Republicans of 1861 laid their grasp upon our fiscal policy. It cannot stop too soon. The official returns of the exports of the United States show that during the fiscal year which ended on the 30th of June 1884, the exports of domestic merchandise from the United States to all parts of the world fell off in value $79,258,780, as compared with the exports for the year ending the 30th of June, 1883. Our exports of machinery fell off nearly a million dollars; of general manufactures of iron and steel more than a million and a quarter of dollars. There was a good deal of gunpowder burned in the year 1883-4, but the value of our exports of it fell off a quarter of a million of dollars. The value of our exports of flax and hemp fell from $547,111 in 1882-3 to $67,725 in 1883-4; our exports of agricultural implements declined during the last year more than a million of dollars in value; our exports of cotton goods, colored and uncolored, more than twelve hundred thousand dollars. Clearly Protection does not develop the manufactures of the United States. It “protects” the manufacturers (which is quite a different thing) against and at the expense of the consumers of the United States, and gives point to the Duke of Somerset’s assertion that “in no country has the power of capital been more invidiously exerted” than in the United States. If our foreign manufacturing friends had any money to spend on American politics, they would have done well to throw it into one pool with the contributions of Mr. Blaine’s two hundred millionaires!

Alexander Hamilton, the Federalist Secretary of the Treasury under Washington, was the first apostle of Protection in America, but in approaching the subject he “walked delicately,” like Agag. The Americans of 1789 established absolute free trade between all the sovereign States of the new Republic; nay more, during the negotiations for peace at Versailles in 1783, the American Commissioners offered Great Britain absolute free trade between the new States “and all parts of the British dominions, saving only the rights of the British chartered companies.” David Hartley, the philosophic writer on “Man,” one of the British Commissioners, had wisdom enough to see the immense importance of this offer, and urged the British Government to close with it. Lord Shelburne, I believe, agreed with him. But the king peremptorily refused to entertain a proposition which, had it been accepted, must have changed the whole subsequent course of the history of the two countries.

Down to 1809 no import duties were levied in the United States except for purposes of revenue only. High rates of duty were levied in 1816 after the war of 1812, not for “protection,” but in order to meet the exigencies of a most dangerous financial situation. In 1824, Henry Clay, backed by New England and the middle States, carried through a tariff to “protect American industry.” This was followed up by the tariff of 1828, known as the “Bill of Abominations.” But the Democratic sense of the country clearly saw that as the power to levy protective taxes must be derived from the revenue power it is of necessity incidental, and that as the incident cannot go beyond that to which it is incidental, Congress cannot constitutionally levy duties avowedly for Protection; and the Democratic party has never since departed, and never can depart, from this doctrine in its party action. In 1833, under President Jackson, “Protection” went down with Nullification. In 1846, under President Polk, the liberal Democratic tariff of Secretary Walker was framed, under which our exports increased from $99,299,766 in 1845, to $196,689,718 in 1851, and our net imports from $101,907,734 to $194,526,639. In 1856, under Democratic rule, our net imports were $298,261,364, in specie value, and our exports $310,586,330. In that year the Democratic Convention declared “the time has come for the people of the United States to declare themselves in favor of progressive free trade throughout the world.” Under Republican Protection, despite the development of the population, our net imports fell from $572,080,919 in 1874, to $455,407,836 in 1876, and our exports from $704,463,120 (mixed values, gold and inflated currency) to $655,463,969; and in 1876 the Democratic Convention declared, “We demand that all Custom House taxation shall be only for revenue.” Of course trade can never be said to be free excepting where, as in the internal commerce of the United States, no tax is levied on trade; and therefore so long as any revenue is raised by duties it is absurd, as Senator Sherman said in discussing the tariff question in 1867, to talk of a “free trade tariff.” But it cannot be denied that under the Democratic Revenue Tariff of 1846 a revenue of at least $140,000,000 would easily now be raised, and Senator Sherman, in the speech to which I refer, admitted that “the wit of man could not possibly frame a tariff” which should produce that sum “without amply protecting our domestic industry.” If this happens as an incident to raising such a revenue, American manufacturers will do well to be thankful for it. Had the monopolists succeeded in getting Mr. Blaine into the White House to thwart legislative reform of tariff taxation for four years more, a worse thing would have overtaken them. For it is unquestionable that a spirit of resistance to protective monopolies is moving through the country, and especially through that nursery of empire, the great North-West, which will not much longer be denied. The Democratic Convention at Chicago wisely took note of this when it made Mr. Vilas of Wisconsin, one of the most eloquent and popular of North-Western Democrats, permanent chairman of the body; and Mr. Vilas has stated the purposes and the convictions of the North-West with plainness of speech: —

The tariff (he says) is a form of slavery not less hateful because the whip is not exposed. No free people can or will bear it. There is but one course. The plan of protective robbery must be utterly eradicated from every law for taxation. With unflinching steadfastness, but moderately, without destructive haste or violence, the firm demand of freedom must be persistently pressed, until every dollar levied in the name of Government goes to the Treasury, and the vast millions now extorted for a class are left in the pockets of the people who earn the money. Resolute to defend the sacred rights of property, we must be resolute to redress the flagrant wrongs of property.

These are strong words. But they are only the echo from the land of the Great Lakes in 1884 of the liberal principles embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and sanctioned by the Constitution of the United States in 1789. Those principles are the life of the Democratic party. The Democratic party can only be opposed by opposing those principles. It can only be crushed by crushing them; and it is their inextinguishable vitality which guarantees the permanence of our indissoluble Union of indestructible States. —Nineteenth Century.