| Show I WHAT WILL THEY BO Henry C Payne is authority for the statement that the McKinley law will not be revived but that a duty will be placed on wool As Mr Payne is one of the leaders i of his party his statement raises the I question What are the Republicans going to do with their victory Four I years ago they made a canvass in I I defense of the McKinley law two years ago the keynote of their campaign I I cam-paign was the demand for restoration of the law Now however it appears I that the old law is to be dropped and j I something else substituted This further justifies the opposition I of the Democrats to the McKinley act Four years ago the Republicans explained ex-plained that the people had acted hastily hast-ily Then when they carried congress in 1894 they maintained that the result re-sult was a popular verdict in favor of restoration of the act Abandonment I of it now is an admission that the people were right in 1892 and that the I verdict in 1894 was not an indorsement of the repealed law but simply a protest pro-test against the administration What can the Republicans consistently consist-ently do The present tariff law is a I high protection measure and the rates cannot be increased very much without I with-out getting back to the McKinley figures fig-ures If they confine themselves to the imposition of a few special duties for the purpose of raising revenue they will have done about what a Democratic Democrat-ic congress would have undertaken though the articles selected for increased in-creased taxation might vary in some cases They will have abandoned the special protection programme to which they have adhered and the victory on this great economic question will be yielded up to the party that is in defeat de-feat this year Someone has said that the tariff question has been reduced to one of schedules Amplified this means that there is legitimately nothing more to the problem than the necessity for raising revenue The action which the Republicans propose to take will set the seal of indorsement upon the proposition prop-osition and the party will be in the position of having fought a man of straw set up by itself but which it is now compelled by the logic of the situation sit-uation to pull down |
