OCR Text |
Show MR. CLEVELAND'S TARIFF REFORM. Is Mr.. Cleveland a bird of ill omen to the Democratic Demo-cratic party ? He affects to see a good chance for it next year, especially if it goes into a campaign with the slogan of tariff reform for the battle cry. That will make many a man in the country shiver, because they will have a vivid reminder of what Mr. Cleveland's Cleve-land's idea of tariff reform means. He tried it when he was President. A very brilliant gentleman in the House of Representatives prepared a bill that suited him exactly. It practically smashed the protective pro-tective tariff on everything except sugar. He was, so to speak, "sweet" on the sugar tariff, but everything ev-erything else went, and could the bill have been crystallized into a law we doubt very much whether there would have been enough left of the Democratic Demo-cratic party to provide itself with a grave stone. Another Democrat in the Senate, one Gorman, took that bill as it came up from the House, tore it into about 450 shreds, changed the schedules, made it a pretty good protective tariff, as it was passed through the Senate and the House was compelled to concur. When it got to Mr. Cleveland he was furious jnd showed more bad temper than he did on any other public measure he was ever called upon to consider. He called it perfidy and dishonor, and if we remember correctly, refused to sign the bill, but permitted it to become a law by action of time. Then the country began to slowly revive, but it was a hard game, and we believe history will put down Mr. Cleveland's last administration as the most unfortunate un-fortunate in the history of the country, with the single exception of that of James Buchanan. Now he comes from the silence and wants his party to go into another campaign on that same slogan. slo-gan. A great many Republicans will join in the demand de-mand for tariff reform, but they will .not take the Cleveland brand. That was not tariff reform, it was tariff annihilation; annihi-lation; it was equivalent to going down into the grave of the dead Confederacy, bringing up its tariff plank, sterilizing it and gilding it and offering it to the conntry. It is possible that the Democracy will accept his idea and go into the campaign on that cry, but if it does and succeeds, and it tries again to pass such a bill as was the Wilson bill, then good-bye to the Democracy De-mocracy for at least a generation to come. |