Rensselaer Republican, Volume 27, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 September 1894 — THE CAMPAIGN. [ARTICLE]

THE CAMPAIGN.

Fatal Blundering and Shameful Surrender oi Principle by Democrats. Tom Johnson’s Questions. Congressional Record. Aug. 24. Look at the shameful position in which the surrender that is proposed will put the party that has an overwhelming majority in this House and the complete control of all branches of the Government in its hands. What are we Democrats to say to our constituents when. in a few days now; we return to them to rendei 4 an account of our stewardship? They sent us here to repeal the McKinley bill. They sent us here to wipe out that system miscalled protection which we, in our National platform, declared a fraud and a robbery and pledged ourselves to wipe out. They took us at our word: they put the whole National Government in Democratic hands. Two years nearly have passed, years of unprecedented suffering to our constituents, the working masses, yet we have given them no relief.' What are we to say to them when they ask us what we have done? Are we to brazen it out? Are we to “point with pride” to what is popularly known as the Gorman surrender bill, and which this House is now asked to accept as its own? Are we to tell them that if it is not what they asked for and what we promised, it is at least- better than the McKinley bill, and that by and by, if they will continue us in power, we will try to do a little better still?

If we do, they will treat us with the scorn that such a barefaced plea will deserve. The Gorman bill is not better than tlie 31 rKinley bill, -measured even by the standard of rates. Most of its reductions are nominal reductions, reductions that are merely tire taking.of useless bricks off a wall which is left sufficiently high to give the beneficiaries of protection ill the protection that a tariff can give. It is more fully and emphatically a trust bill than was even the McKinley bill. All the trusts were called in to make it up. and what tricks and devices lie hidden to the general public in its technical language no man—l do not believe even Senator Gorman —yet really knovVs. It is aa improvement on the McKinley bill in free wool and free lumber and some other small additions to the free list. But, on the other band, it is clearly worse than the McKinley bill in that it taxes sugar. Now 7 , supposing that the trusts that have really had the making up of this bill have taken no advantage of the experience, they have had since the McKinley bill was passed and that the only large difference between the McKinley bill and the Gorman bill is that-one taxed wool and the other taxes sugar, which is the tax the people will feel most keenly and directly—a tax on wool or a tax on sugar? No human being eats wool or uses wool in any way until it has been manufactured, and the manufacturers ‘of woollens are still carefully protected in the Gorman billbyarelativelyhigher tariff than even the McKiniev bill gave them. But every man, woman and child uses sugar. It is one of the prime necessaries of life. And there is not a housewife in the land who will not feel that she is robbed by our “Democratic Tariff Reform” when she finds that where she got three pounds of sugar under the McKinley bill she now, under the Gorman bill, for the same money, gets but two. You and 1. with our official incomes of $5,000 ayea.r, may not feel this tax; Mr. Cleveland, with his official income of $50,000 a year, may not feel it; <;ur colleagues of the Senate, especially those who may have bought Sugar Trust stock at the right time, may not feel it, but the great mass of the people by whose votes we are here—the great mass of the people who must count every penny of incomes not sufficient to enable them to live in half way decent comfort, they will feel it f they will feel it at once and feel it bitterly. ‘ Again will they get an object lesson — that the tariff is a tax. Will you dare to go to them and point to sugar as a sample of the way in which you have carried out your pledges to reduce taxation?

And wtien they ask you what this tax is for what will you tell’ them? Will you quote to them Mr. Cleveland’s letter to Mr. Wilson on the propriety of taxing sugar? Will you quote to them Mr. Carlisle’s statement that the needs of the Treasurer require, the taxation of sugar? I know, and you know, and the people know —I was going to say that every dog that barks in the streets oi the capital knows —that the reat purpose of imposing this tax is not to give revenue to the Government, but revenue to the boodlers. You can not disguise it from the people, for the people know it already, that the purpose of this sugar tax is to put millions and mil lions in the pockets of men who aye already millionaires by robbing the people. They know that this tax on sugar has been bought th rough every step of its way—carried by such open, undisguised corruption as has never been flaunted in their faces before; they know that the Sugar Trust has purchased this privilege Of taxing them, and that though the price it may have paid may be millions, it will receive back millions and millions before the Treasury gets one cent. ' Mr. Speaker, I stand aghast at the fatuity of the Democratic party »« represented here. When the McKinley bill was passed with its

one bright spot, free sugar, we single tax Democrats congratulated each other. “There goes,” we said, “one way of raising public revenue by the taxation of labor never to be revived again; for no party can ever rise in the United States that will dare in times of peace to try to tax sugar now that the people have found out who pays, the tax.” Yet, now comes a party mad enough to try and tax sugar. And to try it under circumstances that might well appall even the man who said, “The people be damned!” Political deceucy, nd less than political prudence. ought to prevent Democrats from trying it under the .open charges that this bonus to the Sugar Trust at the expense of the people is in payment of heavy contributions made from the funds of the Sugar Trust to the Democratic National Committee in the last Presidential campaign. And the attitude of Mr. Cleveland on the sugar tax, the at-

titude of Mr. Carlisle, 1 the attitude of our own Ways and Means Committee in reporting, a tax on sugar, which we free trade Democrats only beat in this House by the aid of Republicans, give a color to the charge which the action now proposed will carry in the public mind to certainty, that is the way in* which the Democratic party is paying the monster trust for election help, as well as the way in which individuals are paying it for very substantial favors rendered to some members of that party since. Is the Democratic y>arty as- represented here mad indeed. with the- madness visited by the gods upon those they would destroy?

No; if we make this surrender we cannot take it back, and if the President does not veto the bill, which will then be presented to him, we must go bac,k, to our constituents with the Gorman bill as the approved and indorsed Democratic bill —the answer which the Democratic party makes to the demands of the people; a bill reeking with notorious bargain and sale; a bill that the Republicans jeer at, that the Deinperatic press has universally denounced; a bill that the President himself lias declared an exhibition of perfidy and dishonesty; a bill that cannot possibly be defended, and that as certainly as election day comes in November, will be indignantly repudiated by the people. What, then, shall we sav to our constituents if we make this surrender?

It is already to be seen what a good many gentlemen propose we shall say, We are to plead the babv act. We are to say that the Democratic party, with the three branches of the National Government in its control, was to carry out its pledges, and would certainly have done so, but that it was prevented by foul- or five undemocratic Democratic Senators! A nice story, this! But will anyone believe it? A nice story, this! But it will not be true.

It is of course possible that with the close division of parties in the Senate a few Democratic Senators, by going over to the Republicans, might have con verted our small ma-qoi’-ity-in -tliabbody—mto-a- rninorrty’ and rendered it impossible to carry out. a Democratic, policy. But wilt you put your huger on the record of a vote that will show that- this has been done? The record will shew that the party majority hr,s never been broken; that surrender after surrender, closing with the last final surrender, has been made by the Democratic body acting in the Democratic name and under Democratic forms, and that the few men whom it is proposed to make the scapegoats of the most ignominious surrender of a party of which politeal history knows, are, so far as any record will show, as good Democrats as the men who will denounce- them. If the Democratic party goes before the people to plead the baby act it must tell them a story like Faistaff's story of the men in buckram. It must tell them that the Democrats of the House with their overwhelming majority, the Democrats of the Senate with their clear majority, the Democratic President with all the enormous power of the Administration in his hands, were surrounded by four or five wicked Democrats in masks, who never once let their faces be seen, and that, thus surrounded. they were compelled tc surrender —no. deemed it prudent tc surrender without firing a shot.