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ing in a great and imperial republic to open her doors as she does her heart to works of genius of the past or of the present.

When, Mr. Speaker, the French found we were excluding her works of art it touched her heart, because she loved her art next to glory; so she sought to hurt our feelings. When she saw we had stabbed her art she undertook to hurt us in our most sensitive part; and so she excluded the American hog. [Laughter and applause and cries of "Vote!" "Vote!"]

The amendment was defeated by a non-partisan vote of 54 ayes and 77 nays.

The bill was passed on May 21 by a strictly partisan vote of 164 to 142.

The Senate referred the bill to the Committee on Finance, which, on June 17, reported it back with amendments. It came up for discussion on July 7, and was debated almost to the exclusion of other matters until September 10, when it was passed by a vote of 40 to 29.

Almost every Senator spoke upon the bill, many of the speeches being able, and several of unusual brilliance, but, as their arguments were necessarily repetitions of those in the preceding House debate, they are not presented here.

The House refused to concur in the Senate amendments, and a conference was appointed. After considerable debate the report of the conference was agreed to on October 1, 1890, and approved by President Harrison on the same day.

In the presidential election of 1892 the tariff was the chief issue, and upon it Grover Cleveland was elected to a second term of office.

CHAPTER XIV

THE TARIFF OF 1894
[THE WILSON BILL]

William L. Wilson [W. Va.] Introduces New Tariff Bill in the HouseDebate: in Favor, Mr. Wilson, Tom L. Johnson [O.], William C. P. Breckinridge [Ky.], Jerry Simpson [Kan.], W. Bourke Cockran [N. Y.], William J. Bryan [Neb.], Charles F. Crisp [Ga.]; Opposed, Julius C. Burrows [Mich.], John Dalzell [Pa.], Joseph G. Cannon [Ill.], Thaddeus B. Mahon [Pa.], Nelson Dingley [Me.], Sereno E. Payne [N. Y.], Joseph H. Walker [Mass.], Charles A. Boutelle [Me.], Thomas B. Reed [Me.]-Bill Is Passed-Senate Amends Bill in Direction of Protection and Passes It-Mr. Reed Taunts Democratic Representatives-After Futile Joint Conferences House Accepts Senate Amendments-Debate: Mr. Wilson, Mr. Reed, Lafe Pence [Col.]-Bill Becomes Law Without Signature of the President.

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N December 19, 1893, William L. Wilson [W. Va.], chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means, introduced in the House a bill of the majority of the committee revising the tariff. On December 21 Thomas B. Reed [Me.] presented the minority report on the bill. On January 8, 1894, the bill came up for discussion in the Committee of the Whole.

THE WILSON TARIFF BILL

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, JANUARY 8-FEBRUARY 1, 1894 Mr. Wilson supported the bill in a speech consuming the greater part of two days (January 8-9).

The majority members of the Committee of Ways and Means have had to deal with a system that has grown up through thirty years of progressive legislation. They do not profess that they have been able, at one stroke of reform, to free it from injustice or to prepare a bill directly responsive

to the command of the people. They have dealt as intelligently and as fairly as they could with existing conditions. Even in their desire and purpose to do this they have been hampered

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The Discharged Nurse (peevishly)-Dear me! It grieves me to death to see how that child's wasting away since they changed its food.

Cartoon by J. S. Pughe in "Puck".

by the usual difficulties of reform and by some very unusual difficulties. We knew and expected that some friends would fall away from us whenever we presented any definite measure of legislation. We knew from all experience of the past that not all who march bravely in the parade are found in line when the musketry begins to rattle. [Applause.]

But in addition to this usual and expected embarrassment we are called upon to take up this work in the shadow and depression of a great commercial crisis. I shall pursue no inquiry into the causes of our present stricken industries and paralyzed trade. But, sir, from whatever causes originated, whether produced and fostered, or merely aggravated and intensified, by bad legislation, it is to us a hindrance in the performance of our duty, if for no other reason than that it has been eagerly seized upon by the enemies of tariff reform to kindle hostility against that movement. Yet, Mr. Chairman, if there ever was a time when the burden of taxation ought to be lightened it is when men are struggling for the necessaries of life. [Applause.] If there ever was a time when the fetters of trade should be loosened it is when trade is held in the paralysis of a commercial crisis. [Applause.]

Again, Mr. Chairman, we undertake to relieve the people of taxes at a time when government revenues are falling behind government expenditures, and when we must daily scrape the bottom of the barrel to gather meal enough to make our daily bread.

We begin our task by an effort to free from taxation those things on which the industrial prosperity and growth of our country so largely depend.

Of all the reductions made in this bill there are none in their benefit to the consumer, none in their benefit to the laborer that can be compared with the removal of the taxes from the materials of industry. We have felt that we could not begin a thorough reform of the existing system, built up, story by story, until it has pierced the clouds, except by a removal of all taxation on the great materials that lie at the basis of modern industry, and so the bill proposes to put on the free list wool, iron ore, coal, and lumber. [Applause on the Democratic side.]

Sir, I have no doubt, speaking in the light of experience, that, with wool on the free list and moderate duties on finished products, we shall have such a growth of manufacturing in this country as will steady and improve the market for American wool, and greatly cheapen the cost of woolen goods to the American people.

Now, Mr. Chairman, if there is any one great industry as to which we could throw down to-day our tariff walls and defy the world's competition, it is the great iron and steel industry of this country.

We have found along the Appalachian Ranges of the South,

around the Great Lakes of the North, deposits of iron ore, so rich, so easily worked, so accessible to other materials, and so convenient to our cheapest systems of transportation, that we can now mine the ore and make the pig at less cost than anywhere else in the world.

Sir, there has been no more oppressive monopoly in this country than that of the makers of steel rails. [Applause.] Under a tariff which gave them first $28, then $17, and now $13.44 a ton protection, the rolling mills have combined to keep up prices to the people of this country far beyond the cost of production, and now, when we have reached a point where we shall soon be able to make steel rails as cheaply as they can be made in any country, they are raising their angry outcry against a bill carrying a duty of 25 per cent. on steel rails.

TOM L. JOHNSON [O.].-Will you tell us why you still give them 25 per cent. protection?

MR. WILSON.-A maker of steel rails asks me why we leave this duty at 25 per cent. I suppose the best answer I could give is that we could not well make it less according to the general scale of duties in the iron and steel schedule.

So as to coal. There is now a duty of 75 cents a ton on bituminous coal-a duty which is in excess of the entire cost of production, either in the United States or elsewhere.

We are not only the great iron-producing country, we are the great coal-producing country of the world. With exhaustless supplies, so close to the surface that the cost of mining has been reduced to a minimum, to less than is possible in Nova Scotia, to less than is actually paid in England, the question of a tariff on coal is neither a question of protection nor a question of revenue, but simply a question of subsidy to the great railroad corporations of the country. [Applause on the Democratic side.]

We are exporters of coal for sale in neutral markets. We have a steadily and of late years a rapidly growing export trade, and retain this duty only to hold onto markets so remote from the coal mines that railroad transportation is their chief item in the cost of fuel.

As to lumber, another article put on the free list, I need say but a few words. Logs, as everyone knows, have been free for years. Under the existing tariff we are denuding our forests and rapidly destroying the most valuable part of our timber. It is not contended that the cost of lumbering in this country is materially higher than in the countries from which we might import such products. Along the Canadian border the

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