nt of $50,000,000. They were opposed
by a united Republican party, both frightened and gratified because the
issue had been made so clear. It was charged that the Committee on Ways
and Means had drawn up the bill in secrecy, and that a majority of its
Democratic members were Southerners who knew nothing of the needs of
manufactures. The danger to American labor from the competition of the
pauper labor of Europe was urged against it. It was asserted to be a
pro-British measure, and stories were circulated of British gold, coming
from the Cobden Club, a free-trade organization, to subvert American
institutions. The Democratic organization drove the bill through the
House of Representatives in spite of all resistance. In the Senate, with
the Republicans in control, the bill never came to a vote, and was used
to manufacture campaign materials for the campaign then pending. Many of
the advisers of Cleveland had urged him to withhold the tariff message,
lest he arouse the enemy and defeat himself, but he had risked personal
and party defeat in order to get an issue definitively accepted--the
first issue so accepted in politics since 1864.

The Mills Bill fiasco was the most important party measure of
Cleveland's Administration, yet it served only to accentuate the
difficulties in tariff legislation which had been experienced in 1883,
and to provide an issue for the campaign of 1888. The laws that were
passed between 1885 and 1889 were generally non-partisan in their
character and were of most influence when they helped to readjust
federal law to national economic problems. The Federal Government was
unfolding and testing powers that had existed since the adoption of the
Constitution, but had not been needed hitherto in an agricultural
republic. The change that forced the resort to these powers came largely
from the completion of a national system of communication.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

For the election of 1884, consult, in addition to Stanwood, J.F. Rhodes,
"The National Republican Conventions of 1880 and 1884" (_Scribner's
Magazine_, September, 1911), and "Cleveland's Administrations"
(_Scribner's Magazine_, October, 1911). There is an annotated reprint of
the "Mulligan Letters" in _Harper's Weekly_ (1884, pp. 643-46). The
biographies of Blaine by Hamilton and Stanwood should be examined, as
well as the sketches of Cleveland (who left few literary remains), by
J.L. Williams, G.F. Parker, and R.W. Gilder. Among partisan