y
investigate, all the various questions relating to the agricultural,
commercial, mercantile, manufacturing, mining, and (other) industrial
interests of the United States, so far as the same may be necessary to
the establishment of a judicious Tariff, or a revision of the existing
Tariff, upon a scale of justice to all interests."

That same year, in the face of most protracted and persistent opposition
by the great bulk of Democratic members, both of the Senate and House of
Representatives, and an effort to substitute for it the utterly ruinous
Democratic Free-Trade Tariff of 1846, the Bill recommended by this
Republican Tariff-commission, was enacted; and, in 1883, a modified
Tariff-measure, comprehending a large annual reduction of import duties,
while also carefully preserving the great Republican American principle
of Protection, was placed by the Republicans on the Statute-book,
despite the renewed and bitter opposition of the Democrats, who, as
usual, fought it desperately in both branches of Congress. But
Republican efforts failed in 1884, in the interest of the wool-growers
of the country, to restore the Protective-duties on wool, which had been
sacrificed, in 1883, to an exigency created by Democratic opposition to
them.

Another Democratic effort, in the direction of Free-Trade, known as "the
Morrison Tariff-Bill of 1884," was made in the latter year, which,
besides increasing the free-list, by adding to it salt, coal, timber,
and wood unmanufactured, as well as many manufactures thereof, decreased
the import duties "horizontally" on everything else to the extent of
twenty per cent. The Republicans, aided by a few Democrats, killed this
undigested and indigestible Democratic Bill, by striking out its
enacting clause.

By this time, however, by dint of the incessant special-pleading in
behalf of the obnoxious and un-American doctrine of Free-Trade,--or the
nearest possible approach to it, consistent with the absolutely
essential collection of revenues for the mere support of the Government
--indulged in (by some of the professors) in our colleges of learning;
through a portion of the press; upon the stump; and in Congress;
together with the liberal use of British gold in the wide distribution
of printed British arguments in its favor,--this pernicious but favorite
idea of the Solid South had taken such firm root in the minds of the
greater part of the Democratic Party in the North and West, as well as
t