for Republican votes for Hill. At any rate,
New York State was carried for both.

It is unfortunately necessary to add that the 1888 election was most
corrupt. The campaign was estimated to have cost the two parties
$6,000,000. Assessments on office-holders, as well as other subsidies,
replenished the Democrats' campaign treasury; while the manufacturers of
the country, who had been pretty close four years before, now regarding
their interest and even their honor as assailed, generously contributed
often as the Republican hat went around.

In Indiana, Mr. Harrison's home State, no resource was left untried. The
National Republican Committee wrote the party managers in that State:
"Divide the floaters into blocks of five, and put a trusted man with
necessary funds in charge of these five, and make him responsible that
none get away, and that all vote our ticket." This mandate the workers
faithfully obeyed.

So far as argument had weight the election turned mainly upon the tariff
issue. The Republicans held that protection was on trial for its life.
Many Democrats cherished the very same view, only they denounced the
prisoner at the bar as a culprit, not a martyr. They inveighed against
protection as pure robbery. They accused the tariff of causing Trusts,
against which several bills had recently been introduced in Congress.
Democratic extremists proclaimed that Republicans slavishly served the
rich and fiendishly ground the faces of the poor. Even moderate
Democrats, who simply urged that protective rates should be reduced,
more often than otherwise supported their proposals with out and out
free trade arguments. As to President Cleveland himself no one could
tell whether or not he was a free trader, but his discussions of the
tariff read like Cobden Club tracts. The Mills bill, which passed the
House in the Fiftieth Congress, would have been more a tariff for
revenue than in any sense protective. Republican orators and organs
therefore pictured "British free trade" as the dire, certain sequel of
the Cleveland policy if carried out, and, whether convinced by the
argument or startled by the ado of Harrison's supporters, people, to be
on the safe side, voted to uphold the "American System."

[Illustration: Portrait.]
Joseph B. Foraker.

More than eleven million ballots were cast at the election, yet so
closely balanced were the parties that a change of 10,000 votes in
Indiana and New York, both of which went for