much to the popularity of his administration. The ceremony was the first wedding of a president in the White House, and his daughter, Esther, born in 1893 during his second term, was the first child of a president to be born in the president's official home. The home life of Mr. Cleveland and his wife and children at the White House and in New York, at Buzzard's Bay and later at Princeton, has been happy, unostentatious, and sheltered from publicity as far as he could effect that desired end. "Those who are selected for a limited time to manage public affairs" he said in his first inaugural address "may do much by their example to encourage, consistently with the dignity of their official functions, that plain way of life which among their fellow citizens aids integrity and promotes thrift and prosperity."
His amusements have been duck shooting and fishing, which for years he has enjoyed with the genial actor, Joseph Jefferson; and he plays billiards for exercise.
The tariff message of 1887 gave the Democratic party its issue and its candidate in 1892, when Cleveland, in spite of minor dissatisfied factions, on the first ballot, was a third time nominated for president. He was elected by a majority of 110 electoral votes, his plurality of nearly 500,000 on the popular vote carrying with it Democratic majorities in both branches of congress and complete Democratic control of federal affairs for the only two years since 1861.
In August, 1893, President Cleveland called congress in special session, stating that while tariff reform had lost nothing of its immediate and permanent importance, the financial conditions of the country should at once and before all other subjects be considered. The repeal of the Act of 1890, which had been a somewhat timid concession to the free silver theory, and the establishment of the gold standard, were recommended. The Democratic representation in congress, especially from the West and South, was pronounced for free silver, and the essential reestablishment of the gold standard was effected only after a long and bitter struggle. It was the great substantial achievement of President Cleveland's second administration, as civil service reform had been of the first.
The tariff bill, passed by the Democratic Congress, was so far from meeting the views of President Cleveland that he declined to approve it, allowing it to become a law without his signature. Without doubt, the most exceptional act of his two administrations, in its moral courage, was his message of December, 1893, concerning
