EDITORIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
THIS story is all news to me" is a phrase frequently used by readers of Miss Tarbell's narrative of "The Tariff in Our Times," which The American Magazine has been publishing during the past year. Curiously enough the events of our own times, by which we mean the 50 years just behind us, often are all news to us. We know the story of the Revolution of '76 better than the story of Reconstruction; the causes of the fall of the Bastille are clearer to us than the causes of the Panic of 1873! It was this consideration mainly that led us to publish Miss Tarbell's narrative. We wanted to get certain significant facts of recent tariff history clearly in the minds of our readers in order to use them as a basis for telling certain other stories of the day in which we are all concerned and of which we are all thinking. What are these facts?
It is clear that at the beginning of the period covered the country was committed to low duties, laid primarily for revenue and only incidentally for protection. It was not a change in the popular mind that brought about high duties. They were laid from 1862 to 1865 to compensate manufacturers for internal taxes made necessary by the war, and the raise of duties was accompanied by a distinct promise to take them off as soon as the war was over and the internal taxes were removed.
But they were not taken off when the taxes were because of the strength of the resistance of those who profited by the duties.
The party in power, the Republican, was occupied with serious problems: the war debt, reconstruction, the resumption of specie payment. To solve these problems it felt the necessity of a strong and solid front. Again and again it compromised on the tariff. The Democratic party came into power committed to a tariff for revenue—with incidental protection. But the same interests which had converted the Republicans to their uses went to work to protectionize the Democrats and they were finally able to prevent the party carrying out the policy to which it was committed. That is, Miss Tarbell's first series of articles makes it clear that for twenty-five years after the close of the war both great political parties shaped their course on the tariff to suit the demands of those who profited by it.
The Story of a Great Campaign
What were the methods by which the protected interests were able to exercise such power in politics? Miss Tarbell's second series of articles, which will appear in the coming numbers of The American Magazine, will answer this question. It is doubtful if there has ever been an educational effort in the United States in behalf of a doctrine equal in organization to that which was developed to eradicate the general belief in tariff for revenue with incidental protection and replace it by the doctrine of protection for protection's sake. It was a campaign which included every device from the most vulgar of broadsides to the very founding of institutions of learning to teach protection. It was a campaign inaugurated supported and carried on almost exclusively by those who profited by the duties. There never was a disinterested element of any importance in it.
Hand in hand with the education machine built up by the protectionists went the political machine, developed until it has been able to control the elections in scores of Congressional districts—to name the chairmen of the Ways and Means Committee, to select the chairmen of at least the Republican National Committee, and to dictate to the very president of the United States! From it grew many political devices full of significance, its chief fruit of course being the Campaign Fund, as we now know it.
Apt Pupils and Unholy Alliances
While the educational and political machinery of the protectionists have always been active in any field where there was a
