CONGRESS. (THE TARIFF BILL.) 



171 



tion, it is to us a hindrance in the performance 

 of our duty, if for no other reason than that it 

 has been eagerly seized upon by the enemies of 

 tariff reform to kindle hostility against that 

 movement. Yet, Mr. Chairman, if there ever was 

 a time when the burden of taxation ought to be 

 lightened, it is when men are struggling for the 

 necessaries of life. If there ever was a time when 

 the fetters of trade should be loosened, it is when 

 trade is held in the paralysis of a commercial 

 crisis. 



" But calamity is a bad counselor, and they, who 

 know this, are eagerly seeking to baffle the great 

 movement of the people for lighter burdens by 

 false and inflammatory appeals to those whose 

 judgment is unbalanced and whose reasoning 

 powers are. for the time being, blunted by per- 

 sonal suffering and distress. This is but consist- 

 ent with the past history of protection in this 

 country. Protection, when expelled from our rev- 

 enue laws, never came back into them with the 

 conscious and intelligent assent of the American 

 people. It crept stealthily in through the back 

 door when the people were in the agony of civil 

 war, and it now seeks to hold its position because 

 the people are in the agony of a commercial 

 crisis. 



" Again, Mr. Chairman, we undertake to relieve 

 the people of taxes at a time when Government 

 revenues are falling behind Government expendi- 

 tures, and when we must daily scrape the bottom 

 of the barrel to gather meal enough to make our 

 daily bread. 



" I do not believe I can open this debate with 



better service to the country than by giving a 

 >rief recital of the steps and' of the 'means by 

 which the Treasury has been emptied and the 

 Irovernment brought to actual pecuniary straits. 



" In the last report of Secretary Fairchild he 

 stimated the surplus revenue for the fiscal year 

 1889 at $104,000,000. In the first report of his 

 successor, Mr. Windom, the surplus revenue for 

 1889 was admitted to be $105,000.000. When 

 Mr. Fairchild vacated his post at the close of 

 Mr. Cleveland's first administration he turned 

 over to his successor an available cash balance, 

 stated in the present form of Treasury state- 

 ment, of over $185,000,000. How was that sur- 

 plus disposed of? Chiefly by the purchase of 

 bonds not yet due, at premiums ranging from 5 

 to 8 per cent, on the bonds of 1891, and from 27 

 to 29 per cent, on the bonds of 1907. 



" Between the 4th day of March, 1889. and the 

 31st of October of that* year, Secretary Windom 

 purchased $67,000,000 of bonds at the premiums 

 I have stated. In his annual report of 1890 he 

 states the total amount of 4- and 4-per-cent. 

 bonds purchased and redeemed since March 4, 

 1889, the beginning of the Harrison administra- 

 tion, at $211,832,450. and the amount paid out 

 for them at $246,620,741.72, a transaction that 

 threw upon the taxpayers the loss of many mil- 

 lions of dollars. But this was by no means the 

 worst use made of that surplus. The Fifty-first 

 Congress tried its hand upon it. 



" That Congress diligently sought out new 

 methods and new objects of appropriation. It 

 took up the log-rolling scheme, which Mr. 

 Cleveland had vetoed, of refunding to certain 

 of the States the direct tax of 1861, and thus got 

 rid of some $14,000,000. It increased offices, 



voted subsidies to steamships and bounties to 

 sugar growers. It deliberately fastened upon 

 the country a higher system o*f permanent ex- 

 penditure, while it as deliberately proceeded to 

 reduce revenues, after the manner of protection, 

 by repealing revenue taxes, and by diverting a 

 larger share of other taxes from the public 

 Treasury into private pockets. It discovered 

 that tobacco had become ' a prime necessity to 

 the poor man as well as to the rich,' and re- 

 duced the excise tax on manufactured tobacco, 

 and abolished all license taxes on its sale. It 

 found another article producing the largest 

 revenue to the Government of any on the cus- 

 toms list, and carrying into the Treasury the 

 largest proportion of what the people actually 

 paid in taxes upon it, and so raw sugar was 

 passed to the free list, with the new development 

 of the protective system in the bounty to sugar 

 producers. 



" Under the pretext of relieving the poor man 

 from part of the taxes on that necessary of life, 

 manufactured tobacco, it heaped more taxes on 

 those unnecessary luxuries, the clothing of him- 

 self and his family. Under the pretext of giv- 

 ing 'a free breakfast table' to the American 

 workingman, it untaxed his sugar that it might 

 put heavier taxes upon his knives and forks, his 

 plates and dishes, his table furnishings, and 

 many of the common articles of his food. 



"Counting the remitted revenue from sugar, 

 which was $55,000.000 per annum ; counting 

 the remitted tobacco taxes, which meanwhile 

 would have produced $17,000,000, we see that 

 from these two sources alone, since the McKinley 

 bill went into effect, nearly $200,000,000 of reve- 

 nue have been surrendered. 



"But even this would not have emptied the 

 Treasury had there been only the same liberal, 

 but not lavish, scale of expenditure which 

 marked the previous Administration. 



" We must add the sums given away or ap- 

 propriated. To the $14,000,000 of the direct 

 tax refunded there must be added at least 

 $17,000,000 paid in sugar bounties, and to the 

 sugar bounties must be added the annual in- 

 crease in our pensions under the law of 1890, 

 which has run up our pension appropriation by 

 $60,000,000 per year. 



" Sir, I do not stop to question the justice or 

 the liberality of the dependent pension bill, but 

 I do say that the bill would never have passed 

 had there not been an overflowing Treasury to 

 empty, and had there not been devised along 

 with "that bill a new scheme of taxation, under 

 which those other pensioners, the protected in- 

 dustries of the country, were to get the first pull 

 and the largest share of the taxes levied to pay 

 pensions. 



" Is it to be wondered at, Mr. Chairman, that, 

 with such diminution of public revenues and 

 such waste of public moneys and such increase 

 of public expenses, the Treasury is to-day in 

 distress? Had these very proper subjects of 

 taxation been retained tobacco and sugar we 

 should have had more than $200,000,000 of 

 revenue from them alone since the tariff act of 

 1890. Had these wasteful, and in the main un- 

 called-for, expenditures been avoided, we should 

 have had over $200,000,000' less expenditures 

 since the passage of that act. 



