A Republican Point of View

THE ISSUES OF THE CAMPAIGN

BY SAMUEL W. McCALL

IN complying with the invitation of the editors of the Atlantic to present my view of some aspects of the present political campaign, I am far from assuming to give the authoritative party position. My point of view is not that of one who regards every act of his party as beyond criticism, or who, if he admits that it is liable to error, admits it only in general terms and as something that is incident to all human institutions. Whatever I may say, if it satisfies nobody, can at least be charged against no one but myself.

So far as the selection of candidates is concerned the Democrats have not done badly. Mr. Parker is a man of courage and independence, and has had large experience in public affairs of the kind to develop a conservative and fair-minded executive, qualities that are certainly not out of place in the presidential office. With regard to their candidate for the vice-presidency, there may be some who will be influenced by his advanced age, but by most men his present vigor and his long and successful, if not illustrious, career will be accepted as evidence of great natural qualities that might even now be profitably employed in the public service. Arguments that are based merely upon the number of years a man has lived, and that involve the drawing of a dead line without reference to the particular qualities of the individual, are not, as a rule, the weightiest arguments. It might be a sufficient reply to the accusation of age for Mr. Davis to appropriate, with a slight change, the words of the declamation, which very likely saw much service even before he was a schoolboy, “The charge of being a young man I shall neither attempt to palliate nor deny. ”

But the present contest is not essentially one between candidates, but one between parties. If Mr. Parker were made President he would be compelled to act generally in harmony with the political forces which elected him or become a president without a party. This is true rather with reference to great policies than with reference to the distribution of patronage. Questions of patronage are sure to create dissensions, but are not likely to produce the alienation, or even the radical cleavage, of a whole party. Irritation will be justly aroused at the spectacle of an executive employing the offices for the benefit of his own personal friends, but by and by the leeches become merciful and fall off, — after they have sucked their fill, — and the parties again confront each other upon the historic issues, or upon the new questions which have sprung up, without reference to the distribution of patronage except as a matter of honest administration.

We need not go back to the time of Andrew Johnson to find an instance where the attitude of a president upon a question of public policy has effectively separated him from his own party. A perfect instance can be found in the last Democratic administration which will serve, not merely as an illustration, but as a weighty argument in determining which party one should support in the present campaign. I refer to the action of Mr. Cleveland upon the money question.

For fifteen years prior to Mr. Cleveland’s second election both parties had been playing with the silver question. A strong sound-money sentiment existed in most of the important Republican states, but that party, in order to secure a majority in the electoral college, was compelled to rely upon pronounced silver states, and, as a result the laws which it enacted with reference to silver were not of the most conservative character. But the attitude of the Republican party as a whole upon the money question was safer than that of the Democratic party as a whole.

The last heavy blow aimed at a sound currency was struck by the Sherman silver purchasing act. When Mr. Cleveland was inaugurated he found the gold reserve in the treasury at the lowest point it had reached since the resumption of gold payments. The demands upon this reserve had been and were being greatly augmented by the required monthly purchase of at least 4,500,000 ounces of silver and the issue in payment for it of treasury notes redeemable in gold. The financial situation grew even more serious when the revenue became insufficient to meet the expenditures. The Sherman notes, so called, would be presented by bankers when they desired gold for export or for speculation; they would be redeemed by the government and paid out after redemption to meet its running expenses, and would be again presented for redemption in gold. They constituted an ideal mechanism for making raids upon the dwindling gold reserve.

The McKinley tariff law, however valuable its economic features, involved a daring experiment from the standpoint of revenue. It dispensed with the duty upon sugar, which has at nearly all times been the most important item in tariff taxation, and which has at times yielded a revenue well above sixty millions a year. Even during Harrison’s administration a nominal deficit had been averted by throwing the bank-note redemption and other special or miscellaneous funds into the chasm of expenditures. But, barely sufficient at the best for the needs of the government even in good times, a great deficit was sure to follow any great financial storm, and only a great deficit was needed to intensify the evil conditions and to make the treasury helpless. That financial storm speedily came after Mr. Cleveland’s inauguration.

I am aware that there is as yet no general agreement as to the cause of the panic of 1893. Some contend that commercial crises are sure to come at certain intervals, as it were by the clock, and that the natural accumulation of business errors during the twenty years that had elapsed since the panic of 1873 made this particular crisis inevitable when it came. There is reason for claiming that it was largely in the beginning a financial panic, in the nature of a penalty for much unwise financial legislation. It is certain that among the first acute symptoms was a money famine, and that, while the wheels of the mills were still turning, the banks of the great financial centres of the East suspended money payments. Others claim that the popular mandate at the election of 1892 for a radical revision of tariff duties was the substantial cause. Perhaps it would not be far from the truth to ascribe it to all three causes combined, with the last-mentioned cause the least natural and the least potent of the three.

But, whatever the cause, Mr. Cleveland was soon confronted with an enormous deficit under the operation of the McKinley Act, a deficit that was not at all repaired by the Wilson Act, after the Supreme Court had struck down that part of it imposing a tax upon incomes.

The administration had its choice between permitting the treasury to suspend gold payments and, on the other hand, securing the repeal of the silver purchasing act and ultimately purchasing gold by issuing the national bonds. Mr. Cleveland strained his relations with his party by making repeal the central feature of his policy. Then came the necessary but unpopular work of issuing bonds in time of profound peace. He exposed himself to the taunts of the opposition party and to the unrelenting hostility of his own, but he heroically performed his task, and, after throwing hundreds of millions of bonds into the quicksands, at last maintained a secure foundation for the national credit.

It is not a difficult thing to be a patriot on dress parade, to the music of bands and amid the popular acclaim. One can be that while sacrificing the people to their own momentary errors. Mr. Cleveland was not that sort of patriot. He was never a great favorite with the gallery. But in unflinching pursuit of a really patriotic purpose, in bravely incurring the odium involved in the performance of a pressing public duty, a duty the discharge of which was of momentous consequence to the country, it would not be easy in the history of all our presidents to find a parallel to Mr. Cleveland’s conduct at this particular crisis. But his heroism proved for the time being his undoing. He saved the gold standard, but he lost his party, and he became a general without an army. His party lent itself to a bitter and determined attack upon the central policy of his administration.

I have dwelt upon this instance at some length because it tends strongly to show the attitude of the Democratic party with reference to one of the most important functions of our government.

The leaders of that party now admit that the gold standard is irrevocably established. They are well qualified to bear witness to the strength of the fortress which they have made a supreme but an unavailing effort to destroy. Very likely the gold standard is firmly established, but one would need to be quite sure before voting to put in power at this early time the party which repudiated its own President for his heroic defense of it, which only four years ago declared in favor of the free coinage of silver at the heaven-born ratio, and which at its national convention only this year expressed no sort of opinion upon money until forced to do so by its candidate.

The extent to which the tariff is involved as a practical issue in the present campaign is by no means clear. After a radical declaration in favor of free trade in 1892, the Democratic party enacted the Wilson Act, which was in many of its schedules a highly protective measure. For instance, the duties upon iron and steel, in the manufacture of which to-day the most colossal of our trusts has an existence, were substantially the same under the Wilson Act as they are in the present tariff. The declaration in the St. Louis platform is less radical than that of 1892, and no one can tell what the Democratic party would attempt to do if it should succeed to the control of the presidency and of the two Houses. Judging by experience it would probably conduct a make-believe agitation, which would have all the bad effects of the threat of free trade, and wind up its demonstration by the passage of a measure similar to the Wilson Act. On the other hand, the Republican party is fairly committed to a revision of the tariff. It cannot be questioned that such an inequality has arisen in the schedules as would require the party, as the champion of protection, to undertake that friendly revision which it has always professed a willingness to make. Between a radical revision and no revision at all the former is preferable. A radical revision would involve business disturbance. No revision at all would continue some outgrown schedules and ratify and make seated many important duties which answer no just purpose of revenue or protection, and which, chiefly in consequence of developments since their adoption, as directly impose the payment of a tribute as if that were the declared purpose of the law. A deliberate and sanctioned governmental favoritism soon becomes permanent. The plunder and the confiscations of to-day become the vested interests of to-morrow. If the Republican party is true to its repeated declarations, and no party has ever been more mindful of its pledges, it will revise the tariff, bearing constantly in mind both the safety of our industrial system and justice to the man who buys. The higher wage scale prevailing in our country and a fair return upon capital actually invested should be secured, but not the solvency of grossly watered, and even aerated, stocks.

President Roosevelt’s administration has made a determined effort to enforce the anti-trust law which was regarded as an important law when it was enacted, and into which the Supreme Court has construed important and far-reaching provisions of which the great lawyers who framed the act never dreamed. And yet it may be questioned whether all the proceedings in the courts and the fear of the drastic provisions of the law have abated by a single farthing the profits which the trusts have wrung from the people. The trusts have been the subjects of much invective. They do not care what people say about them. Their feelings are not hurt by rough language, but they are keenly sensitive to whatever cuts into their profits. The degree of relationship between them and the tariff, whether that of mother and daughter, is a question I shall not discuss, but that there is no relationship at all, and that one has no influence upon the other, cannot seriously be contended. Is there any reason outside of the tariff to explain why foreign countries pay only twenty-one dollars per ton for our steel rails when our own railroads pay twenty-eight dollars ? Whatever may be the cost of a ton of steel rails, I imagine no one would claim that twenty-one dollars would not cover our present labor cost and a fair return upon actual capital invested and even a considerable additional profit to the manufacturer. But the people of our country pay seven dollars more per ton for our homemade rails than do the people abroad,because that is about the amount of the duty that we must pay in order to get the benefit of foreign competition. The obvious way to give relief from trust exactions in a case like this is to reduce the tariff.

I am aware that the notion is ridiculed that people generally consume steel rails. Perhaps not as a direct article of diet, but nearly everything that they eat and wear is borne upon railroads, and anything that increases the cost of transportation is a direct tax upon them. But steel is only an illustration. It is undeniable that there are other articles on which a reduction of duty would be followed by a reduction of price, and could be made without cutting into wages or fair profits.

With regard to the future of the Philippine Islands, it is not clear that there is even a nominal issue between the two parties. The time for this issue to have been pushed effectively was four years ago, but at that time the Democratic party coupled it with the impossible issue of the free coinage of silver. The ultimate fate of our captive, whether she shall be conceded the right of self-government, or whether, like a well-treated slave, she shall receive everything she desires except freedom, is destined to be an important question to her, as well as to us, until it shall be settled right.

The practical record of the Democratic party with reference to this question impairs the force with which it might otherwise press it. When the Paris treaty was made the Republican party was responsible for the government. It was under the pressure of events when it could not simply criticise, but must act, and it needed the restraint that comes from a vigilant and critical opposition, for in a government like ours the responsibility of the opposition party to expose relentlessly the errors of a proposed policy is not less than the responsibility for action upon the party in control.

The Democrats at that time unquestionably had the power to force into our title to the Philippines a pledge similar to the Teller Resolution which afterwards stood like a lion in our path when we were licking our jaws for Cuba, and to which Cuba is to-day indebted for her position as an independent nation. But they did not exercise their power. They resisted the treaty just enough to preserve the appearance of an opposition for campaign purposes and supported it just enough to put it through. A sufficient number of their Senators to secure the ratification of the treaty voted for it in response to the solicitation of Mr. Bryan, who was then the leader. That party must, therefore, share the responsibility for the political relations which were established between the Philippines and the United States.

Time has not dealt kindly with some of the arguments that were urged in favor of the annexation of the Philippines. Gentlemen who satisfied their judgment by citing the annexation of the contiguous continent of Louisiana, which now forms so splendid a part of the American republic, as a precedent for annexing those “sprinkled isles” upon the other side of the globe, must be convinced by this time that there is a material difference between the two cases. And then the “key to the commerce of the Orient” has not apparently opened those markets to us.

But whatever the errors of the past, the present has a most important problem. The ultimate relation of the archipelago to the United States is yet to be decided. Self-government, which, as Mr. Parker well said, must mean independence, is in harmony not merely with the principles of our own government, but with all that is most glorious in the history of the Republican party. That party came into being upon the announced principle that the Constitution carried freedom into the territories, and that Congress had no power, in defiance of that instrument, to establish slavery there. There is an inconsistency, too palpable to need to be pointed out, between that foundation principle of the party and the principle involved in our government of the Philippines, that Congress may rule over them free from all constitutional restraints. I prefer to believe that the Republican party will ultimately act in harmony with its forty years of unrelenting opposition to the idea of slavery, individual or national, rather than with the policy into which it deviated under the impulse of the war passion. It is certainly making an effort to fit the people of the Philippines for conducting their own affairs. Mr. Roosevelt declared in his first annual message to Congress that it was our purpose to fit them for self-government after the fashion of the really free nations. This could certainly mean nothing less than that he believed in ultimate independence, for he certainly would not make it a national policy to cultivate in the Philippine people qualities which were to remain unexercised, and to create aspirations which we did not propose to satisfy.

It is yet open to the Republican party to adopt the policy of independence, and there is quite as much probability that the architect of a great policy would modify it, even radically, as that an opposition party would do so. In the architect it would appear to be a perfecting of the policy in the light of subsequent events, and there would be ample scope for the breed of imaginative orators, always ready to unfold the emotions of a situation, to claim that the change was not merely a natural evolution, but a part of the profound original plan. But a radical change by the opposition party would appear like repeal. It would expose itself to that species of effective, but not costly rhetoric which finds its climax in “hauling down the flag,” and it would be quite as likely to seek shelter from the performance of an apparently unpopular duty under the guise of recognizing “an accomplished fact.”

The least important result of our dominion over the Philippines is the greatly increased cost of our government, but that has reached proportions where it must receive attention from its important relation to our fiscal policy. So long as we retain those islands it would be criminal neglect for us not to provide for their defense. We cannot hold territory upon remote seas and near the theatre of the greatest international conflicts of the age, and not be prepared for attack, unless we intend to invite humiliation and war. Our increased naval and military expenditures are directly due to our possession of the Philippines, and will be necessary without considerable reduction so long as we hold them. The Dingley Act has justified the prophecies of the sagacious economist whose name it bears, and it is now providing ample revenue for the needs of the government, having reference to the conditions existing at the time of the enactment of the law. But our revenue is insufficient to support us with our colonial appendages. We shall be compelled to choose between reimposing the socalled war stamp taxes and cutting down our expenses. The latter is not possible to any great extent so long as we continue our Philippine policy.

Our treasury has so large a surplus that a deficit might continue for some time with the beneficial result of returning to the people money that had been needlessly taken from them by taxation, only to be hoarded in the banks without interest. But that is an unnatural condition. The revenue must, as a rule, substantially equal the expenditures. When Louis XVI chose to follow “Madame Deficit” rather than Necker,he elected to have the French Revolution. I imagine that the party that proposes to reimpose the stamp taxes in time of peace in order to avoid acting in harmony with the principles of our government will see the handwriting on the wall. We must change our relations with the Philippines or readjust our system of taxation.

The Republican candidate for the Presidency is a man of fine public spirit and of high ideals of government developed by twenty laborious years of important service. That creature of carnage and war, of blood and iron, with which we are diverted, is largely the offspring of the imagination of some of his eulogists. My always eloquent and usually sensible friend, Frank Black, saw fit to present Mr. Roosevelt to the Chicago Convention as the incarnation of war. Ignoring the real forces of civilization, the forces that sweeten the spirit of man and enormously increase his efficiency, he chose the bludgeon as the emblem of genuine history, and made to breathe again the spirit of the Stone Age, — that epoch of history makers who went about with clubs and “did things” whenever they could get a crack at the skull of a neighbor. According to this view General Grant probably averted a good deal of glorious history, instead of making it, when he established the Geneva arbitration; and, rather than build a home for the Hague tribunal, Mr. Carnegie would better rear a temple of war with ever open gates. The warrant for all this appears to be that during the Spanish war Mr. Roosevelt was the volunteer colonel of a thousand volunteers — an admirable soldiery — who bravely did all the fighting fate permitted them to do, and who, in the entire war, barely lost a score of men killed in battle. Mr. Black has easily struck the climax of the fanfaronade following a war between a cripple and a Colossus. After a halfdozen years of boastful exaggeration and “world power” fustian, which have brought us to the point of bullying and beating our little brothers among nations, the time has come for the republic to resume its serenity and to stand erect again in the majestic spirit of the old America. Or soon our august greatness of soul will be gone, and we shall be but the spirit of a pigmy inhabiting the body of a giant.