The Globe Republican

Cleveland's tariff views.

The President's Position and the Chicago Platform.

A recent article in the Philadelphia Ledger concerning the tariff views of President Cleveland has awakened a good deal of discussion in political circles. The editor of the Ledger is known to hold intimate relations with the president, and its columns have on several occasions been made a medium of communication with the public. It is assumed, therefore, that its statement as to his attitude on the tariff question is authoritative as really so as if made by the president personally. It is not surprising that the Ledger manifesto should have occasioned widespread amazement. It attributes to the president views which are directly antagonistic to those of his party and flatly opposed to his own repeatedly declared opinions.

The Ledger says:

"Upon the silver question it is known to everyone that there is no one in authority, no one in the country, whose financial policy is safer or sounder than Mr. Cleveland's, and it is, if not absolutely known, at least confidently believed, that his economic policy is opposed to any revision of the tariff which will injure the people's industrial interests or jeopardize their prosperity. Mr. Cleveland is known by his own declarations, which are conclusive, to be favorable to a revision of the McKinley act, but he is also known by his own declarations to be unfavorable to free trade or to anything like free trade, or to anything that would be unjust or harmful to our great manufacturing interests."

The democratic policy, as declared at Chicago, antagonized all protective duties as robbery and as without warrant in the constitution. The democratic national platform demanded that the McKinley act, designed for the encouragement and protection of our great manufacturing and industrial interests, should be repealed, and pledged the party to make its repeal a special and immediate duty. Mr. Cleveland, accepting his nomination on that platform, emphasized his approval of its principles in a carefully digested letter in which he denounced protection as "extortion," as oppressive to the people and as "directly favorable to private and selfish gain," and explicitly affirmed that tariff legislation can only find justification in the necessities of the government. If any candidate for president ever occupied, by his own avowals, an attitude of hostility to the great system of manufacturing industries which has grown up under republican tariff legislation, and to the protective policy which now exists, that candidate was Mr. Cleveland. His election was urged specifically on that ground by the revenue reformers and free traders of the country. He received the votes of all such reformers and free traders. He received as well the votes of thousands of workingmen who had been deluded by his appeals and those of his advocates into the belief that they were suffering from evils which he would cure by a reversal of our tariff policy. His election was hailed at home and abroad as the triumph of free-trade ideas. These facts are known of all. They are part and parcel of the history of the times.

Is it any wonder, then, that a statement, semi-officially made, that while in favor of tariff revision, Mr. Cleveland is "unfavorable to anything that would be unjust or harmful to our great manufacturing interests," should provoke wide amazement--that democratic newspapers should receive it with incredulous surprise?

It can hardly be otherwise than that, if Mr. Cleveland's position shall prove to be what it is thus declared to be, serious divisions will arise in the democratic ranks as to tariff legislation. The great majority of the party leaders are in full sympathy with the Chicago platform. They honestly desire the extermination of the protective system, root and branch. They are unwilling now to acknowledge that they won the presidency by false pretenses. These men will not tamely acquiesce in the proposed abandonment of the vantage they have gained by long years of stubborn fighting. It may be they will not be able to hold their ground--we hope they will not be able--but they will not surrender, without a desperate struggle, the principle which they regard as fundamental in the party faith.

Republicans, of course, will find genuine satisfaction in this possible democratic break-up on the tariff question. The matter, however, has a higher than a partisan significance. It involves the welfare of great national interests which the accepted democratic policy menaces with disintegration and ruin. The conservation of these interests should be the first concern of republicans. If that result can be reached through democratic dissensions, precipitated by the president, then surely these dissensions are to be welcomed. We may have little respect for the consistency of the man who, once lifted to place, can repudiate the declarations by which he climbed into power; but if that insincerity inures, in the inevitable logic of events, to the advantage of the public, we can well afford to moderate our partisan criticisms of the spectacle of political tergiversation thus presented, in a keen enjoyment of the continued practical triumph of principles for which we stand, and have always stood, in our politics.--Frank Leslie's Weekly.

Reports from democratic authorities indicate more positively from week to week that the crowning feature of the coming democratic revenue measure will be the sugar tax. The sugar tax is now advocated by the leading democratic organs of the country, and daily prophecies are sent out from democratic sources that the administration is as favorable to the sugar duty in 1893 as it was at the time of Grover Cleveland's presidential messages in 1885 and 1887.-Minneapolis Tribune.

Mills are closing up, ten thousand men have been thrown out of employment in the northwestern iron mines, lake vessels are tying up, and disaster is everywhere. Silver has something to do with it, but the specter of free trade a hundred times more.-Philadelphia Press.

The democrats seem determined to sacrifice Gov. Boies' gray hairs in their vain efforts to save the old hulk of Iowa democracy.-Iowa State Register.