protect the State of Illinois from "domestic violence," but to guard the property of the United States, to prevent obstruction of the United States mails, and to enforce the judgments of the United States courts as against illegal combinations. Authority for this was found in the law. of April 20, 1871.26 The President answered Governor Altgeld, explaining the matter very briefly; only to receive another and very long despatch, arguing about the relations of State and Federal authority, and still missing the point as completely as before. To this second telegram, Mr. Cleveland sent (July 6th) a short response which ended the discussion:

"While I am still persuaded that I have neither transcended my authority or duty in the emergency that confronts us, it seems to me that in this hour of danger and public distress, discussion may well give way to active efforts on the part of all in authority to restore obedience to law and to protect life and property."

or con

President Cleveland's course in sending troops to Chicago against the protest of the State's executive, and in using the army elsewhere to prevent obstruction of the 26" In all cases where insurrection, domestic violence, spiracies in any State shall so obstruct or hinder the execution of the laws thereof and of the United States, or whenever any such insurrection, violence, . . or conspiracy shall oppose or obstruct the laws of the United States or the due execution thereof, . . . it shall be lawful for the President and it shall be his duty to take such measures by the employment of . . . the land or naval forces of the United States ... as he may deem necessary for the suppression of such insurrection."

The suppression of the so-called Whiskey Insurrection in Pennsylvania, in 1794, by President Washington was really a quasi-precedent for Mr. Cleveland's action. The legal forms adopted in ordering the despatch of troops at this time were followed by the officers of the Government in 1894-just a century later. Cf. Schouler, History of the United States, i. pp. 275-280 (New York, 1898).

mail-routes, was, on the whole, generally approved by public opinion and by Congress. A great deal of the comment made upon it was, however, based upon a misapprehension of the facts. Many persons then imagined, and many still believe, that the President put a new and bold construction upon his own powers, and that in consequence the functions of the Executive were by his action substantially enlarged. Such, however, was not the case. He was merely doing what he was empowered and even required to do by statute—a statute originally enacted under President Grant, and aimed at the Ku Klux Klan. Hence both the States' Rights Democrats, like Governor Altgeld, who condemned him, and the advocates of centralisation, who applauded him, did so with insufficient knowledge. If he deserved praise at all, it was not because of a new precedent which he established, for he established none; but for his rude courage in using, through a sense of duty, his statutory powers in a way that was certain to intensify the hatred of him which had by this time come to be almost a religion in the Western States.

The serious constitutional question which the strike of 1894 brought into prominence concerned the judiciary rather than the Executive. "Government by injunction " was a phrase that now came into general use. The Interstate Commerce Law of 1887, and the Sherman AntiTrust Law of 1890, had both been framed with a view to checking the power of the corporations. Clever lawyers, however, had most ingeniously converted these two acts into instruments to protect the railway corporations against attack. If an engineer left his post, or if the crew of a train deserted it, this was held to be a conspiracy in restraint of commerce. A United States Circuit Court had issued a "blanket " injunction against all the em

ployés of the Northern Pacific Road, forbidding them to strike. As to Mr. Debs and his associates, they had been enjoined from inciting men to strike. On December 14th, they were brought before Judge Woods in Chicago, and sentenced-Debs to six months' imprisonment and the others to three months-for contempt of court. This extension of the enjoining power was contrary to the whole spirit and practice of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence as hitherto understood. By the new procedure, a judge defined in advance the nature of an offence, and by injunction forbade the commission of it by certain specified persons. If they disobeyed the injunction, they were brought before the judge and fined or imprisoned, not directly for the act itself, but for contempt of court. In this way, the judge became also the accuser, and the accused lost the right of a jury trial. Many of the most conservative publicists in the East were alarmed by this alarming stretch of the judicial power. In the case of Mr. Debs, the principle at issue was admirably summed up in these words:

"If Debs has been violating the law, let him be indicted, tried by a jury, and punished. Let him not be made the victim of an untenable court order and deprived of his liberty entirely within the discretion of a judge. If the precedent now established is to stand, there is no limit to the power which the judiciary may establish over the citizen." 27

The action of Judge Woods in sentencing Debs was, however, sustained by a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court handed down on May 27, 1895, and he served his term in prison. Yet it is to be noted that the indictments for conspiracy found against him in legal form

Springfield Republican, quoted by Andrews op. cit. p. 342.

by a Federal Grand Jury were afterwards dismissed. The report of a Commission appointed by President Cleveland 28 to investigate the origin of the great strike was full of deep significance. This Commission found in the Railway Managers' Association an example of "the persistent and shrewdly devised plans of corporations to overreach their limitations and to usurp indirectly powers and rights not contemplated in their charters." It found that neither the Railway Union, nor any general combination of railway employés had been planned, until the railway managers had set the example. In the judgment of the Commission, the evils of intensive combination must in the end be met by government control of such corporations as have a public or quasi-public character. The report was widely read, and its unquestioned facts and dispassionate deductions impressed themselves upon the minds of thousands. More and more was it becoming evident that the proper form of resistance to the glacierlike power of consolidated capital, was not through strikes or other efforts of voluntary associations, which tended too readily to promote disorder, but rather through the Federal Government itself, using all its latent and immense resources to protect its citizens impartially.

28 In July, 1894. The members of this Commission were Carroll D. Wright of Massachusetts, John D. Kernan of New York and Nicholas E. Worthington of Illinois. See the President's message of December 3, 1894.

CHAPTER IX

THE BOND SALES AND VENEZUELA

WHILE the Wilson Bill was dragging its slow way through Congress, and while the fierce struggle against the railways in the West was being fought out to the bitter end, another highly controversial question had arisen to plague the President and to widen still further the breach between him and the majority of his party. Throughout the entire four years of the second Cleveland administration, the sensitive nerve of the Government lay in the condition of the Treasury; and it throbbed painfully in response to every event of serious import, whether this related to domestic politics or to international affairs. Here, again, the makeshifts and compromises of the past broke down completely, and the President was forced to take upon himself the whole burden of a responsibility which his predecessors had managed to evade. The events now to be narrated are those concerning which the sharpest differences of opinion existed at the time. They obscured in the mind of the people all the other acts of the administration. They stirred millions of Americans to a pitch of acrimonious frenzy for which there are few parallels in our history. And in the end they shivered and rent the Democratic party until it cast aside its old traditions and, while retaining its historic name, stood forth transformed into the champion of new causes and new political ideals.

It has already been mentioned in these pages that the Treasury's gold reserve of $100,000,000 was intended to