selves repeatedly capable of acts of heroism, but law-breaking was countenanced, vice was protected, and bosses levied regular tribute upon the activities of the underworld. The Lexow Commission in New York stripped the concealment from the police system in that city and made possible in 1894 one of the spasmodic revolts of decent society against corruption. Theodore Roosevelt became police commissioner there under the new Administration, and with Jacob Riis as his Boswell sought to remove the force from politics. The condition in the New York police department differed only in degree from that in other cities. In the rural districts there was no organized police at all and public order depended upon the law-abiding instincts of the community reënforced by an occasional sheriff's posse.

Outside of half a dozen larger cities there existed no permanent force capable of quelling serious outbreaks. When

The militia and regular army

trouble occurred the governor was called upon to summon the militia to the scene of the disturbance, but the militia was commonly so unprepared and ill-disciplined that its presence before a mob made the situation worse. Only in the great industrial States in which the calls for strike service were relatively numerous was the militia well enough trained to be of use. Since strikes constituted almost the only occasion for its use, it easily became an object of the distrust of organized labor. In one of the strikes of 1893 the local controversy approached a condition of a petty civil war when a sheriff's posse in Colorado sought to quiet striking miners in Cripple Creek and Governor Waite called out the militia to arrest the posse.

The United States Army, as the last recourse for defense in an emergency, ranked high in public esteem. The regular soldiers were disciplined and self-restrained and aroused fewer antipathies than militiamen. The army was not materially changed from its condition when Hayes withdrew it from the Southern States. In 1894 it comprised 2136 officers and 25,772 men, and the bureaus in the War Department which directed it had performed their customary

régime with little change through two decades. The line of great commanders was running down. The title of General of the Army, conferred upon Grant and Sherman, lapsed with them, although it was temporarily revived for Grant's benefit shortly before his death. After Grant and Sherman the command of the army passed into Sheridan's hands, and on his death in 1888 the list of great names ends. Schofield, and then Miles, exercised command for the next fifteen years, but there were no more great heroes of the Civil War to lend the luster of their names to the office of commanding general.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Benjamin Harrison, shortly after his retirement, published a popular description of the National Government in This Country of Ours (1897); Henry Demarest Lloyd, Wealth against Commonwealth (1894), is an attack upon business organization in general and the trusts in particular. James Howard Bridge, The Inside History of the Carnegie Steel Company (1903), is an interesting special study, as are Carroll D. Wright, "The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers," in Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. VII, and Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography (1920). T. S. Adams and H. L. Sumner, Labor Problems (1905), is a convenient summary. Brand Whitlock, Forty Years of It (1914), gives a sympathetic view of Governor Altgeld's problems. Charles A. Beard, Contemporary American History (1914), devotes much space to a discussion of the growing power of the courts. The basic figures for the silver controversy are in Secretary of the Treasury, Annual Report, 1893.

CHAPTER XXI

THE DEMOCRATIC SCHISM

IN his second inaugural address Cleveland laid greatest stress upon two problems before his Administration; one, the immediate need, was the maintenance of a "sound and stable currency"; the second, which was the main purpose of his campaign, was to correct "the injustice of maintaining protection for protection's sake." Before it was possible to take up his major task, the emergency of the panic of 1893 drove him to demand the repeal of the Silver Purchase Act. This was accomplished on November 1, by which date the most acute period of the crisis was over. When Congress reassembled in December to consider the tariff bill, which William L. Wilson was ready to report, the organism of the party was so wrenched because of the silver controversy that it was in no condition to function smoothly upon tariff revision.

campaign pledges

At least four sets of obstructive facts stood before the President as he prepared to induce his party to redeem its Democratic pledge to revise the tariff. The political consequences of industrial unrest told against him. The direct effect of the repeal of the Sherman Act was to weaken the party unity from within. The growth of Populism operated from without the party to seduce Democrats from their allegiance, and finally the panic itself was a weapon to be used with telling effect by the Republican Party now in opposition.

Industrial unrest had contributed to Cleveland's election, but its continuance after his inauguration worked to his detriment. The mass of unemployed workmen tended to hold him responsible for their distress. The promptness with which the President intervened during the Pullman strikes brought down upon his head the wrath of labor radicals and of liberal Democrats. John P. Altgeld, of

Illinois, gave voice to the protest against what he believed to be federal usurpation in State affairs. He had already drawn attention to his extreme liberalism by pardoning a group of the anarchists convicted after the Chicago riots of 1886. His protests revealed a lack of unity within the Democratic Party. The character of the unrest is illustrated by the movement originated by Jacob S. Coxey, of Massillon, Ohio, who invited the unemployed to start with him on Easter Sunday, 1894, to march upon Washington and to carry to Congress in person their demands for relief. Little detachments of "Coxey's army" started from numerous parts of the United States and ultimately arrived in Washington, where the Capitol police arrested them for walking on the grass around the Capitol. Their protest fizzled to the level of comic opera, but the grievance did not evaporate with the movement.

Effect of

the repeal of the Sher

man Act

The repeal of the Sherman Act snapped many of the party relationships that had been prepared with reference to tariff revision. Until 1893 the party had tried to avoid bringing the silver issue into politics, and had formulated ambiguous and inconsistent platform planks upon the subject. The desire for free silver, however, was nearly unanimous among Southern and Western Democrats, many of whom lost their confidence in Cleveland when they thought of him as the agent of Wall Street and in league with the "gold-bugs." The appeal of Populism was strengthened by the success of the People's Party in the election of 1892. This was most marked among the Western States, where fusion tickets were placed in the field and elected by a Populist-Democratic combination. The program of Populism embraced a long list of genuine reforms, overshadowed by the demand for silver inflation. It was cardinal doctrine with the Populists that both great parties were derelict in their duties and sold out the interests of the common people. Professional politicians were under the ban, as having been guilty of deception and betrayal. The Populists who were nominated for office were, as a conse

Successes

of the

Populists

quence, inexperienced men. Their honesty and devotion to reform were generally unquestioned, but their experience in the practical management of government was slight. They at least were a protest to double-dealing. “It has become much the fashion to run candidates on two or more diverse platforms, so they can be for a gold standard in one locality, free coinage of silver in another, and something else elsewhere," wrote an Iowa Congressman upon the general situation. In their conduct in office the inexperience of Populist officials made them the butt of Eastern paragraphers. Waite, of Colorado, whose frequent use of militia and whose high-flown language opened him to attack, was perhaps most widely known. But Peffer, of Kansas, and "Sockless" Jerry Simpson were burlesqued and ridiculed, while their sincere attempts to carry out the Populist reforms were sneered at and opposed. Said the New York Nation, which was never able to appreciate either their provocation or their aims, "the whole course of Populist reasoning and action in Kansas has betokened rascality rather than ignorance."

The panic that Harrison evaded with dexterity and passed on to Cleveland was chiefly due to a long train of events for which neither party as such was responsible. It was used, however, as a reason for attacking the Democratic Party, which was in office when it broke. In later years,

as Republican stump speakers became more hazy in their recollection of the sequence of events, it was habitually charged that the panic of 1893 was due to the Democratic tariff of 1894. Burrows, of Michigan, expressed the same idea before that tariff was passed: "I confidently assert that if the election of 1892 had resulted in the retention of the Republican Party in power, accompanied as it would have been with the assurance of the continuance of the American policy of Protection, the effect upon the public revenues as well as the general prosperity of the country would have been entirely reversed."

The natural consequence of the panic made tariff revision difficult if not impossible. The national surplus disappeared,