first to take place under the act of February 3, 1887, and the first in the history of the government under the Constitution which was regulated by a general law, and did not require previous concurrent action by the two Houses of Congress for the time being. The joint convention for counting the votes was held in the hall of the House of Representatives on February 13, 1889. The proceedings were devoid of striking incident. Mr. Cox, of New York, called attention to a slight deviation from the precise requirements of the law. It appears that Mr. Ingalls, the President pro tempore of the Senate, who presided, did not "call for objections, if any," after the reading of each certificate, as directed by section four of the law (see p. 454). The official report of the proceedings does not state whether or not the presiding officer changed his method after attention was called to the matter. When the vote of Indiana was reported, the vote of the President-elect's own State, there was applause, which was quickly suppressed. Mr. Manderson, the first of the Senate tellers, reported the state of the vote in detail, and in a summary; the presiding officer repeated the summary, and added a formula, drawn from the law, that this announcement of the state of the vote "is, by law, a sufficient declaration" that Benjamin Harrison, of the State of Indiana, had been elected President, and Levi P. Morton, of the State of New York, Vice-President, for the ensuing term.

XXX

CLEVELAND'S SECOND ELECTION

THE victory of the Republicans, although narrow, was complete. A safe majority of the electoral vote was supplemented by a meagre majority in both Houses of Congress. A factional quarrel among the Democrats of Delaware threw the legislature of that State into the hands of the Republicans, who thus regained the one Senator, lost in Virginia, needed to give them ascendency in the upper house. The House of Representatives was so closely divided between the two parties as to give some ground for the apprehension that certain Democratic governors in southern States would revise and amend the returns for Congressmen, and withhold certificates from candidates who apparently had received a plurality of votes. In one case only did a governor assume authority to pass judicially upon the county returns, and his act was not sufficient to overcome the Republican majority. The victorious party felt itself returned permanently to power in the country; and the exultant remark was commonly made that, "if we behave ourselves well," the Republicans could not be shaken from their hold upon the government for twenty years to come.

The four years' term of Benjamin Harrison which followed was a period of as bitter party strife as the country has ever seen. It was crowded with events that had a direct bearing upon the ensuing election. The Republicans proceeded to carry through their measures with perfect confidence that they had the people behind them; the Democrats waged an aggressive and unrelenting war upon them. In the end it was evident that the dominant party had exposed itself to attack at too many points. The favor of the people was withdrawn when the administration was at its mid-point, and given to the opposition by an overwhelming majority. At the close of the four years the control of every department of the government, except the judicial, passed into the hands of the Democrats,

where it had not been placed since the election of James Buchanan in 1856.

When the Fifty-first Congress met, in December, 1889, the extremely small Republican majority in the House of Representatives, as elected in 1888, was reinforced by the addition of five members from newly admitted States. The two parties had been engaged in a competition for the favor of the people of the Territories clamoring for admission to the Union. For several years Republicans had urged the passage of an enabling act for Dakota. The Democrats, knowing that the proposed new State would be against them, had prevented its admission until the Territory became populous enough, as it was territorially large enough, to claim division, and admission as two States. Then the Democrats proposed to offset the two Dakotas by admitting at the same time Washington and Montana, both of which they expected to control. The Republicans feared that opposition to the admission of Washington and Montana - which they knew would be futile in any would insure their becoming Democratic States. Accordingly they gave their support to the "omnibus bill, which became a law in February, 1889. All four of the States were carried by the Republicans at the first election, and added eight votes to the strength of the party in the Senate, and five - South Dakota elected two members-to the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. But after these five votes were added, the majority in the House was still too small to be effective. The chance absence of a few members might easily convert it into a minority. Moreover, the rules of the House and the to that timeuniform interpretation of the quorum clause of the Constitution rendered a narrow majority powerless for affirmative action in the face of determined "filibustering."

event

Mr. Thomas B. Reed, of Maine, who was chosen Speaker, had long held two views directly opposed to accepted parliamentary law. He maintained that the vote of a member was not the only method of revealing his presence in the House as a part of a constitutional quorum; that the House itself, or the Speaker as the organ of the House, might take cognizance of his physical presence and count him as a present member. Under the previously accepted theory, the ruling party could pass no motion if, not mustering a full quorum of its own members, the opposition unanimously refused to vote. Mr.

Speaker Reed acted upon his own theory, prior to the adop tion of any rules, by counting as present non-voting members who were otherwise taking part in the proceedings. The other point whereon he differed from earlier parliamentary authorities was that of dilatory motions. Congress had long before limited the "freedom of debate" by a rule which restricted a member's right to occupy the floor on any motion to the space of one hour. It had limited his right to make motions by the "previous question." But it had left open for his use certain privileged motions which, made alternately and decided in each case by a roll-call, would put a complete and indefinite stop to public business. The Speaker proposed a new code of rules of parliamentary procedure, which included a recognition of the right to "count a quorum," an absolute prohibition of dilatory motions, and some minor amendments of the current parliamentary law. The code was debated with great asperity, but was finally adopted by a party vote. It made the majority masters of the House, and enabled them to pass measures which never would have been brought to a vote under the old system. It added greatly to the power of the Speaker in the conduct of business, and to his control over legislation. Mr. Speaker Reed's strong will and undaunted courage, in enforcing his new rules against violent opposition, earned for him with the Democratic members the title of "Czar." Not a few of them admitted that his position was sound and logical, while they condemned his forceful maintenance of it. The Republicans applauded; and the whole country saw afterward that it was upon him, far more than upon any other person, that the responsibility rested for things done and left undone by the Fifty-first Congress.

The Republicans proceeded, promptly and mercilessly, to decide contested elections by ejecting Democrats and giving the places to members of their own party, thus increasing their effective majority. The fact that the number, both of contested seats and of members displaced, was unusually large they explained by asserting that fraud had been unusually rife in the elections and returns. The opposition accused the majority of using its power to override and reverse the will of the people expressed at the polls. In many cases the Democrats refused to answer to their names when the resolutions unseating their members were put to vote; some of them were counted, though not voting, to make up the quorum.

Both parties were committed, by platform and by the promises of their candidates and leaders, to a revision of customs duties. A large part of the session was occupied in the elaboration of a tariff bill. It was reported by Mr. McKinley, of Ohio, chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means, in April; was passed by the House of Representatives in May; was passed by the Senate in September; and, after an adjustment of the differences between the two Houses by a conference committee, was sent to the President, by whom it was signed on the 1st of October. The act was popularly styled the "McKinley Bill," and as such played a great part in the political events of the next three years. The principle of the bill was to lighten the burden borne by the people by removing altogether the duty on sugar, the article most productive of revenue of all commodities entered at the custom-houses, and at the same time to make the system of "protection more thorough by raising the rates of duty on all foreign articles which, under the previous tariff, could compete successfully with similar articles of domestic production. The American sugar-planters were compensated for the withdrawal of tariff protection by means of a bounty on their production. The Tariff Act of 1890 went beyond any previous measure of the kind in its levy of duty on agricultural productions imported from abroad. The avowed intention of its partisans was to give the farmer protection equal to that enjoyed by the manufacturer. The McKinley Act aroused the unmeasured opposition of the Democrats, who could find no words adequate to express their detestation of it, and of what they denounced as the bad faith of the Republicans. In their view the people had demanded a substantial reduction of the tariff, and had given the Republican party a commission to carry out their will. That party had solicited and obtained the privilege of making the reduction in a spirit friendly to the protective system and to the manufacturers. Now, so the Democrats declared, the party in power had violated its pledge by bringing forward a proposition in which increases of the rates of duty were far more numerous than reductions. But the Republicans were unmoved by the criticism, and persisted in their course. Some of their leaders made no secret of an opinion that the measure was too radical. In particular, Mr. Blaine, the Secretary of State, expressed the opinion openly, and directed attention to the fact that while the bill was