Page images
PDF
EPUB

that the passion for land-ownership and for settlement and colonization and the building up of States is not yet extinct in the American people. The date fixed for the sale of the lands was the 16th of September, 1893. There was a great rush for the new territory, and about one hundred thousand settlers suddenly threw themselves into it with a zeal of competition for homes that amounted almost to battle.

CHAPTER L.

ON the 30th of October the so-called Sherman law was repealed by Congress. This might well appear to be the last of that series of acts which, extending over a period of twenty years, had finally resulted in the establishment of the single gold standard of values in the United States. It seemed that the international combination of the gold interests of two continents had finally triumphed, to the incalculable disadvantage of the producing classes in all civilized nations. Step by step, the conspiracy had gone on, until at last the bimetallic constitutional dollar of the law and the contract had been adroitly done away in the interest and under the dictation of the fund-holding classes of Europe and America, and to the woful hurt of the rest of mankind.

All this had been done under the name and in the guise of upholding the national credit. A change of all contracts --such as a king of the Middle Ages could not have made among his subjects without driving them to revolutionwas effected by a series of intrigues the history of which as hereafter written will constitute the most terrible arraignment of American statesmanship to be found in all our national annals. The first, most obvious, and most disastrous result of the work was the precipitation and intensifying of the financial panic and universal prostration of business, the parallel of which had never before been witnessed in our country. The tariff legislation of this epoch, by un

settling values, contributed not a little to the overwhelming disaster of the times. Whether the tariff reform advocated by Cleveland and the Democratic party was or was not a thing wise to be undertaken, certain it is that values were, for the time, ruinously affected by the acts of the current Congress.

This work, coming on top of the demonetization of silver, completed the sorrow of the American people. As for the tariff legislation, that took form in a bill prepared by Representative William L. Wilson, of West Virginia, which, though not a measure of free trade and not a measure founded on the principle of a tariff for revenue only, nevertheless included as much of these two principles as the expediency of the hour would bear. The Wilson Bill was passed by the House of Representatives, and transmitted to the Senate. In that body the monopolies had so great influence that a measure proposed by Senator Gorman, including a tariff on coal and iron and a differential duty on refined sugar, was substituted for the Wilson Bill, and forced upon the reluctant House. Such was the odium created by this measure, which was adopted on the 13th of August, that the elections following hard after went overwhelmingly against the Democrats.

While this legislative work was in progress, the industrial depression and discontent and suffering of the people led to the most alarming consequences. Strikes and lockouts became the order of the day. Business failures resounded through the land like the falling of a forest. Commerce virtually ceased. Presently, in the latter part of April, 1894, a hundred and thirty thousand miners stopped work and were joined immediately afterward by fully twenty-five thousand others. Nearly all the coke plants in western Pennsylvania were closed. Meanwhile, the discontented and half-starved people began to show their desires and

passions in a way never hitherto displayed in the United States.

Those who had been thrown out of employment began to combine, without knowing why, into what was known as the army of the Commonweal. One such army, under the leadership of J. S. Coxey, of Massillon, Ohio, marched on Washington City, to demand employment from the national government. Another band came on from the far West, under the leadership of their so-called "General" Kelley. Railway cars were appropriated here and there for transportation. Collisions occurred between divisions of the army and various bodies of troops. On the 30th of May these men of the Commonweal made a demonstration on the steps of the Capitol at Washington. The authorities. of the District, on the alert for some excuse, found the leaders of the army on the Capitol grounds in a place forbidden. Coxey and Carl Browne were arrested for trespassing, and were convicted and imprisoned. During the whole summer of 1894 these strange movements of the under men of the United States continued.

Meanwhile, riots broke Uniontown, Pennsylvania. persons were killed there.

out in the coke regions near On the 4th of April, 1894, six Serious disturbances among the

miners occurred in Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Illinois and Kansas. In many places the State militia was called out, and petty ights occurred. At Cripple Creek, in Colorado, a great riot took place, and prominent citizens were seized and held for some time as hostages.

Hard after this came a prodigious scandal in the politics of New York City. There a vile system had been established under the auspices of the Tammany Society. There came at length a revolt of public sentiment. Rev. Charles H. Parkhurst, a noted preacher of the metropolis, led a public crusade against the iniquitous government of the city. It

transpired that the saloons and disorderly houses of New York had entered into corrupt combination with the police officials, paying them for the privilege of carrying on their vicious and unlawful pursuits without disturbance. Bribery and blackmail had spread through all the purlieus of the city. The Senate of New York appointed a committee to investigate the shocking condition of the metropolis, and placed at the head Senator Lexow, whose name passed into the history of the day. The revelations made by the committee were astounding. A municipal election came on, and the Tammany Society was routed. A People's ticket was successful against the most powerful political organization in America, backed as it was by an average majority of sixty thousand votes. For the time at least a better state of affairs was brought about in the leading American city.

The fall elections of 1894 went overwhelmingly against the Democratic party. It were hard to say whether the triumph of that party only two years previously or its disaster at the middle of the Cleveland administration was greater. As a matter of fact, the election of Cleveland in 1892 was not a great indorsement of the Democratic party. Neither was the overthrow of that party, two years afterwards, a popular indorsement of the Republican party. Both of these great elections were in the nature of rebukes administered by dissatisfied and ultimately independent people, first to one party, and then to another, in proportion as each was seen to be virtually in league with oppressive monopolies and other baleful influences and conditions in American politics, and against the common people.

The beginning of the second administration of Cleveland was troubled with a complication relative to Hawaii, During the recent Republican ascendency in the government, an American party had appeared among the Hawaiians

« PreviousContinue »