“Men whose capital is invested in productive enterprises, who take the risks of business, men who expend their capital and energy in the development of our resources, are in favor of the maintenance of the protective system. The farmer, the rice-grower, the miner, the vast army of wage-earners from one end of the country to the other, the chief producers of wealth, men whose capital is their brain and muscle, who aspire to better their condition and elevate themselves and their fellows; the young man whose future is yet before him, and which he must carve out with his hand and head, who is without the aid of fortune or of a long ancestral line—these are our steadfast allies in this great contest for the preservation of the American system. Experience and results in our own country are the best advisers, and they vindicate beyond the possibilities of dispute the worth and wisdom of the system.”
There were members enough on the Democratic side of carry it through, though by a perilously small majority.
The senate, however, could not be brought to an approval, and the Mills bill failed there.
That, however, was but the beginning of William McKinley’s victory. So strong a case had he made for protection that in 1888 his party leaders had been roused to appreciate the stupendous interests involved in the issue. They ceased to temporize, to avoid, to “trim.” They had been on the defensive for twenty years. They took in 1888 the aggressive, made protection the issue, named General Harrison as their candidate, and echoing William McKinley’s arguments in every school district of the nation, achieved a splendid victory.
But it was wholly due to the wisdom and foresight, the ability and eloquence of Major William McKinley, of Ohio.
Then came his crowning work. That was the measure which has taken its place in the history of the nation as “the McKinley Tariff Law.” It was adopted in May, 1890, and took effect October 6 of the same year.
There is no royal road to success, no short cut-off to eminence. Whatever is of great worth must cost great labor. William McKinley had put into his preparation for that work all the years of his adult life. He knew the subject as no other man in the nation knew it. And when, as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee at last he was commissioned to write a tariff bill, he gave himself wholly and utterly to the task. No laborer in the mills which his policy safeguarded put in so many hours daily as did William McKinley in the preparation of that great measure. He worked all day in Committee or on the floor of the House, consuming nervous force in a manner which would have utterly broken down a less magnificent physique than his own. And then every night he received representatives of various industries from all over the nation—from the farms, from the mines, from the mills, from the stores, from the offices of transportation companies. And they testified a thousand times that he knew their case far better than did they. Yet he heard them patiently, respectfully, discussed the schedules with them, and out of all the information he could gather produced that bill which stands for the highest expression of statesmanship any republic has ever known.