Author: Albert ShawPublisher:
ISBN: 9781331092131
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 776
Book Description
Excerpt from The American Review of Reviews, Vol. 48: July, 1913 Almost everyone interested in the subject of the tariff has understood that the present extra session of Congress was not called for deliberation and debate, but for the sole purpose of passing a bill. The tariff-revision work that is culminating now has been going on continuously for four years. Any mistakes in the direction of radical change that the pending measure may be found to include have been rendered inevitable through the cumulative blunders of the Republican party. It had promised in 1908 to revise the tariff if kept in power. The country took it at its word, and elected President Taft and a Republican Congress. Whereupon the pundits of the Republican party thrust their thumbs in their cheeks and announced that they were about to spring a most excellent joke upon the American public. "We admit," they said, "that we promised to revise the high tariff. But be pleased to observe that we did not say that we would revise it downward; we may conclude, upon the whole, to revise it upward." Whereupon they proceeded to do that very thing, with consequences that clear thinkers frankly predicted, and that Republican leaders and tariff beneficiaries are now beginning to understand in their relationships of cause and effect. An honest and sensible revision of the tariff in the extra session of 1909 would have satisfied the country, and would have remained on the statute books for a considerable period of years. It would have been the last of the general tariff bills made by rule of thumb. The progressive Republican Senators proposed to keep the protective tariff, but to put real reform into the schedules, lowering the rates, simplifying the obscure and complex items, and eliminating the tricks. In addition to such revision, it was proposed to establish a non-partisan tariff commission that could devote scientific study to the subject in all its phases, and enable Congress, in future years, to construct a modern and defensible scheme of national taxation. As the discredited Republican managers look back upon the great tariff debate of only four years ago, - in which Dolliver, Cummins, Beveridge, LaFollette, Bristow, Clapp, and a number of others, made their attacks upon the textile and metal schedules and upon other parts of the Payne-Aldrich bill, - they must wonder what sort of blindness had seized them that they could so little understand the nature and force of public opinion. The country would have accepted the proposals of the progressive Republican Senators at that time as satisfactory fulfilment of the promises made by the party in the campaign of 1908. Everything demanded by the group of whom the late Senator Dolliver was a worthy representative seems to all Republicans now to have been most moderate and reasonable; yet President Taft and his administration read all of those Senators out of the Republican party because of their firm adherence to the party's pledges, and their unyielding attitude against the folly of the standpat majority. The country indicated its sentiment by promptly electing Democrats to fill two or three vacant Congress seats in Republican districts - one in Massachusetts and another in New York. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
