The difficulty of procuring from the people of the United States an unequivocal decision upon any political question, and of expressing that decision in legislative enactment, is familiar to every student of our history. The questions that occupy Congress now are in large part the same that were debated there forty years ago, save that the issue of slavery and the extreme States' rights theory have disappeared. But even in these cases the exceptions prove the rule; for it is grimly significant of our legislative immobility that the two great questions of a century should finally have been settled by the sword. If the people declared for anything at the general election of 1884, they may be supposed to have declared for a revision of the tariff, since the platform of principles adopted by each great party at its National Convention affirmed the necessity of such revision; yet Congress not only failed to legislate for that object, but actually at one time refused to discuss a measure designed to meet the issue in question, and at another stopped in the midst of such legislation to test the popular will upon the very same matter. Furthermore, while it will be assumed by most persons that whatever the significance of the election four years ago, the contest just ended sets the seal of disapproval upon the recent effort of the House of Representatives to revise the tariff; yet we hear already that the LI. Congress can hardly escape some such legislation as has just been attempted. The truth is, that the election of 1884, as all our elections, was in the main a struggle for spoils. The question at issue was not tariff revision or any other great economic idea, but which party should administer during the next four years the great patronage of the Federal Government. In the contest of November last the people for the first time in twenty years had a living issue presented, but so unused were they to the discussion of economic principles that it may be questioned whether the verdict just delivered with so much apparent emphasis was really the expression of a well-ascertained public opinion. It is worthy of note, too, that believers in the spoils system of politics are already taunting the vanquished with the folly of presenting a political idea to the American people, and prophesying a more rigid exclusion of principles from politics in all time to come.