The _Post's_ story received little credence when it appeared, but later on the course of events gave it a strong coloring of probability. Mr. Frick proceeded to fortify the Homestead mills with every evidence of inviting a desperate conflict. At the same time, the other manufacturers commenced to show their hand, those of the Mahoning and Shenango Valley, a district located about fifty miles from Pittsburgh, taking the initiative by announcing a general reduction of wages ranging from 20 to 60 per cent. The Pittsburgh manufacturers avoided taking a distinctly aggressive stand, but gave out significant statements to the effect that the condition of the iron and steel market rendered it impossible for them to continue paying the rate of wages maintained during the previous year. These symptoms of depression in one of the most generously protected industries within a short time after the passage of the McKinley tariff bill afforded a prolific subject of commentary to the opponents of the high tariff system. Both political parties made their nominations for the presidency in the month of June, when the labor trouble was waxing warm, and it became only too plainly perceptible that, since the Republican party took its stand mainly on the benefit resulting to American labor from the protective tariff, Republicanism would be held answerable by the working classes for the proposed wage reductions in Pennsylvania. As a matter of fact the efficacy of the tariff as a wage-maintaining agency had been grossly overdrawn by stump orators and over-zealous partisan newspapers. For years it had been dinned into the ears of the workingman that it was his duty to vote for Republican candidates because the Republicans in Congress maintained the high protective tariff and the high protective tariff meant high wages. But now, at the opening of a presidential contest, the workingman was confronted with what seemed to be proof positive that the high tariff had lost its virtue, and when the Democratic press pointed to the astonishing spectacle of wage reductions ordered by the "pampered iron barons" of Pennsylvania, as illustrating that the protective system was a sham and a fraud, what wonder that organized labor was quick to accept the indictment as a just one! The Democratic national convention did not lose sight of the opportunity thus offered, and in the platform on which Grover Cleveland was nominated at Chicago perhaps the most telling plank was that which denounced the protective system as fraudulent and referred to the strikes in the iron trade as an immediate attestation of the failure of "McKinleyism."