This generation has had one bitter experience of Democratic tariff legislation. In 1892, the Democratic party was, for the first time in thirty-two years, placed in control of both houses of Congress and the presidency. It came into office committed to free trade, as it would now again come into office pledged to free trade. It passed the Wilson bill in August, 1894, and thereby took its first step towards the abandonment of the policy of protection for American industries. There followed, principally as the direct result of this Democratic tariff legislation and the antecedent menace, an acute period of industrial and financial depression. I had supposed that the fateful years 1894, 1895 and 1896 would never be forgotten by those who suffered through them. As Governor Wilson himself well said in his "History of the American People," in describing this period of misery: "Men of the poorer sort were idle everywhere, and filled with a sort of despair. All the large cities and manufacturing towns teemed with unemployed workingmen who were with the utmost difficulty kept from starvation by the systematic efforts of organized charity." This was also a time of unprecedented social unrest and discontent and of Coxey's ragged "Army of the Commonweal of Christ" crying for food and work. It was a period of misery and depression, of popular discontent and disturbance, of strikes, riots, destruction of property, murder and maiming in industrial disputes. No one could deny, as the historian pointed out, that the country had fallen upon evil times and that American workmen found it harder than ever to live. We have only to recall to the people's minds the conditions of unemployment, poverty and misery which followed the last tariff legislation of the Democratic party, and compare conditions as they exist to-day. The people of this country will make a terrible mistake and a frightful blunder if they now vote to run the risk of a repetition of those days under the delusion that the currency system of the government was the cause of the business depression and misery that followed immediately upon the election of Cleveland in 1892 and the passage of the Wilson tariff law in 1894.