And yet there had been warnings enough of the volcano smouldering underfoot, if the eyes and ears of public men had been open to see and hear. Beginning at the time of President Garfield’s assassination, the one cry which went up from the common people, the working people of the land, was for years that of “Hard Times.” Business received a blow in that year from which it did not recover. Trade was slow and meagre; purchases of all sorts were made “from hand to mouth;” workshops and factories lay idle because there was insufficient demand for their products; men who felt keenly the disgrace of failure to support their families were compelled to beg for public aid to keep their humble homes and to supply even the most sordid demands of life. For years the country’s economic policy had been such as to poison the air with false doctrine and enervate the energies of commerce by vacillating action. It would be a bootless task to discuss now the relative merits of “Free-trade” and “Protection” to the United States. Perhaps either policy, adhered to with reasonable fidelity and administered, as to its details, with such common-sense as men are accustomed to use in the conduct of their private affairs, would have obviated the loss of work and the consequent poverty and want which filled the land, from 1882 to 1887, with a constantly deepening tide of misery. But the whole subject was made the shuttlecock of petty politics and pitiful politicians, until the nation ceased to have a policy which could be recognized or was of any avail as a stay before the sweep of commercial failure and pecuniary distress. It is asserted that no less than two and a half million operatives and working-men were idle in the fall of 1887, when the first serious outbreaks occurred. By far the larger number of these had been unable to earn enough, during the preceding two years, to pay the rents demanded for their cottages and hovels, and were constantly in danger of ejection, without the hope of finding another home. The land was filled with idle workmen, many of them foreigners unaccustomed to free institutions, and bitter in their denunciations of all government, which was to them the synonym of tyranny. Few, of either foreign or native birth, were possessed of sufficient discrimination to discover the underlying causes of their misfortunes, or of wisdom enough to set about remedying them.