In 1865 the revenues of the United States, amounting to $322,000,000, and far exceeding the needs of the Treasury in time of peace, came chiefly from the tariff and the internal revenue. The two taxes were dependent upon each other. Each increase in the latter had forced an increase in the former, lest special burdens should be laid upon American manufacture. The ideal of protection had never been lacking, nor had special interests failed to look out for themselves, but the dominant spirit in the war taxes was revenue. When Congress undertook to reduce the revenue to a peace basis, it found that every approach to the tariff aroused classes of interested manufacturers, while every attack upon the internal revenue was welcomed by the public. As a result, following the line of least resistance, most of the internal taxes were removed by 1870, leaving the tariff rates where they had been, and higher than any protectionist had asked. A large part of the tariff rate had been intended to equalize the internal revenue tax; the removal of the latter created to that extent an incidental protection, which was unexpected but was none the less acceptable. Some few details of the tariff were modified by special acts, and there was a flat reduction of ten per cent in 1872. But the panic of 1873 reduced the revenues and frightened Congress, in 1875, into restoring the ten per cent. In 1882 the rates of 1865 remained substantially unchanged, leaving the protected industries in the enjoyment of an incidental protection never intended for them and created only by accident in the general reduction of revenue. Spasmodic attacks were made upon the tariff system throughout the seventies, but since few defended it on principle they failed to affect the public. The tariff was not a political issue. Opposition to it was confined to members of the Democratic party, in search for weapons to turn against the Republicans, and to theorists and economists who had little connection with politics. There were free-trade clubs after 1868, though few ever wanted to establish real free trade. All that the free-trader commonly desired was a mitigation of protection and the establishment of reasonable rates. Godkin, Schurz, Sumner of Yale, David A. Wells, Edward Atkinson, and Henry D. Lloyd taught the tariff-for-revenue theory wherever they could find listeners. Wells wrote on "The Creed of Free Trade," in the _Atlantic Monthly_ in 1875, and was sure he had found the issue of 1876. But in neither this nor the next campaign did the parties face the issue. In 1880 the tariff figured only as a means of embarrassing Hancock, while Garfield did not even mention it in his inaugural.