protective system, at the joint behest of the whiskey trust and the agents of foreign manufacturers.” It was practically a declaration for prohibitive tariff, nothing else indeed would “check imports of such articles as are made by our people.” There is no doubt that the party was driven to this extreme position on protection by its own political difficulties. The Mugwump movement out of the party in the early ’80’s, due partly to the failure of the leaders to keep faith on the tariff, and more to the general corruption in its service and its methods, had cost them the election of 1884. Mr. Cleveland had stolen their thunder as revisionists when he put boldly to the country a doctrine very like that which they had publicly proclaimed in 1872 and 1880. The only element in the country they could rely upon in 1888 was the manufacturers, and they could only rely upon them when they gave them what they asked. Particularly necessary was it that they produce a bill which should in principle and practice satisfy the Iron and Steel Association. This organization had come to take the same political relation to the tariff that the Industrial League had held earlier. Like its predecessor, it aspired to choose chairmen for the Ways and Means Committee, to name presidents, and to write tariff bills. Its position in the Republican party in 1888, which was close to that of a dictator, was due almost as much to the recognition it had received from Mr. Blaine as to its own energy and efficiency. As we have seen, Mr. Blaine in the ’70’s had thought it good politics to serve the Industrial League in any way he could. When the Iron and Steel Association gradually replaced that organization he followed the same practice and in 1884, took one of its leading members, B. F. Jones of Pittsburg, as chairman of the Republican National Convention. Mr. Cleveland’s election, and the popular revolt against the high tariff attitude, had only quickened the determination of the Iron and Steel Association to protectionize the country, to get out of the way all pestiferous Republican tariff reformers, all free-trade and tariff-for-revenue only Democrats. They began on the Congressional districts and did some most effective work. Their most brilliant stroke was defeating William R. Morrison of Illinois in 1886. For years Mr. Morrison had represented his District in Congress. He had won the hostility of the Iron and Steel Association by his aggressive fight on protection, and it decided he must go. In the fall of 1886 John Jarrett of Pittsburg, a former president of the Amalgamated Iron and Steel Association and at the time president of the Tin Plate Association, went into Mr. Morrison’s district, and by free use of money, “$3.00 a day and all necessary expenses” according to his own published letters, had organized a large body of laborers to work for protection. There were some bitter charges made against Jarrett’s methods; whatever they were,