But quite apart from the corruption which went on, a great debate characterized the campaign,—a debate which followed the line of the House arguments on the Mills Bill, of the Senate’s on the Allison Bill. The speeches in the two Houses were indeed campaign speeches, addresses not to a deliberating body, but to a balloting constituency. The Democrats depended mainly on the cry of excessive taxation. Their platform had rung the changes on the word until it almost lost its effect from over-repetition. The Republicans seized the opening and answered them with jeers. In New York City they even carried parrots in their processions taught to cry “tariff is a tax.” The high prices of certain necessities like woollen garments due to the tariff was another effective Democratic argument. General Harrison dismissed it lightly. “I have an impression,” he said, “that some things may be too cheap” “cheap coats involve cheap men.” There could have been no better epigram for those bent on keeping up prices. Argue as the Democrats would that the man who had to pay $20.00 here for a suit that would cost him but $10.00 abroad, would be better off if he could put his extra money to other uses, the Republicans could cry “But without the tariff he would have no twenty dollars, he would have no ten, for he would have no work!” The fallacy that there would be nothing to do in the country if protection did not enable men to manufacture was insisted on continually. Moreover, the Republicans would not admit what was, and still is, true, that the great body of wages in protected industries is less than in the unprotected. The trusts figured repeatedly in the attack on the Republican position, only to be waved aside, as by Mr. Blaine. “Trusts,” he declared, “are state issues,” “they have no place in a national campaign.” The Republicans were not without good ammunition. The Democratic revision was full of inconsistencies as any revision made as ours are, is bound to be. It did show geographic bias. Moreover, the Democratic position had the disadvantage of being an attempt to meet a condition and one not of their making. They might be free traders as a few of them were; they might be tariff-for-revenue only men, as most of them were, but when it came to making a tariff bill they felt themselves obliged to fix duties not only with revenue and reform in mind, but with protection as well. The Republicans could taunt them with inconsistency and cowardice and describe their revenue duties as disguised protection to their own friends. And in the same breath that they accused them of protecting their friends they anathematized them as “free-traders,” friends of England, enemies of their own countrymen.