“If, in the pending tariff, sugar is placed upon the free list, we give to certain countries a free market for $95,000,000 of their products, while they are not asked to open their markets to the free admission of a single dollar of American products. We ought to have, in exchange for free sugar from certain countries, a free market for breadstuffs and provisions, besides various fabrics from all parts of our country. In short, we ought to secure, in return for free sugar, a market for $60,000,000 or $70,000,000 of our own products. It will not require reciprocity treaties to secure this boon. The tariff bill can contain all the necessary conditions. The legislative power is able to secure the desired end. Within the last twenty years we have given the countries south of us free admission for nearly $60,000,000 worth of their products without receiving a penny’s advantage in exchange. If sugar be now made unconditionally free, we shall have given to the Latin-American countries free admission for $150,000,000 of their products. It is time, I think, to look out for some reciprocal advantages. We are a very rich nation, but not rich enough to trade on this equal basis.” Although Mr. Blaine’s idea was not adopted as he had presented it, a reciprocity clause based on it was embodied in the Tariff Act of 1890. This clause gave the President power to impose duties on sugar, molasses, tea and coffee and hides, all free in the McKinley Bill, if he found that a country which was exporting any of these articles into the United States was levying duties on the products of the United States which seemed to him unjust. There was of course a lively skirmish over giving the President this power. The Democrats declared it unconstitutional and in this view they were supported by Republican Senators as able as Mr. Edmunds and Mr. Evarts; however, it became a law. As finally passed, the McKinley Bill was a complete victory for that group of protectionists who had been struggling for twenty-five years to force the Republican party to break the pledges repeatedly given during and after the war to lower the customs as rapidly as the financial condition of the country would permit, to repudiate its long accepted moderate interpretation of the doctrine, and to substitute for it the teaching, that the wealth of this country had been produced by protection and that its stability depended upon protection being accepted as a permanent national economic policy. It was equally a victory for the theorist like Kelley to whom protection was sacred because he saw in it a panacea for poverty, and for William Whitman and Joseph Wharton who saw fortunes for themselves in wool, nickel, iron, and steel if they could secure the duties they asked. For John Sherman and Morrill and Allison it was a half-victory only. They had held moderate protection as the only wise and safe policy, but they had been overruled.