Mr. Cleveland was inaugurated in March of 1893, but tariff reform was not the first work before him. The Silver Question was the more pressing, and the extra session he called for August had as its business the repeal of the purchasing clause of the Silver Bill which the Republicans had adopted in 1890, and by which they had bought a part of the votes for the McKinley Bill. The extra time of this session was utilized to begin work on the tariff. More loudly than ever the public demanded its reform. Nothing that had been promised that the McKinley Bill would do had been done, nothing but reducing the surplus—and that had been overdone. The combination of free sugar, prohibitive tariffs, and reckless spending with purchasing bonds not yet due at a premium, had reduced it to over $105,000,000 in the year the bill was adopted, to $2,500,000 in the year Mr. Cleveland was elected and a deficit was ahead; in fact, Mr. Cleveland inherited a deficit which the fiscal year after his inauguration had reached nearly $70,000,000. He also had inherited a business depression, the culmination of which came in the first summer of his administration, and along with the deficit and panic a series of labor troubles equal to those of the ’80’s. The McKinley Bill had failed utterly to do the two things which its makers had oftenest declared it would do, preserve prosperity and satisfy labor. Steadily after its passage depression grew. In 1892 the labor troubles of our country were as acute as in any year of our history, and these troubles were in the highly protected industries, in iron, steel, wool, and cotton. The McKinley Bill was not the cause of the depression, as the Democrats argued. The world was in panic. One of those periodic disturbances which sweeps the globe, a logical result of man’s bungling with the laws of trade, had started. That we did not feel the acute pangs of this disturbance as soon as Europe was due to the stimulants we had been taking in the way of high tariffs and cheap money. When they wore off, as they quickly did, our condition was the worse for the delay. A few months after Mr. Cleveland’s election the depression and unrest culminated in the panic of ’93. There has always been an effort to shift the responsibility of this disturbance on the Democrats. The panic of ’93 was caused, so Republican orators have repeated for eighteen years, by alarm at the prospect of a Democratic revision of the tariff. There was never a serious charge with less foundation. That panic was headed directly towards us long before Mr. Cleveland’s nomination. A McKinley bill could not stop it; but it did make it the more acute when it came, by the very fact that it had helped free silver to hold it back.