“When this bill is laid before the President for Executive approval and he has sufficiently examined it to be assured of its identity as the very measure which he himself has already publicly repudiated, I can imagine him taking the Wilson letter in one hand and reading his own words, ‘This is an act of party perfidy and party dishonor,’ and then dropping his pen from the other, exclaiming with ineffable scorn, ‘Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?’” Mr. Reed was right. The bill, which was passed by a vote of 182 to 106, 12 Democrats only voting against it, was never signed by Grover Cleveland. It became a law without his name on August 27, 1894. CHAPTER X THE DINGLEY BILL Two months after the Wilson Bill became a law, the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives suffered as thorough a reverse as had the Republicans in 1892. The House stood, after the election, 246 Republicans, 104 Democrats, and 7 Populists. The South returned 33 Republicans. The painful failure of Congress to make the honest and thorough revision of the tariff which the country had expected was certainly one cause of the party’s overthrow. Honorable men could not sanction the scandal and barter which had attended the making of the new law. But there were other and powerful causes for the defeat. There was the silver question. With every month it became more certain that silver was to be the issue in the next campaign. There was a possibility at least that the Republicans would continue to make the issue their own. The group of Western Republican Senators who in 1890 had voted for a tariff bill of which they did not approve in order to get votes for a silver bill of which the voters did not approve, were more hotly devoted to free silver than ever,—more determined to make it a party measure. Already several Republican State Conventions had declared for it. Among the New England Congressmen there seems to have been a willingness to prepare the way for some kind of action, at least to consider free silver, for in the spring of 1894 Henry Cabot Lodge made a conciliatory and ambiguous speech on the subject in the Senate and there were others, who like him seemed to be ready to go either way. On the other hand, free silver had no hope with the then dominant faction of the Democratic party. Mr. Cleveland and his supporters were willing to go down to defeat rather than even seem to encourage the fallacy. Free silver then carried many voters to the Republicans in the fall of 1894.