It had been a hard battle to get the bill through, but it was certainly a step toward more equable taxation. If the country had remained prosperous it is probable that in the next Congress the revenue reformers would have continued the work of equalization and distribution, but the country did not remain prosperous. The year 1873 saw a panic of wide extent, a panic caused by gigantic speculations in railways, in land securities, in booming schemes of every kind. Men spent everything they owned in roseate ventures and then borrowed all their hopeful neighbors would lend, and this madness followed only seven years after a war, which had cost the country perhaps 4000 millions of dollars! It was not a quick, sharp panic with easy recovery. Its shocks recurred again and again, and the desolation it spread dragged itself over several years. No time indeed for reform. But not so bad a time for those who had objected to the lowering of the duties in the bill of 1872. The falling off of revenue due to decreased importation was reason enough to them to make an effort to replace its provisions. They hurried on to this more rapidly than they would have done perhaps if in 1874 the general dissatisfaction with the Grant Administration intensified by the hard times had not caused the election of a majority of Democrats to the House. The protectionists, having only a short term of power left them, hastened to take advantage of it. We must have more revenue, they urged. The surplus of 1873 and 1874 is but $2,000,000. We shall have nothing for the sinking funds—we must put more taxes on tobacco and spirits, more duties on molasses and sugar, and we must restore the 10 per cent reduction on manufactured goods. It was urged by the tariff reformers that if revenue was wanted the repeal of the 10 per cent reduction would help but little—that the restoration of the duty on tea and coffee was the simplest and fairest—but the protectionists were determined to get back their 10 per cent, and they did it, though only after a hard fight and a close vote. And thus it happened that when the Republicans resigned to the Democrats in 1875, the majority in the House of Representatives, which they had held for fifteen years, they left behind them tariff schedules devised for war needs and enacted by them under a definite pledge of reduction when the war should be over and internal taxes removed. CHAPTER IV THE BUSINESS MAN TAKES CHARGE