The bill of 1875 took away from the tariff reformers of the Republican party practically all they had won in an eight years’ fight. The duties were again on a war basis, and while the need of revenue had been the plea for putting them back, everybody knew that the real victory was to the high protectionists. What could the Republican revenue-reformers do? The question came home with force now, for they were on the eve of a presidential campaign. It became still more difficult to answer with the appearance of the platform of the Democratic party, which for the first time in twenty years came out boldly on the tariff question. That it did so was due largely to the sagacity and fire of a young Southerner who was to play a large part in the coming struggles on the question—Henry Watterson, editor of the Louisville (Ky.) _Courier-Journal_. Mr. Watterson was what may properly be called a “born journalist.” His father before him had been an active newspaper man and almost constantly since he was sixteen, when he had edited a juvenile sheet whose political editorials had been copied all over Tennessee, he had been connected in one way or another with a newspaper. At eighteen he had written for _Harper’s Weekly_ and _The Times_ in New York. At twenty he was serving under Roger A. Pryor in Washington. After the war broke out he had not been able to resist the army, but even there he broke ranks once to establish at Chattanooga a semi-military daily which he called _The Rebel_, and which for a year he made the delight of the Confederate army. At the close of the war Mr. Watterson started a paper in Nashville, but in 1868 he was asked to take a position on the Louisville _Journal_—a paper made famous by George D. Prentice. He did so, and from the start his influence was magnetic. The paper grew in popularity and power until its editor, with good reason, was called the Dictator not only of his state but of his party. Politics was his element, and he fought for whatever cause he championed with a vigor, a wit, an eloquence that were the terror of his opponents. His opinions on the tariff were uncompromising. He had no patience with anything but “tariff for revenue only,” and he went to the Convention of 1876 resolved to have his way on that point, and he had it by writing in the plank himself. It was a very characteristic bit of Wattersonian literature: Reform is necessary in the sum and modes of Federal taxation to the end that capital may be set free from distrust and labor lightly burdened. We denounce the present tariff levied upon nearly 4000 articles as a masterpiece of injustice, inequality, and false pretence. It yields a dwindling and not a yearly rising revenue. It has impoverished many industries to subsidize a few. It prohibits imports that might purchase the products of American labor. It has degraded American commerce from the first to an inferior rank on the high seas.