This in the main was the position of Mr. Cleveland. It certainly was a little more radical than some of Mr. Cleveland’s advisors, Mr. Whitney and Mr. Vilas, for instance. But it was a position which filled men like Colonel Mills and Henry Watterson and Tom Johnson with disgust. They determined that it was time that the party stopped its coquetting with protection and followed a single-hearted tariff-for-revenue only policy, and it was such a policy which Mr. Watterson in particular determined should be adopted by the Democratic convention. He had succeeded in getting a tariff-for-revenue only plank into the platforms of 1876 and 1880. In 1884 he had seen his party, “with General Butler astride its back and Mr. Randall on its flanks,” as he described it, obliged to straddle. In 1888 this straddle had been repeated. Mr. Cleveland, seeing a “condition and not a theory,” could not sanction a plank which promised to reform the tariff with revenue only in mind. He knew the effects of duties on industries ought to and would be considered. Mr. Watterson went to Cincinnati in 1892 prepared for the fight of his life. He won. They called him a platform-smasher afterwards; he corrected them: he was a platform-maker; and that was true. Henry Watterson by his tactics and eloquence led the Democratic convention of 1892 to declare for tariff-for-revenue only, and Mr. Watterson meant just that.
“How would I make a tariff bill?” he said, later, in one of the most notable political speeches of the period.
“By the aid of all the best experts and authorities I would get together all the needful statistical data. I would then find a clean sheet of paper. I would lay this on the table—not the little round one, but the big oblong table—in the Ways and Means Committee Room. Then I would open the cupboard containing, among other perishable contents, the McKinley Bill. I would take this out none too gently—and pitch it into the fire. Then I would draw upon my clean piece of paper three lines. Thus:
I would begin at the top of the first column with sugar. Then the duty, say one cent a pound. Then the estimated revenue—say $35,000,000. Then I would abolish the sugar bounty, making a difference of $45,000,000 in the revenue. I would follow with tea and coffee. I would continue, giving precedence as far as possible to revenue-yielding commodities not produced in this country, down through the largest revenue-yielding domestic products—without the least regard to protection, incidental or otherwise—and when I got $200,000,000 I would stop. Then I would take another bit of white paper, and I would frame an Internal Revenue Act, raising $175,000,000 on spirits and tobacco-making, $375,000,000 in all—and the rest, $50,000,000 or $75,000,000, as the estimate might require, I would raise by a tax, first on inheritance and dividends, and then, if needs required, on big incomes.