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millennium based on the application of justice to public affairs, knew that the work would be hard, and the way weary. No one of them nor his enemies, planning already a course to stem the tide of social progress, could have dreamed of the gigantic task which was to confront the President and his party in the hastening years.

CHAPTER IV

THE PERILS OF PRIVILEGE

N the fourth day of March, 1913, Woodrow Wil

Ο son was inaugurated President of the United

States, and the Third American Revolution began.

Without any asserted declaration such as had marked the entrance of the Colonies into their struggle for independence, without the thunders of civil warfare which had menaced the elections of 1860, but with a vision of government no less radical than Jefferson's, and a solemnity of purpose as deep as Lincoln's, the twenty-eighth Chief Executive of the American Republic took the oath of office on the steps of the great white Capitol on the Senate hill of Washington, and started the building of an administration destined to be one of the greatly portentous periods in the history of his nation.

Untoward circumstances-the clouds of a great European conflict which was to let down upon the United States the dark waters of war-hung below the horizon. Not with these, however, although his keenly student mind apprehended them long before his weighty sense of obligation to stave off warfare admitted the necessity of action, but with the internal menaces to democracy was he most vitally concerned as he faced forward. Through years of mediocre executive direction, lightened only by occasional flashes of vivid but not continuously potent action, through years of legislative maneuverings by and judicial upholdings of a power designed to change its essence from democratic to plutocratic, the Government of the United States had subtly but none the less surely weakened from the ideal of its conception. Against the perils

of privileged encroachment upon the constitutionally pledged rights of the people of the nation Wilson was to take prompt and effective action, swinging back the pendulum of power to the point designed for it by Franklin, by Jefferson and by Madison, and held by Jackson and by Lincoln. Realiza

tion of the magnitude of his task must have been his strongest emotion as he gazed down from the point where so many Presidents had stood before him, seeing beyond the vista of city, and hills, and river to the far horizons of the country he captained.

"The firm basis of government is justice, not pity," he proclaimed. "This is the high enterprise of the new day; to lift everything that concerns our life as a nation to the light that shines from the hearthfire of every man's conscience and vision of the right. . . . This is not a day of triumph; it is a day of dedication. Here muster, not the forces of party, but the forces of humanity. Men's hearts wait upon us; men's lives hang in the balance; men's hopes call upon us to say what we will do. Who shall live up to the great trust? Who dares fail to try? I summon all honest men, all patriotic men, all forward-looking men, to my side. God helping me, I will not fail them, if they will but counsel and sustain me."

To outward seeming the country the President faced from the portico of Congress was little changed in its democracy from the Republic of the vision of its founders. The same forms, the same apparent system of checks and balances, the same semblance of popular government persisted. Only a student of past history and contemporaneous finance could have known how far below the standard of the men who fought to create it and the men who fought to uphold it the spirit in

high places had fallen. Mammon sat upon the seats of the mighty. The money-changers traded not on the porch, but in the inner shrine of the temple. To drive them out a lash of courage was needed. It befell that, even without prophetic vision of the future, Woodrow Wilson knew that the most important appointment he had to make was that of Secretary of the Treasury; and it was from no haphazard choice, no idea of repayment of obligation, no sense of expediency that he had designated for that place the man destined to stand with himself as the most important and significant public figure of their time and country.

The first duty facing the Wilson Administration when it took office in March, 1913, was the revision of the tariff. From the date of the enactment of the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Bill during the Taft administration, public sentiment against it had grown steadily until the country was convinced that a prompt downward revision was necessary. The 1912 platform had declared that "high Republican tariff is the principal cause of the unequal distribution of wealth: it is a system of taxation which makes the rich richer and the poor poorer; under its operations the American farmer and laboring man are the chief sufferers; it raises the cost of the necessaries of life to them, but does not protect their products or wages. The farmer sells largely in free markets and buys almost entirely in the protected markets. In the most highly protective industries such as cotton and wool, steel and iron, the wages of the laborers are the lowest paid in any of our industries."

While the primary duty of collecting information for the proposed revision, which was immediately taken up by the special session of Congress called by the Presi

dent, fell upon the Ways and Means Committee of the House and on the Finance Committee of the Senate, the Treasury Department was intimately involved in the work-first, because all revenue questions have to be considered by that department; and second, because the administration of the law would fall upon that department since it involved the customs division. Throughout the fight in Congress, which finally resulted in the enactment of the Underwood-Simmons Tariff Law, McAdoo took an active part and cooperated with the President and the leaders of House and Senate to make sure that the new law would avoid the inequalities and injustices of the thoroughly discredited Payne-Aldrich measure.

The main objective was the downward revision of the existing high-in many cases prohibitive-tariff duties on necessaries of life. Once the task of revision had been started, lobbyists of all the affected industries swarmed to Washington in the hope of writing for themselves the schedules of the new act as they had written the schedules of the old. Their unwelcome presence began to have an effect so unfavorable that the President was forced to denounce them in a public statement which resulted in lessening their activities and permitting the officials of the Treasury and the members of the committees of Senate and House to work out a law in the interests of the entire people rather than of the special interests affected by the provisions of the measure.

The problem of currency reform, intimately related to the daily lives of the nation's citizens, loomed in demand for solution by the incoming administration. Through more than a half-century of centralization the money power of the United States had focused into

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