our people engaged in industrial occupations, the
beneficence of the great principle of home industrial Protection, that
Tariff-agitation actually ceased, and the National Democratic platform
of that year had nothing to say in behalf of Free-Trade!

After the close of the War, however, at the very first National
Democratic Convention, in 1868, at which there were delegations from the
lately rebellious States, the question was at once brought to the front,
and, under the inspiration of the old Rebel leaders aforesaid, the
Democratic platform again raised the banner of Free-Trade by declaring
for a Tariff for revenue. But the mass of the People, at that time
still freshly remembered the terrible commercial disasters and
industrial depressions which had befallen the Land, through the
practical operation of that baleful Democratic Free-Trade doctrine,
before the Rebellion broke out, and sharply contrasted the misery and
poverty and despair of those dark days of ruin and desolation, with the
comfort and prosperity and hopefulness which had since come to them
through the Republican Protective-Tariff Accordingly, the Republican
Presidential candidate, representing the great principle of Protection
to American Industries, was elected over the Democratic Free-Trade
candidate, by 214 to 71 electoral votes-or nearly three to one!

Taught, by this lesson, that the People were not yet sufficiently
prepared for a successful appeal in behalf of anything like Free-Trade,
the next National Democratic Convention, (that of 1872), under the same
Southern inspiration, more cautiously declared, in its platform, that
"Recognizing that there are in our midst, honest but irreconcilable
differences of opinion, with regard to the respective systems of
Protection and Free-Trade, we remit the discussion of the subject to the
People in their Congressional districts, and to the decision of the
Congress thereon, wholly free from Executive interference or dictation."
The People, however, rebuked the moral cowardice thus exhibited by the
Democracy--in avoiding a direct issue on the doctrine which Democracy
itself had galvanized at least into simulated life,--by giving 286
electoral votes to the Republican candidate, to 63 for the Democratic,
--or in the proportion of nearly five to one.

Warned, by this overwhelming defeat, not to flinch from, or avoid, or
try to convert the great National question of Tariff, into a merely
local one, the National Dem