ailed to look out for themselves, but the
dominant spirit in the war taxes was revenue.

When Congress undertook to reduce the revenue to a peace basis, it found
that every approach to the tariff aroused classes of interested
manufacturers, while every attack upon the internal revenue was welcomed
by the public. As a result, following the line of least resistance, most
of the internal taxes were removed by 1870, leaving the tariff rates
where they had been, and higher than any protectionist had asked. A
large part of the tariff rate had been intended to equalize the internal
revenue tax; the removal of the latter created to that extent an
incidental protection, which was unexpected but was none the less
acceptable. Some few details of the tariff were modified by special
acts, and there was a flat reduction of ten per cent in 1872. But the
panic of 1873 reduced the revenues and frightened Congress, in 1875,
into restoring the ten per cent. In 1882 the rates of 1865 remained
substantially unchanged, leaving the protected industries in the
enjoyment of an incidental protection never intended for them and
created only by accident in the general reduction of revenue.

Spasmodic attacks were made upon the tariff system throughout the
seventies, but since few defended it on principle they failed to affect
the public. The tariff was not a political issue. Opposition to it was
confined to members of the Democratic party, in search for weapons to
turn against the Republicans, and to theorists and economists who had
little connection with politics. There were free-trade clubs after
1868, though few ever wanted to establish real free trade. All that the
free-trader commonly desired was a mitigation of protection and the
establishment of reasonable rates. Godkin, Schurz, Sumner of Yale, David
A. Wells, Edward Atkinson, and Henry D. Lloyd taught the
tariff-for-revenue theory wherever they could find listeners. Wells
wrote on "The Creed of Free Trade," in the _Atlantic Monthly_ in 1875,
and was sure he had found the issue of 1876. But in neither this nor the
next campaign did the parties face the issue. In 1880 the tariff figured
only as a means of embarrassing Hancock, while Garfield did not even
mention it in his inaugural.

The forces that compelled a revision of the tariff in 1882-83 had to do
with revenue and expenditures. Following the new prosperity the receipts
increased beyond the ability of Congress to spend them. There wa