DOES THE TARIFF MAKE MEN IMMORAL?

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the difficulty. There still are plenty of openings for the investment of new capital in manufactures, if our manufacturers will study the lists of imports to find where the home supply is inadequate to the home demand.

§ 308. The depression of 1873 and the following year grew out of an excessive construction of railroads in America, and a consequently feverish stimulation of the iron and steel industries. The great outlays in wages to iron-workers imparted a similar impetus to textile and other manufactures, which continued until the collapse of the Northern Pacific Railroad precipitated a panic far less severe than those of 1837 and 1857, but whose effects were felt for years.

§ 309. (2) Again, in the course of time a duty becomes excessive through a change in the conditions of production, and it is said that the American manufacturer, if the home competition do not prevent this, will raise his price to the highest figure permitted by the tariff, and will make excessive profits by doing this. Whether this be an actual situation or not, it is a conceivable one. There are two remedies for it. One is found in the certainty that excessive profits will increase home competition by leading to a large investment of capital in that particular industry; another may be found in the reduction of the duty to an amount sufficient to compensate the disadvantages, as regards labor, capital, taxation and so forth, under which the American producer lies. The principle of protection justifies no duty of a higher rate than this. In so far as the tariff goes beyond it, it is not protective, but prohibitive.

But it is altogether absurd to abuse the tariff because businessmen will not resist the temptation to take advantage of such a situation as has been supposed. The tariff will produce no higher results than the average morality of the business community. This average is in America at least as high in the manufacturing class as in any other. Dr. Lyon Playfair thinks he finds in the honesty of our manufactures the traces of the old Puritan passion for righteousness. His praise may be deserved, without being true of all our manufacturers. But certainly

neither he nor any impartial observer would select any of our protected industries as furnishing comparatively glaring instances of our want of a high moral standard. He would select rather the grain, stock and oil gambling of the trading classes and the management of some of our great railroads.

§ 310. It is charged against our protective system that it has resulted in the destruction of American commerce. Objectors of this kind use the word "commerce "in the narrow and conventional sense which has been affixed to it by English writers, and which corresponds to the situation of England. They mean by it the export and import of commodities. The true sense of the word is "the exchange of services or commodities between persons of different industrial functions." In this sense Protection is a great promoter of commerce. It creates variety of industrial function within the nation, and fosters the most rapid and continual interchange of services between persons thus differentiated. It promotes association between members of the same nation by producing variety in their employments; while Free Trade between more and less advanced nations always has resulted in the destruction of asssociation among the people of the less advanced, and in their reduction to a monotony of occupation. There is no vaster commerce in the world than that which takes place between the fifty millions of people who live inside the line drawn by the American tariff, and who are growing in mutual interdependence with every year of its existence.

§ 311. As was said in the tenth chapter, we cannot accept the amount of exports and imports as affording any fair test of the country's prosperity. Such a test could have been devised only in a country which had made itself dependent upon others for supplies of food and raw materials, and for customers for its manufactures. But, even when gauged by this test, America is found to have made no retrogression. The proportion of exports of manufactures to the population was greater in 1880 than in 1860. This export might be much greater if we took the

proper steps to increase it. It might be expected, for instance, that the nations of South America would be large customers for

OUR FREE TRADE IN SHIPS.

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our manufactures. We buy of them great amounts of coffee, hides and wool. We can furnish them with many manufactures which they have no ambition to make for themselves, and in some cases not the resources. But our chief trade with that part of the continent is conducted in English ships, which go thither with cargoes of English wares, and come back, by way of New York, with cargoes of South American produce, which they replace by cargoes of American wheat. When we secure direct commercial intercourse with the countries which have few manufactures, we may expect to find foreign markets for our own. At present we have such intercourse only with countries largely engaged in manufacture.

§ 312. It is charged that the Protectionist policy has debarred us from getting our fair share of the carrying trade of the world. But American citizens are free to own and sail ships built in any dockyard of the world. Our laws place such vessels under no disadvantage. We admit ships of every build on equal terms to our ports, and remit many of the charges, such as lighthouse dues, which are charged in the ports of other countries. It is true that by a law passed in Washington's first administration, and continued in force by every party which has been in power since that time, ships of foreign build are not admitted to American registration. They cannot carry the American flag, and our government assumes no responsibility for their safety. But American registration confers no commercial advantages. On the contrary, it brings with it serious disadvantages. The laws for the protection of American seamen impose burdens on the owners of ships in our registration much heavier thaħ are borne by others. Our consulate system collects far heavier fees from them; our systems of State taxation impose, as a rule, much heavier fiscal burdens on them; and in return for these the vessel which has American registry receives no compensatory advantages. The nation does not maintain a decent navy for its protection; it does not exert itself with any remarkable energy in the defence of American interests, property or citizens abroad. In these respects it is much behind Eng

land, which is ready to continue registration and efficient protection to any ship which Americans may purchase from British owners.

We are

In fine, we have absolute Free Trade in the matter of merchant marine. It is to this, in great measure, that we owe the decline in American shipbuilding-a decline which began in 1855, six years before the Morrill Tariff was enacted. almost the only country which has acted on the laissez faire maxim in this matter. Great Britain built up hers by a system of subsidies, at first paid openly, afterward under the cover of payment for carrying the mails. France has a subsidy system more thorough and extensive than any other country of Europe. In America the same method was followed until 1855, when, on recommendation of the Senate Committee of Commerce-Mr. Jefferson Davis was chairman-subsidies were discontinued. Their resumption is demanded now by many of the most influential commercial bodies in America, and is expected from the Congress in session at this writing.

§ 313. Protection corresponds to the purpose of the American people to be a complete and entire nation, at peace with every other in so far as in us lies, desiring no advantage at the expense of any other, wishing for them that fulness of national life which we desire for ourselves, but as independent of their good or ill will as the resources of the national domain will permit us to be. It sometimes is denounced as irreligious and selfish, but only by those who have taken no pains to understand it. There is a religion, The Saturday Review says, which became current in England about 1851, made up of "Free Trade and the pleasanter parts of Christianity;" with that religion Protection comes into conflict. But there is nothing in it which is inconsistent with the Golden Rule: "Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them."

CHAPTER THIRTEENTH.

THE SCIENCE AND ECONOMY OF INTELLIGENCE AND

EDUCATION.

§ 314. In presenting what have been found to be wise methods of national economy, and in attempting the solution of economic problems, it has again and again been pointed out in the foregoing chapters, that the education and the consequent high intelligence of the people is essential to the prosperity of a nation.

We have seen that an agriculture that is not directed by scientific knowledge is wasteful in itself, and will at last be unable to meet-much less to outrun-the ever-increasing demand of the people upon its productiveness. Experience also shows that, so long as farming is conducted in an unintelligent way, it will never be anything but a distasteful drudgery, which will drive the best young men of the agricultural class into the cities, and to occupations that employ mind as well as muscle.

We have seen that the notion that labor will always leave an illrewarded employment for one that is better paid, is disproved by facts. The uneducated farm-hand of Dorsetshire, with his mental horizon no larger than the visible one, shrinks from pushing out into an unknown and untried world to seek his fortune, and puts up with ten shillings a week, when a few shires farther north he might earn a competence. The Flemish boer works for a half or a third what he might get a dozen miles to the south, because he has never had the chance to pick up the small amount of French that would fit him to labor in Brabant or Brussels.

We have also seen that improvements in methods and in machinery, by discontinuing the employment of some class of workmen, inflicts great injury upon that class if its average of intelligence be low, and its power of adapting itself to a new set of conditions be slight. And we have also seen that all these