Speech of Hon. Justin S. Morrill, of Vermont,
(Author of the Tariff Bill of 1861), delivered in the Senate of the United Stales, December 8, 1881, on the Bill to Appoint a Tariff Commission.
The Senate, being as in Committee of the Whole, and having under consideration the bill (S. No. 22) to provide for the appointment of a commission to investigate the question of the tariff and internal revenue laws—
Mr. Morrill said: I have brought this subject to the early attention of the Senate because, if early legislative action on the tariff is to be had, obviously the measure proposed by Senator Eaton and passed at the last session of the Senate is a wise and indispensable preliminary, which cannot be started too soon. The essential information needed concerns important interests, vast in number and overspreading every nook and corner of our country; and when made available by the ingathering and collocation of all the related facts, will secure the earliest attention of Congress, as well as the trust and confidence of the country, and save the appropriate committees of both Houses weeks and months of irksome labor—possibly save them also from some blunders and from final defeat.
An enlargement of the free list, essential reductions and readjustments of rates, are to be fully considered, and some errors of conflicting codifications corrected.
If a general revision of the Bible seems to have been called for, it is hardly to be wondered at that some revision of our revenue laws should be invited. But changes in the framework of a law that has had more of stability than any other of its kind in our history, and from which an unexampled growth of varied industries has risen up, should be made with much circumspection, after deliberate consideration, by just and friendly hands, and not by ill-informed and reckless revolutionists. When our recent great army was disbanded, war taxes were also largely dismissed, and we have now, and certainly shall have hereafter, no unlimited margin for slashing experiments.
THE TARIFF OF 1861.
The tariff act of 1861, which, by a nickname given by baffled opponents as an echo to a name so humble as my own, it was perhaps hoped to render odious, was yet approved by a democratic President and gave to Mr. Buchanan a much needed opportunity to perform at last one official act approved by the people.
If I refer to this measure, it will not be egotistically nor to shirk responsibility, but only in defense of those who aided its passage—such as the never-to-be-forgotten Henry Winter Davis, Thad. Stevens, and, William A. Howard, and, let me add, the names of Fessenden and Crittenden—and, without the parliamentary skill of one (Mr. Sherman) now a member of this body, its success would not have been made certain.
And yet this so-called “Morrill tariff,” hooted at as a “Chinese wall” that was to shut out both commerce and revenue, notwithstanding amendments subsequently piled and patched upon it at every fresh demand during the war, but retaining its vertebræ and all of its specific characteristics, has been as a financial measure an unprecedented success in spite of its supposed patronymical incumbrance. Transforming ad valorem duties into specific, then averaging but 25 per cent. upon the invoice values, imposing much higher rates upon luxuries than upon necessaries, and introducing compound duties[[86]] upon woolens, justly compensatory for the duties on wool, it has secured all the revenue anticipated, or $198,159,676 in 1881 against $53,187,511 in 1860, and our total trade, exports and imports, in 1860, of $687,192,176, appears to have expanded in 1880 to $1,613,770,633, with a grand excess of exports in our favor of $167,683,912, and an excess in 1881 of $259,726,254, while it was $20,040,062 against us in 1860. A great reduction of the public debt has followed, and the interest charged has fallen from $143,781,591 in 1867 to about $60,500,000 at the present time.
If such a result is not a practical demonstration of healthy intrinsic merits, when both revenue and commerce increase in a much greater ratio than population, what is it? Our imports in the past two years have been further brilliantly embellished by $167,060,041 of gold and silver coin and bullion, while retaining in addition all of our own immense domestic productions; and it was this only which enabled us to resume and to maintain specie payments. Let the contrast of 1860 be also borne in mind, when the excess of our exports of gold and silver was $57,996,004.
As a protective measure this tariff, with all its increasing amendments, has proven more satisfactory to the people and to various industries of the country than any other on record. The jury of the country has so recorded its verdict. Agriculture has made immense strides forward. The recent exports of food products, though never larger, is not equal by twenty-fold to home consumption, and prices are every where more remunerative, agricultural products being higher and manufactures lower. Of wheat, corn, and oats there was produced 1,184,540,849 bushels in 1860, but in 1880 the crop had swelled to 2,622,200,039 bushels, or had much more than doubled. Since 1860 lands in many of the Western States have risen from 100 to 175 per cent. The production of rice, during the same time, rose from 11,000,000 pounds to 117,000,000. The fires of the tall chimneys have every where been lighted up; and while we made only 987,559 tons of pig iron in 1860, in 1880 we made 4,295,414 tons; and of railroad iron the increase was from 235,107 tons to 1,461,837 tons. In twenty years the production of salt rose from 12,717,200 bushels to 29,800,298 bushels. No previous crop of cotton equalled the 4,861,000 bales of 1860; but the crop of 1880 was larger, and that of 1881 is reported at 6,606,000 bales. The yield of cotton from 1865 to 1881 shows an increase over the fifteen years from 1845 to 1861 of 14,029,000 bales, or almost an average gain of a million bales a year.
The giant water-wheels have revolved more briskly, showing the manufacture of 1,797,000 bales of cotton in 1880 against only 979,000 bales in 1860, and this brought up the price of raw cotton to higher figures than in 1860. Thirteen States and one Territory produced cotton, but its manufacture spreads over thirty States and one Territory. The census of cotton manufacture shows:
| 1860. | 1880. | |
|---|---|---|
| Capital invested | $98,585,269 | $207,781,868 |
| Number of operatives | 122,028 | 175,187 |
| Wages paid | $23,940,108 | $41,921,106 |
| Value of productions | 115,681,774 | 192,773,960 |
It will be found that a larger amount of capital has been invested in cotton mills than in woolen, and that the increase of productions has been large and healthy, a very handsome proportion of which is to be credited to Southern States. Goods of many descriptions have also been cheapened in price. Standard prints or calicoes which sold in 1860 for nine and one-half cents per yard now sell for six and one-half cents.
The census returns of woolen manufactures show the following astonishing results:
| Census of 1880. | Census of 1860. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Males employed | 74,367 | 24,841 | |
| Females employed | 65,261 | 16,519 | |
| Capital invested | $155,454,105 | $30,862,654 | |
| Wages paid | 47,115,614 | 9,808,254 | |
| Value raw material consumed | 162,609,436 | 36,586,887 | |
| Value of annual product | 265,684,796 | 61,895,217 | |
| Importations of woolens | 33,613,897 | 37,876,945 | |
| Annual product’n of wool | lbs | 264,500,000 | 60,511,343 |
It thus appears, that while the number of hands employed is three times and a half larger than in 1860, the wages paid is about five times larger and the capital is five times greater. The annual productions have been more than quadrupled, and the aggregate importations have fallen off four millions. With these results in our front, protection on wool and woolens will be likely to withstand the hand-grenades of all free-trade besiegers.
In New England and some other States sheep husbandry has fallen off, and in some places it has been replaced by the dairy business; but in other States the wool-clip has largely increased, especially has the weight of the fleece increased. The number of sheep has increased about 80 per cent. and the weight of wool over 400 per cent. The discovery that the fine long merino wools, known as the American merino, are in fact the best of combing wools and now used in many styles of dress goods has added greatly to their demand and value. Many kinds of woolen goods can be had at a less price than twenty years ago. Cashmeres that then brought forty-six cents per yard brought only thirty-eight and one-fourth cents in 1880, and muslin de laines dropped from twenty cents to fifteen, showing that the tariff did not make them dearer, but that American competition caused a reduction of prices.
The length of our railroads has been trebled, rising from 31,185 miles in 1860 to 94,000 miles in 1881, and possibly to one-half of all in the world. For commercial purposes the wide area of our country has been compressed within narrow limits, and transportation in time and expense, from New York to Kansas, or from Chicago to Baltimore, is now less formidable than it was from Albany or Pittsburgh to Philadelphia prior to the era of railroads. The most distant States reach the same markets, and are no longer neighbors-in-law, but sister States. The cost of eastern or western bound freight is less than one-third of former rates. Workingmen, including every ship-load of emigrants, have found acceptable employment. Our aggregate wealth in 1860 was $19,089,156,289, but is estimated to have advanced in 1880 to over forty billions. Further examination will show that the United States are steadily increasing in wealth, and increasing, too, much more rapidly than free-trade England, notwithstanding all her early advantages of practical experience and her supremacy in accumulated capital. The increase of wealth in France is twice as rapid as in England, but in the United States it is more rapid than even in France.
These are monumental facts, and they can no more be blinked out of sight than the Alleghanies or the Rocky Mountains. They belong to our country, and sufficiently illustrate its progress and vindicate the tariff of 1861. If the facts cannot be denied, the argument remains irrefutable. If royal “cowboys” who attempted to whistle down American independence one hundred years ago ingloriously failed, so it may be hoped will fail royal trumpeters of free-trade who seem to take sides against the United States in all commercial contests for industrial independence.
Among the branches of manufactures absolutely waked into life by the tariff of 1861, and which then had no place above zero, may be named crockery and china ware. The number of white-ware factories is now fifty-three, with forty decorating establishments; and the products, amounting to several millions, are sold at prices 25 to 50 per cent. below the prevailing prices of twenty years ago. Clay and kaolin equal to the best in China have been found east, west, and south in such abundance as to promise a large extension of American enterprise, not only in the ordinary but in the highest branches of ceramic art. Steel may also here claim its birth. No more of all sorts than 11,838 tons were made in 1860, but 1,397,015 tons were made in 1880. Those who objected to a duty on steel have found they were biting something more than a file. Silks in 1860, hardly unwound from the cocoon, were creeping along with only a small showing of sewing-silk and a few trimmings, but now this industry rises to national importance, furnishing apt employment to many thousand women as well as to men; and the annual products, sharply competing with even the Bonnét silks of Lyons, amount to the round sum of $34,500,000. Notwithstanding the exceptionally heavy duties, I am assured that silk goods in general are sold for 25 per cent. less than they were twenty years ago.
Plate-glass is another notable manufacture, requiring great scientific and mechanical skill and large capital, whose origin bears date since the tariff of 1861. It is made in Missouri and in Indiana, and to a small extent in Kentucky and Massachusetts; but in Indiana it is made of the purest and best quality by an establishment which, after surmounting many perils, has now few equals in the magnitude or perfection of its productions, whether on this or the other side of the Atlantic, and richly merits not only the favor but the patronage of the Government itself. Copper is another industry upon which a specific duty was imposed in 1861, which has had a rapid growth, and now makes a large contribution to our mineral wealth. The amount produced in 1860 was less than one-fifth of the present production, and valued at $2,288,182; while in 1880 the production rose to the value of $8,849,961. The capital invested increased from $8,525,500 to $31,675,096. In 1860 the United States Mint paid from twenty-three and one-half to twenty-five cents per pound for copper; but has obtained it the present year under a protective tariff as low as seventeen cents. Like our mines of inexhaustible coal and iron, copper is found in many States, some of it superior to any in the world, and for special uses is constantly sought after by foreign governments.
Many American productions sustain the character they have won by being the best in the world. Our carpenters and joiners could not be hired to handle any other than American tools; and there are no foreign agricultural implements, from a spade to a reaper, that an American farmer would accept as a gift. There is no saddlery hardware nor house-furnishing, equal in quality and style to American. Watches and jewelry and the electric gold and silver plated ware of American workmanship as to quality have the foremost place in the marts of the world. The superiority of our staple cotton goods is indisputable, as is proven by the tribute of frequent counterfeits displayed abroad. The city of Philadelphia alone makes many better carpets and more in quantity than the whole of Great Britain. These are noble achievements, which should neither be obscured nor lost by the sinister handling and industrious vituperation of free-trade monographists.
The vast array of important and useful inventions recorded in our Patent Office, and in use the world over, shows that it is hardly arrogance for us to accept the compliment of Mr. Cobden and claim that the natural mechanical genius of average Americans will soon appear as much superior to that of Englishmen as was that of Englishmen one hundred years ago to that of the Dutch.
THE TARIFF SHIELDED US IN 1873.
If we had been under the banner of free trade in 1873, when the widespread financial storm struck our sails, what would have been our fate? Is it not apparent that our people would have been stranded on a lee shore, and that the general over-production and excess of unsold merchandise everywhere abroad would have come without hindrance, with the swiftness of the winds, to find a market here at any price? As it was the gloom and suffering here were very great, but American workingmen found some shelter in their home markets, and their recovery from the shock was much earlier assured than that of those who in addition to their own calamities had also to bear the pressure of the hard times of other nations.
In six years, ending June 30, 1881, our exports of merchandise exceeded imports by over $1,175,000,000—a large sum in itself, largely increasing our stock of gold, filling the pockets of the people with more than two hundred and fifty millions not found in the Treasury or banks, making the return to specie payments easy, and arresting the painful drain of interest so long paid abroad. It is also a very conclusive refutation of the wild free-trade chimeras that exports are dependent upon imports, and that comparatively high duties are invariably less productive of revenue than low duties. The pertinent question arises, Shall we not in the main hold fast to the blessings we have? As Americans we must reject free trade. To use some words of Burke upon another subject: “If it be a panacea we do not want it. We know the consequences of unnecessary physic. If it be a plague, it is such a plague that the precautions of the most severe quarantine ought to be established against it.”
FREE-TRADE PROSPERITY ON THE WANE.
It gives me no pleasure to notice retrograde steps in the prosperity of Great Britain; and, if some evidence of this sort is brought out, like that of the five thousand houses now marked “To let” in Sheffield and ten thousand in Birmingham, it will have no other purpose than to show that free trade has failed to secure the promised supremacy to English manufactures. The avowal of Mr. Gladstone that the additional penny to the income tax produces less revenue than formerly indicates a positive decrease of wealth; and the steady diminution of British exports since 1873, amounting in 1880 to one hundred and sixty million dollars, with a diminution in the total of exports and imports of two hundred and fifty million dollars, is more conclusive proof as well of British decadence as of the advancement of other nations.
COMMERCIAL PROTECTION.
The sum of our annual support bestowed upon the Navy, like that upon the Army, may be too close-fisted and disproportionate to our extended ocean boundaries, and to the value of American commerce afloat; yet whatever has been granted has been designed almost exclusively for the protection of our foreign commerce, and amounts in the aggregate to untold millions. Manufacturers do not complain that this is a needless and excessive favor to importers; and why, then, should importers object to some protection to a much larger amount of capital, and to far greater numbers embarked certainly in an equally laudable enterprise at home?
THE FREE-TRADE PROPAGANDISTS OF ENGLAND.
For the last thirty-five years England has been making extraordinary efforts, political, industrial, legislative, diplomatic, social, and literary, all combined, to persuade mankind to follow her example of reversing that policy of protection, supreme in her Augustan age, or from Queen Anne down throughout the Georgian era, and the policy maintained by Chatham, by the younger Pitt, and by Canning with an energy that created and sustained the most varied and extensive workshops of the world. Already mistress of the ocean and abounding in wealth, the sea-girt Island aspired to a world-wide monopoly of trade. Penetrated with this later free-trade ambition, and not infrequently accused of trying to make all England tributary to Manchester, and all the rest of the world tributary to England, the eloquent Mr. Bright, who grandly rejected any idea of a new nation in America, resorts even to the infelicitous language of passion when he denounces his opponents, as he does, by declaring that any looking toward protective legislation anywhere in the world is proof either of “congenital depravity or defect of judgment.” Let us be thankful it is no worse, for what would have happened if the wrathful Englishman had said “total depravity?”
The repeal of the corn laws was not for the benefit of foreign nations, but solely for the benefit of Englishmen.
First. It was their belief that their skill and great capital gave them that superiority which would secure them against all competition except that arising from cheaper food.
Second. The cheaper-fed workmen of Germany, France, and America presented the only competition not to be resisted, and it had to be at once squarely met. Protection was abandoned, and abandoned possibly forever, but abandoned because the laboring British population had become too great and too hungry, with over a million and a half of paupers, when measured by the supply of home-grown food. Some of the little Benjamins must go to Egypt for corn. Starving men do little work, but occasionally do too much. The sole conditions to the continuance of the dense population and the grand scale of British manufactures in competition with modern nations appeared to be parsimony and privation, or lower-priced bread and lowest-priced labor. With these partially secured there came a season of temporary relief, but, unfortunately, with no increase of wages. It was barely success at the cost of an alliance with the discontent of underpaid workmen, with strikes and organized expatriation. Free trade, it is found, grinds labor to the bone, and forces it to fly, with muscles and machinery, to more inviting fields.
British agriculture, long depressed and chronically exposed to bad harvests, is now threatened with ruin by foreign competition, and British manufactures also seem almost as destitute of sunshine as their agriculture, though still owning a reluctant allegiance to the laws of the universe and to the exact science of the garrulous Bonamy Price. Lord Derby, in a late speech to the Lancashire farmers, recommended that some of the farmers should emigrate—five millions, I believe, he proposed—and those who might remain, said he, will then be able to farm on better terms.
True enough; but what a cold, sunless, and desperate remedy is that! If not Roman decimation, at least a sentence of banishment, crushing out the sweetest affections planted in human hearts, their love for their birthplaces, the homes of their fathers! But if these ill-fated men have barely supported life by the pittances daily earned, by what means, at whose cost, can they be transported to better and more welcome homes? The advice of Lord Derby is like that of the children of Marie Antoinette when the populace of Paris were clamoring for bread. Said the children: “Why don’t they buy cake?” Equally “child-like and bland” is Lord Derby. It would seem, when over 40 per cent. of their yearly imports must be of food, that the British Islands are too small for the foundations of the empire. The grand pyramid stands upon its apex reversed.
English statesmen have not forgotten the reservation of Sir Robert Peel, the author of the free-trade bill in 1846: “I reserve to myself,” said he, “distinctly and unequivocally the right of adapting my conduct to the exigencies of the moment and to the wants of the country;” and that is all protectionists ever claim to do.
Already Sir Stafford Northcote, the leader of the Tory opposition in the House of Commons, is on the fence, and only ventures to favor “universal free trade.” That is surely a horse of another color, not Wellington’s “Copenhagen,” but more like Sancho Panza’s “Dapple.”
The recent reaction or change in many organs of British opinion shows that this right of adaptation to the exigencies of the moment is neither surrendered nor obsolete. Let me cite an extract from an influential paper, called the Observer:
There is no obligation upon us to incur industrial martyrdom for the sake of propagating free-trade principles, even supposing their truth to be as self-evident as we fondly imagined. Moreover, to speak the honest truth, we are beginning to doubt how far the creed to which we pinned our faith is so self-evident as we originally conceived. If we can persuade other nations to follow our example, then free trade is unquestionably the best thing for England. It does not follow, however, that it is the best thing for us, if we are to be left the sole adherents of free trade in the midst of a community of nations devoted to protection.
The Observer does not say, as will be seen, that it is best for other nations, but only, if they will follow her example, “unquestionably the best thing for England;” and that will not be disputed.
Other nations, however, seem to prefer to profit by the earlier English example, displayed for seventy years after Smith’s Wealth of Nations appeared, and free trade, like the favorite English plum-pudding, is now called for by nobody but themselves, and is getting so cold as to be unpalatable even at home. Yet it is proposed by the amateur statesmen of our urban free-trade clubs, guiltless of any drop of perspiration in the paths of industry, to arrest American development by copying this foreign example, and thus bring our home labor and all of its rewards down to the European and Asiatic level. Nevertheless, I have faith that we shall abide in the track of the principles and politics which elevate and give character to American citizens, surrounding them with the daily presence and beauty of the useful arts, which so largely add to the power and dignity of any people in the great family of nations. To limit the industrial forces of an active, inventive, and ingenious people to agriculture alone, excluding manufactures and the mechanic arts, would be little better than in time of war to restrict an army to infantry alone, to the exclusion of cavalry and artillery. Great battles are not often so won.
A diversity of pursuits makes a great nation possible in peace, and greater in war. General competence, habits of self-reliance, and higher culture are thus more surely obtained. The improvement in one occupation is contagious, and spreads to all others. Philosophy, politics, and liberty all go up higher, and the happiness and dignity of mankind are promoted.
It is an axiom of British free-trade economy that for any branch of manufactures to rest on safe foundations it is indispensable that both the raw material and the skilled labor required should be indigenous. This seems to be a rule intended to fence out of the field all nations where either the raw material or the skilled labor called for is not native and abundant; but, if applied where the raw material is not indigenous, the British Islands would be stripped of a great share of their industry. Nor can any nation claim a class of men as born with a monopoly of skilled endowments; these, at any rate, are not “congenital,” and trades must be taught by long apprenticeships; but raw materials are usually planted by nature, and climate and soil fix and determine inflexible boundaries. Cotton is not indigenous in the British Islands, though their accomplished cotton manufactures have made it the leading article of commerce, leading their national policy. Hemp and silk, also, are the products of other lands. Having no timber or lumber good enough for ships, it is all brought, like their royal timber, from any place in the world but home. The steel used at Sheffield for cutlery is made from iron imported from Sweden and Norway; and no fine or merino wool consumed is of home growth. Not a little of the best machinery now alive in England had its birth on this side of the Atlantic, and must be credited to American genius.
The title of the British Islands to all the raw material, and to exclusive and hereditary mechanical skill among men, is widely contested, and the world will not fold its arms unresistingly to any such pretentious domination. The power of steam, though marvelously developed by English cleverness, is an auxiliary force belonging of right to the whole human race, as much as gravity or electricity, wherever its service may be called for, and its abode can no more be exclusively monopolized than that of the Promethean fire stolen from Heaven.
The first steam-engine is supposed to have been employed at Manchester in 1790, where there are now, it is stated, in daily use within a circuit of ten miles more than fifty thousand boilers, yielding a total force equal to the power of one million horses, and the combined steam-power of Great Britain is represented to be equal to the manual labor of twice the number of males living on the globe. We greatly admire the prodigious enterprise of Great Britain, and it would be strange if, with our immensely greater coal-fields, it should let Americans sleep.
THE THEORY.
Free trade, as a theory, unembarrassed by contact with practical affairs, and divorced from any idea of supplying other equal and legitimate sources of revenue for the support of governments, appears wonderfully simple and seductive. Tearing down custom-houses, as a knock-down argument, is held to be scientific, but it is not conclusive. Some schoolmen, innocent of earning even a coat or a pair of shoes by the sweat of the brow, and sage without experience, adopt the theory because it is an article of faith—saving without works—with a ready-made catechism in imported text-books, and requires no comprehensive investigation of the multiform and ever-varying facts and exigencies in national affairs; but when the theory comes to be practically applied alike to all times, places and conditions of men, it obviously becomes political quackery, as untenable and preposterous as it would be to insist upon clothing all mankind in garments of the same material, in summer or winter, and of equal cut and dimensions, whether for big men or little, on the Danube or on the Mississippi. But however free trade comes to America, it comes as a strait-jacket, and whether new or second-hand, it is equally a misfit and unacceptable.
The affairs of communities are subject to endless differences from age to age and year to year, and governments that do not recognize these differences are either stupid or tyrannical, and deserve to be superseded or overthrown. In 1816 the sound policy of England, as Lord Brougham declared, was to stifle “in the cradle those infant manufactures in the United States which the war had forced into existence.” In 1824 the policy, according to Huskisson, was “an extension of the principle of reducing duties just so far as was consistent with complete protection of British industry.” In 1846 duties upon most foreign manufactures had almost ceased to yield any revenue, and Sir Robert Peel was forced to listen to the cry for cheap bread, though he was teased almost to the fighting point by the fertile, bitter, and matchless sarcasms of Disraeli, who also said: “The time will come when the working classes of England will come to you on bended knees and pray you to undo your present legislation.”
At this moment important changes of public opinion seem to be going on abroad, and the ponderous octavos of Malthus, Ricardo, McCulloch, and Mill may have some repose. What may have been found expedient yesterday may be fraught with mischief to-day, and he that has no distrust of an inflexible free-trade hobby will turn out to be, unwittingly perhaps, as has been well said, “a friend of every other country but his own,” and find at last that he has rejected the solid school of experience only to get astride of an imported catch-word, vainly imagining he is bottomed on a scientific and universal principle. Daniel Webster declared, “I give up what is called the science of political economy. There is no such science. There are no rules on these subjects so fixed and invariable that their aggregate constitutes a science.”
PRACTICE VERSUS THEORY.
But English free trade does not mean free trade in such articles as the poor require and must have, like tea and coffee, nor in tobacco, wines and spirituous liquors. These articles they reserve for merciless exactions, all specific, yielding a hundred millions of revenue, and at three times the rate we levy on spirits and more than five times the rate we levy on tobacco! This is the sly part of the entertainment to which we are invited by free-traders.
In 1880 Great Britain, upon tobacco and cigars, mainly from the United States, valued at $6,586,520, collected $43,955,670 duties, or nearly two-thirds as much as we collect from our entire importations of merchandise from Great Britain.
After all, is it not rather conspicuous hypocrisy for England to disclaim all protection, so long as she imposes twenty-nine cents per pound more upon manufactured tobacco than upon unmanufactured, and double the rate upon manufactured cocoa of that upon the raw? American locomotives are supposed to have great merit, and the foreign demand for them is not unknown, but the use of any save English locomotives upon English railroads is prohibited. Is there any higher protection than prohibition? And have not her sugar refiners lived upon the difference of the rates imposed upon raw and refined sugars? On this side of the Atlantic such legislation would be called protection.
WHAT THEY MEAN.
One of the cardinal principles of British free-traders is, “Buy where you can buy cheapest, and sell where you can sell dearest,” and that is precisely what they mean. They expect to buy of us cheapest and sell to us dearest. It is the only logical outcome of the whole policy. We are to be the victims of sharpers, whether we sell or buy. One-half of this resounding phrase, “buy where you can buy cheapest,” often appears to touch the pocket nerve of those who, having nothing to sell, derive their income from capital, or from a fixed salary, and they forget that their capital or their salary might have been much smaller had it not been for the greater prosperity and compensation which protection has given to labor and to all business enterprises. Some part of this class are accustomed to make periodical journeys through foreign lands, and as they often bring home more or less of esthetic rarities, they feel aggrieved that such expensive luxuries, which, if cheap and common, would have had no attractions for them, often happen to be among the very tidbits upon which it is the fitting policy of a republican form of government to levy revenue. The tax falls upon those able to pay. No country on the globe sends out so many foreign travelers with a spendable surplus, as the United States, or that scatter their money more generously, not to say extravagantly. English reciprocity in pleasure travel, however, like their often proposed commercial reciprocity, is comparatively jug-handled. They come singly; we go in droves and caravans.
AMERICA VINDICATED BY THOSE WHO COME TO STAY.
But if foreign countries send comparatively an unequal number of visitors tending to reimburse the abounding expenditures of Americans abroad, they do send us a far more numerous if not valuable company who come to stay, bringing both fortunes and affections, and adding, as they have added within the past two years, over a million and a quarter of brave hearts and willing hands to the productive forces of the country. Their tracks are all one way. None go back and none come here as drones, for such stay away to absorb honey already stored; but the “tenth legions,” so to say, of all the conscripted armies of Europe, in health and fit for any service, are rushing to our shore on the “waves of the Atlantic, three thousand miles long,” as volunteers for life. Were we to drop protection this western exodus would cease and the emigrants now here would be relegated to the same scale of wages from which they so anxiously attempted to escape.
These facts are pregnant arguments annually reproduced, upholding the American policy of protection, and show that those who expect to earn their living—tempted, it is true, by the highest rewards, and tempted by free schools for their children—know where to find the largest opportunities for the comforts of life, for happiness and intellectual progress; and know also that America is not and never intends to be a transatlantic Ireland nor an agricultural back lot of Europe.
COMMERCIAL RULES NOT A SCIENCE.
We have some worthy literary professors of free trade and some hacks who know their master’s crib “of quick conception and easy delivery,” as John Randolph would have described them, who, having determined that the sun shall hereafter rise in the west, assume for their doctrines, like their English masters, the basis of absolute science, which they insist shall be everywhere accepted, regardless of all conditions, wants, or circumstances, as the latest revelation of economic truth; but free trade fails, shamefully fails, to stand the admitted tests of an exact science, as its results must ever be both an inconsistent quantity and incapable of prediction. It yields to the condition of nations and of the seasons, to war, to time, and constantly yields to facts. The blackboard compels universal assent to mathematics, and the laboratory offers the same service to chemistry; but any test or analysis of free trade yields nothing but polemical vagaries, and it may appropriately be consigned to the witches’ cauldron with—
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog.
· · · · ·
Mingle, mingle, mingle,
You that mingle may.
Queerly enough some of the parties referred to, denounce the tariff men as but “half-educated,” while, perhaps, properly demanding themselves exclusive copyright protection for all of their own literary productions, whether ephemeral or abiding. It is right, they seem to think, to protect brains—and of these they claim the monopoly—but monstrous to protect muscles; right to protect the pen, but not the hoe nor the hammer.
Free trade would almost seem to be an aristocratic disease from which workingmen are exempt, and those that catch it are as proud of it as they would be of the gout—another aristocratic distinction.
It might be more modest for these “nebulous professors” of political economy to agree among themselves how to define and locate the leading idea of their “dismal science” whether in the value in exchange or value in use, in profits of capital or wages, whether in the desire for wealth or aversion to labor, or in the creation, accumulation, distribution and consumption of wealth, and whether rent is the recompense for the work of nature or the consequence of a monopoly of property, before they ask a doubting world to accept the flickering and much disputed theory of free trade as an infallible truth about which they have themselves never ceased to wrangle. The weight of nations against it is as forty to one. It may be safe to say that when sea-serpents, mermaids, and centaurs find a place in natural history, free trade will obtain recognition as a science; but till then it must go uncrowned, wearing no august title, and be content with the thick-and-thin championship of the “Cobden Club.”
THE BRITISH POLICY EVERYWHERE REJECTED.
All of the principal British colonies from the rising to the setting of the sun—India alone possibly excepted—are in open and successful revolt against the application of the free-trade tyranny of their mother country, and European States not only refuse to copy the loudly-heralded example, but they are retreating from it as though it were charged with dynamite. Even the London Times, the great “thunderer” of public opinion in Great Britain, does not refrain from giving a stunning blow to free trade when it indicates that it has proved a blunder, and reminds the world that it predicted it would so prove at the start. The ceremony of free trade, with only one party responding solitary and alone, turns out as dull and disconsolate as that of a wedding without a bride. The honeymoon of buying cheap and selling dear appears indefinitely postponed.
There does not seem to be any party coming to rescue England from her isolated predicament. Bismarck, while aiming to take care of the interests of his own country, as do all ministers, on this question perhaps represents the attitude of the greater part of the far-sighted statesmen of Europe, and he, in one of his recent parliamentary speeches, declared:
Without being a passionate protectionist, I am as a financier, however, a passionate imposer of duties, from the conviction that the taxes, the duties levied at the frontier, are almost exclusively borne by the foreigner, especially for manufactured articles, and that they have always an advantageous, retrospective, protectionist action.
Practically the nations of continental Europe acquiesce in this opinion, and are a unit in their flat refusal of British free trade. They prefer the example of America. Before self-confident men pronounce the whole world of tariff men, at home and abroad, “half-educated or half-witted,” they would do well to see to it that the stupidity is not nearer home, or that they have not themselves cut adrift from the logic of their own brains, only to be wofully imposed upon by free-trade quackery, which treats man as a mere fact, no more important than any other fact, and ranks labor only as a commodity to be bought and sold in the cheapest or dearest markets.
So long as statesmen are expected to study the prosperity and advancement of the people for whose government and guidance they are made responsible, so long free-trade theories must be postponed to that Utopian era when the health, strength and skill, capital and labor of the whole human race shall be reduced or elevated to an entire equality, and when each individual shall dwell in an equal climate, upon an equal soil, freely pasture his herds and flocks where he pleases, and love his neighbor better than himself.
OUR FARMERS.
The test of profitable farming is the state of the account at the end of the year. Under free trade the evidence multiplies that the English farmer comes to the end of the year with no surplus, often in debt, bare and discontented. Their laborers rarely know the luxury of meat, not over sixteen ounces per week,[[87]] and never expect to own a rood of the soil.
But under the protective policy the American farmer holds and cultivates his own land, has a surplus at the end of the year for permanent investments or improvements, and educates and brings up his sons and daughters with the advantages and comforts of good society. There are more American houses with carpets than in any other country of the world. I believe it will not be disputed that the down-trodden tillers of the soil in Great Britain are not well fed; that they are coarsely underclad, and that for lack of common-school culture they would hardly be regarded as fit associates here for Americans who drive their teams afield, or for the young men who start in life as laborers upon farms. The claim that free trade is the true policy of the American farmer would seem to be, therefore, a very courageous falsehood.
It is an unfortunate tendency of the age that nearly one-half of the population of the globe is concentrated in cities, often badly governed, and sharply exposed to extravagance, pauperism, immorality, and all the crimes and vices which overtake mankind reared in hot-beds. I would neither undervalue the men of brilliant parts, nor blot out the material splendor of cities, but regret to see the rural districts depopulated for their unhealthy aggrandizement. Free trade builds up a few of these custom-house cities, where gain from foreign trade is the chief object sought, where mechanics, greater in numbers than any other class, often hang their heads, though Crœsus rolls in Pactolian wealth, and Shylock wins his pound of flesh; but protection assembles artisans and skilled workmen in tidy villages and towns, details many squadrons of industry to other and distant localities, puts idle and playful waterfalls at work, opens, builds up, and illumines, as with an electric light, the whole interior of the country; and the farmer of Texas or of New England, of Iowa or of Wisconsin, is benefited by such reinforcements of consumers, whether they are by his side or across the river, at Atlanta or South Bend, at Paterson or at Providence. The farmers own and occupy more than nineteen-twentieths of our whole territory, and their interest is in harmony with the even-handed growth and prosperity of the whole country.
There is not a State whose interests would not be jeopardized by free trade, and I should like to dwell upon the salient facts as to Missouri, Kansas, Indiana, Alabama, Illinois, and many other States, but I shall only refer to one. The State of Texas, surpassing empires in its vast domains, doubling its population within a decade, and expending over twenty million dollars within a year in the construction of additional railroads, with a promised expenditure within the next fifteen months of over twenty-seven millions more, has sent to market as raw material the past year 12,262,052 pounds of hides, 20,671,639 pounds of wool, and 1,260,247 bales of cotton. Her mineral resources, though known to be immense, are as yet untouched. Her bullocks, in countless herds on their way to market, annually crowd and crop the prairies from Denver to Chicago. But now possessed of a liberal system of railroads, how long will the dashing spirit of the Lone Star State—where precious memories still survive of Austin, of Houston, of Rusk, and of Schleicher—be content to send off unmanufactured her immense bulk of precious raw materials, which should be doubled in value at home, and by the same process largely multiply her population? With half as many in number now as had the original thirteen, and soon to pass our largest States, wanting indefinite quantities of future manufactures at home, Texas should also prepare to supply the opening trade with Mexico, in all of its magnitude and variety, and far more worthy of ambition than in the golden days of Montezuma.
No State can run and maintain railroads unless the way-stations, active and growing settlements and towns, are numerous enough to offer a large, constant, and increasing support. The through business of long lines of railroads is of great importance to the termini, and gives the roads some prestige, but the prosperity and dividends mainly accrue from the local business of thrifty towns on the line of the roads. It is these, especially manufacturing towns, which make freight both ways, to and from, that free trade must ever fail to do, and while through freights, owing to inevitable competition, pay little or no profit, the local freights sustain the roads, and are and must be the basis of their chief future value. Without this efficient local support, cheap and rapid long transportation would be wholly impracticable.
The Southern States, in the production of cotton, have possibly already reached the maximum quantity that can be cultivated with greatest profit, unless the demand of the world expands. A short crop now often brings producers a larger sum than a full crop. The amount of the surplus sent abroad determines the price of the whole crop. Production appears likely soon to outrun the demand. Texas alone has latent power to overstock the world. Is it not time, therefore, to curtail the crop, or to stop any large increase of it, while sure to obtain as much or more for it, and to turn unfruitful capital and labor into other and more profitable channels of industry? The untrodden fields, where capital and labor wait to be organized for the development of Southern manufactures and mining, offer unrivaled temptations to leaders among men in search of legitimate wealth.
The same facts are almost equally applicable to general agriculture, but more particularly to the great grain-growing regions of the West. A great harvest frequently tends to render the labor of the whole year almost profitless, whenever foreign countries are blessed with comparatively an equal abundance. The export of corn last year in October was 8,535,067 bushels, valued at $4,604,840, but the export of only 4,974,661 bushels this year brings $3,605,813. An equal difference appears in the increased value of exports of flour. A much larger share of crops must be consumed nearer home, if any sure and regular market is to be permanently secured. The foreign demand, fitful and uncertain as it is, rarely exceeds one-twentieth of even the present home requirements, and the losses from long transportation, incident to products of great bulk, can never be successfully avoided except by an adequate home demand.
Farmers do not look for a market for grain among farmers, but solely among non-producing consumers, and these it is greatly to their interest to multiply rather than to diminish by forcing them to join in producing or doubling crops for which there may be an insufficient demand. Every ship-load of wheat sent abroad tends to bring down foreign prices; and such far-off markets should be sought only when the surplus at home is excessive or when foreign prices are extraordinarily remunerative.
The wheat regions of the West, superb as they undoubtedly are, it is to be feared, have too little staying character to be prodigally squandered, and their natural fertility noticeably vanishes in the rear unless retained by costly fertilizers almost as rapidly as new fields open in front. Some of the Middle States as well as the New England, though seeking fertilizers far and near, already look to the West for much of their corn and bread; and there is written all over Eastern fields, as Western visitors may read, the old epitaph, “As we are now so you may be.” It will take time for this threatened decadence, but not long in the life of nations. The wheat crop runs away from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, and sinks in other localities as it looms up in Minnesota, Nebraska, and Dakota. Six years of cropping in California, it is said, reduces the yield per acre nearly one-half.
There was in 1880 devoted to wheat culture over thirty-five million acres, or nearly double the acreage of 1875. In twenty-five years a hundred million people will more than overtake any present or prospective surplus, and we may yet need all of our present magnificent wheat fields to give bread to our own people. Certainly we need not be in haste to slaughter and utterly exhaust the native fertility of our fields on the cheap terms now presented.
England, with all her faults, is great, but unfortunately has not room to support her greatness, and must have cheap food and be able to offer better wages or part with great numbers of her people. I most sincerely hope her statesmen—and she is never without those of eminence—will prove equal to their great trust and to any crisis; but we cannot surrender the welfare of our Republic to any foreign empire. Free trade may or may not be England’s necessity. Certainly it is not our necessity; and it has not reached, and never will reach, the altitude of a science. An impost on corn there, it is clear, would now produce an exodus of her laboring population that would soon leave the banner of Victoria waving over a second-rate power.
Among the nations of the world the high position of the United States was never more universally and cordially admitted. Our rights are everywhere promptly conceded, and we ask nothing more. It is an age of industry, and we can only succeed by doing our best. Our citizens under a protective tariff are exceptionally prosperous and happy, and not strangers to noble deeds nor to private virtues. A popular government based on universal suffrage will be best and most certainly perpetuated by the elevation of laboring men through the more liberal rewards of diversified employments, which give scope to all grades of genius and intelligence and tend to secure to posterity the blessings of universal education and the better hope of personal independence.