Much more than this. Tariff-taxes have to be paid by somebody. Their payment is inexorable at the custom-house, and interest and other charges are added before the sum reaches the ultimate payer. But the ultimate sum however made up is exactly so much out of the commercial gains of the payer. The sign is every time minus and not plus. When egregiously high tariff-taxes are multiplied in number, and all the additions are made to them, they become an incalculably large sum, every cent of which has to be paid out of the gains of current Industry. Now, what a queer way that is to foster industries! What a queer way to help start them! It takes Capital to start new industries, and to carry on old ones; but tariff-taxes (with all their accretions) take just so much out from what would otherwise naturally become Capital. That is to say, all Capital is savings from the gains of Exchanges; and these gains are reduced by every tariff-tax that touches them directly or indirectly. Taxes from their very nature can help nobody. They hurt everybody. What a device this is to start new industries with, namely, to pick the pockets of the very men, who are to start the industries, if they ever are to start at all! Lower your reservoir to begin with, in order to give head and force to your faucet flow!
But this is not half of it. On what industries do the protectionist taxes fall at first to weaken and discourage them? Of course on the natural and profitable ones, which only ask to be let alone in order to maintain a healthful life and growth. If, under natural conditions, any industry is in existence, one may be perfectly sure it is profitable, since Profit is the only thing in the world that can start and build up an industry: when the profit ceases, the trade ceases of necessity: the motive to it is gone. In behalf of what sort of industries are these taxes ostensibly and plausibly levied? Only, if we are to believe the protectionists, the weak and presently unprofitable ones. It is the infant industries that need the nursing-bottle! That is to say, tax down and perhaps destroy the profitable industries, the industries that pay, that can paddle their own canoe and no thanks to anybody, in order to bring forward certain other industries, which by confession and open proclamation are unprofitable, and can only start by taxing their neighbors! Of course, there is a cat in this meal, and we shall let her out of the bag in plain sight presently; but we are taking now our friends, the protectionists, at their own word, and exhibiting their marvellous wisdom under the terms of their own choosing. What a blessed way for a nation to grow rich, to smite down with high taxes the active and enterprising and independent and therefore profitable industries with one hand, and grope around with the other to find some poor and inactive and unfrugal and naturally unprofitable industries, in order to fetch forward these by means of the plunder filched from the others!
To go back for historical illustration to Washington's first administration, when the first (extremely mild) protectionist taxes were levied in this country, we have the highest authority for knowing that many of the leading branches of manufactures were prosperous and profitable. They had no artificial help in order to start, but on the contrary had had continual discouragement for a century under the miserable protectionist policy of the mother country. Washington himself was inaugurated in a dark brown suit of woollen cloth of American manufacture: so was John Adams inaugurated first Vice-President of the United States about the same time in a garb of wholly native manufacture.[11] This was in April, 1789. In November of the same year, Washington returned to New York from his first tour in New England "astonished both at the marvellous growth of commerce and manufactures in New England and the general contentment of its inhabitants with the new government" (Schouler, p. 117). Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, in his famous Report to Congress on Manufactures, in 1791, enumerated seventeen branches as then thriving so as to fairly supply the home market, and settle into regular trades. These were, skins and leather, flax and hemp, iron and steel, brick and pottery, starch, brass and copper, tinware, carriages, painter's colors, refined sugars, oils, soaps, candles, hats, gunpowder, chocolate, snuff and chewing tobacco. It is plain enough from the debates of the time as well as from the nature of the case, that the protectionist taxes in our first two Tariffs, already considered here in detail, although they were comparatively slight in number and amount, fell in the way of discouragement on these incipient yet independent manufactures as well as upon all the farmers of the land. There can be but little rational question, that the woollen industry was sounder at the core in 1789, when Washington was inaugurated in native woollens, than in 1889, when Harrison was inaugurated in the same, the ostentatious gift of a firm of protectionist woollen manufacturers shortly afterwards adjudged to be bankrupt and fraudulently so.
The best point, after all, to make against this hollow fallacy, is the practical one, that no industry whatever, whether "infant" or other, has ever come in this country into an acknowledged self-sustaining position under a whole century's tariff-taxes. Salt, hemp, coal, cottons, woollens, nails, and iron and steel products generally, were the chief articles protectionized at first, and have been protectionized ever since, but no one of them all has ever come into a condition of self-support according to the view of the privileged beneficiaries. Each one of them was an old industry, and a relatively rich industry, when it was taken under the "fostering care" of the tariff-taxes, levied for their further enrichment on the masses of the people; and it was only greedy and secret combinations among these for that purpose, which put them at first and has kept them ever since in the rank of public beneficiaries. The simple truth is, that diversity of employments is rooted in human nature and in the circumstances amid which God has placed men, and so far is it from being true that taxes and restrictions are needful in order to foster manufactures, taxes and prohibitions cannot prevent them from springing into life! They are just as natural to men and to colonies as agriculture is. Indeed, agriculture can scarcely take a step without them. The farmer must have ploughs and carts and other implements; and, depend upon it, there are some natural mechanics in that colony. Clothes are as needful as food, and spinning and weaving in some form will begin at once, and prohibitions will be powerless to stop them.
Deadly to the fallacy in hand is the word of unquestionable History. Any one may read in Palfrey and Bancroft and Hildreth such facts as these, scattered all along through the noble volumes. The manufacture of linen and woollen and cotton cloth was begun in Massachusetts in 1638, in Rowley, by some families from Yorkshire; and became so remunerative in a couple of years that some acts of the General Court designed to stimulate it were repealed. Brick-making and glass-works and the manufacture of salt were all begun in Massachusetts before 1640. In 1643, the younger Winthrop established iron-works in Braintree and Lynn, which after some losses were successfully prosecuted. Within less than twenty years thereafter, tannery and shoemaking had made such strides, that boots and shoes became articles of export. That these were no fancy beginnings in manufactures, we may strikingly learn from an Act of Parliament passed in 1698. Notice the date. This law is a sample of many more:—"After the first day of December, 1699, no wool, or manufacture made or mixed with wool, being the produce or manufacture of any of the English plantations in America, shall be loaden in any ship or vessel, upon any pretence whatsoever,—nor loaden upon any horse, cart, or other carriage,—to be carried out of the English plantations to any other of the said plantations, or to any other place whatsoever." Thus the fabrics of Massachusetts were forbidden to find a market in Connecticut, or to be carried to Albany to traffic with the Five Nations. "That the country which was the home of the beaver might not manufacture its own hats, no man in the colonies could be a hatter or a journeyman at that trade, unless he had served an apprenticeship of seven years. No hatter might employ more than two apprentices. No American hat might be sent from one plantation to another." In 1701 the three charter colonies are reproached by the lords of trade "with promoting and propagating woollen and other manufactures proper to England." In 1721 New England alone had six furnaces and nineteen forges, and there were many others in Pennsylvania and Virginia. Parliament enacted in 1750 that no more mills should be erected in America for slitting or rolling iron, or forges for hammering it, or furnaces for making steel; and in certain cases, agents of the crown were authorized to tear down such establishments as "nuisances." How far all the arts of navigation had been carried in the Colonies before the Revolution, every one may read in Burke's famous speech on Conciliation with America. How far the products of the loom, the forge, and the anvil, were already being exported, in spite of British legislation, to other countries, any one may see in Lord North's last proposals and concessions to ward off Independence.
Protectionism having once fed its petted beneficiaries from the public crib, that is to say, from taxes wrenched from the many to enrich the few, invariably clamors for more and more rations for its pets from the same public source. Not only does no industry become self-supporting by its bite and its sup, but each becomes according to its own facile representations and representatives, more and more helpless in itself, more and more shameless in its demands, more and more entitled to public charity, and less and less inclined to surrender one iota of past or present privilege. The daughters of the horse-leech cry continually, Give! Give! The following schedule relates to woollens mainly, but it is a fair sample of many other protectionized classes of goods under the successive tariffs in this country, in point of increased taxes on the people in their behoof. While these lines are being written, the McKinley tariff-bill, so-called, having passed the House, is pending in the Senate. It is significant, that this piece of legislation, whether it be finally enacted or not, proposes to open the second century of the United States Protectionism by largely hoisting the tariff-taxes along the main line. Infant industries indeed!
| Articles. | Rate of Duties Under the Tariff of | |||||||||
| 1791. | 1859. | 1861. | 1864. | 1883. | 1890. | |||||
| Per cent. | Per cent. | |||||||||
| Dress goods of cotton and worsted, costing 15 cts. the sq. yd. | 5 | 19 | 30 | per cent. | 55 | per cent. | 68 | per cent. | 88 | per cent. |
| Same, costing 20 cents sq. yd. | 5 | 19 | 30 | " | 50 | " | 60 | " | 90 | " |
| Same, all wool or of mixed materials, costing 24 cents sq. yd. | 5 | 24 | 30 | " | 47 | " | 77 | " | 100 | " |
| Same, costing 30 cents sq. yd. | 5 | 24 | 30 | " | 55 | " | 70 | " | 90 | " |
| Same, costing 60 cents sq. yd. | 5 | 24 | 30 | " | 45 | " | 55 | " | 70 | " |
| Same, weighing over 4 oz. sq. yd. | 5 | 24 | 25% and 12 cts. per lb. | 40% and 24 cts. per lb. | 40% and 23 cts. per lb. | 50% and 44 cts. per lb. | ||||
| Ready-made clothing | 7½ | 24 | 25% and 12 cts. per lb. | 40% and 24 cts. per lb. | 35% and 40 cts. per lb. | 60% and 50 cts. per lb. | ||||
| Tapestry Brussels carpets | 7½ | 24 | 30 cts. sq. yd. | 50 cts. sq. yd. | 20 cts. sq. yd. and 30% | 28 cts. sq. yd. and 30% | ||||
| Tapestry velvet carpets | 7½ | 24 | 50 cts. sq. yd. | 80 cts. sq. yd. | 25 cts. sq. yd. and 30% | 40 cts. sq. yd. and 30% | ||||
| Brussels carpets | 7½ | 24 | 40 cts. sq. yd. | 70 cts. sq. yd. | 30 cts. sq. yd. and 30% | 40 cts. sq. yd. and 30% | ||||
| Druggets and bockings | 5 | 24 | 20 cts. sq. yd. | 25 cts. sq. yd. | 15 cts. sq. yd. and 30% | 20 cts. sq. yd. and 30% | ||||
| Silk goods, including velvets and plushes | 7½ | 19 | 30 | per cent. | 60 | per cent. | 50 | per cent. | Average probably 90% | |
| Woollen hosiery and underwear: | ||||||||||
| Costing 32 cents per lb. | 5 | 24 | 30 | " | 90 | " | 77 | " | 214 | per cent. |
| Costing 42 cents per lb. | 5 | 24 | 30 | " | 79 | " | 79 | " | 175 | " |
| Costing 62 cents per lb. | 5 | 24 | 30 | " | 62 | " | 74 | " | 135 | " |
| Costing 82 cents per lb. | 5 | 24 | 30 | " | 54 | " | 82 | " | 120 | " |
| Linen goods | 5 | 15 | 30 | " | Average 37½% | 35 | " | 50 | " | |
| Cotton hosiery: | ||||||||||
| Costing 62½ cents per doz. | 7½ | 24 | 30 | " | 35 | per cent. | 40 | " | 110 | " |
| Costing 2.10 cents per doz. | 7½ | 24 | 30 | " | 35 | " | 40 | " | 76 | " |
| Costing 4.10 cents per doz. | 7½ | 24 | 30 | " | 35 | " | 40 | " | 64 | " |
It is also significant in this connection to read an extract from the Report of Mr. William Whitman, President of the National Association of Wool Manufacturers, dated March 29, 1890, to the Stockholders of the Arlington Mills, Massachusetts. "I have been your Treasurer for a consecutive period of twenty years. During this period the average earnings have been 20 8⁄10 per centum upon the capital. The earnings of the last year were nearly three and a half times those of the year previous, and there is every indication that the current year will be the most profitable one in the company's history."
Fallacy C: that a home market is better and broader than a foreign market. Professor Thompson of Pennsylvania has publicly and repeatedly stated, that, by a persistent policy of Protectionism a "home market" would be created for all the bread-stuffs that this great country produces; and John Roach, the shipbuilder, expatiated at length before the Tariff Commission of 1882 on the advantages the farmer derives from the better "home market" already created by Protectionism. To come nearer home in place and further down in time, there was organized in Eastern Massachusetts with headquarters at Boston in some connection with the national election of 1888, a so-called "Home Market Club" of large proportions. It is generally understood in the State, that a large minority, if not a majority, of the members, are displeased with the McKinley Bill of 1890, declaring that the mustard is carried to fanaticism in this bill, that neither the "home market" nor any other can profit by such a series of prohibitions.