The Tariff in Our Times

by Ida M. Tarbell

Here is a case of a young Polish girl new to the mills who in cleaning a loom while it was in operation lost parts of two fingers. She did not know it was unsafe or forbidden. She saw others doing it. The court promptly gave the company costs! One might go on for pages with these cruel wrongs.

The heartbreaking part of it is that it takes but a little imagination, but a little knowledge, of what can and is being done to ease hard industrial conditions in the world, and in a scattered way in this very state, to show one how easily unselfishness could redeem Rhode Island. If the textile manufacturers were, as a body, men of enlightened minds, if they had caught even a glimpse of that vision of a new and nobler industrial society which has convinced so many men and women in this country not only of the brutality and wastefulness of our present system, but of the entire practicability of something better, they might easily make of their state as perfect an example of what an industrial society should be as it now is of what it should not be.

This, then, is high protection’s most perfect work—a state of a half million people turning out an annual product worth $279,438,000, the laborers in the chief industry underpaid, unstable, and bent with disease, the average employers rich, self-satisfied, and as indifferent to social obligation as so many robber barons. It is an industrial oligarchy made by a nation’s beneficence under the mistaken notion that it was working out a labor’s paradise. Not only is it a travesty of the principles of protection, it is a mockery of that very individualism behind which it takes refuge. Individualism does not thrive at the expense of its fellows: it appreciates that the very kernel of its own existence lies in respecting and defending the rights of others. As for democracy, what vestige of it is left in either the political or industrial machine which controls the state of Rhode Island?

Certainly the time has come when the pretence that high duties “protect” the American working-man can deceive nobody. The American working-man is not getting the duty. He pays for his higher wages by his higher productivity. It is an old and established law of industry drawn from the experience of all nations that low wages mean high cost. “The highest paid labor,” says Francis A. Walker, “is that which costs the employer the least.” The cotton spinner in India gets 20 pence a week—the cotton spinner in England 20 shillings, but English cottons flood India. The iron worker in Russia gets 3 roubles a week, in England four or five times as much, but it is the Englishman who supplies the markets of Europe. The cotton labor of Egypt and India receives not over one-tenth of what the Southern labor does, but it is our cotton which supplies the world. The wheat hands of the Eastern world are paid from a twentieth to a fifth of what the laborers in the United States receive, but we export vast quantities in competition with the world.

The protectionist who answers every criticism of his rates by conjuring a picture of “pauper labor” is equally conscienceless in his attitude towards the relation of protection to the two most disquieting industrial phenomena of our day, the increase in the cost of living and the multiplicity of corporations which aim to become and often are monopolies. For instance, Mr. Whitman, whose forty years of garrulous and successful defence of the present wool schedule has made him the perfect type of the lay stand-patter, does not admit that there is such a problem as the increased cost of living. He speaks of it as “alleged.” According to Mr. Whitman, the newspapers have talked so much about the subject that people have been deluded into believing that the condition is actual. If there is an increased cost in living, however, the tariff has nothing to do with it. It is due to the cost of the second-class mail! “I believe it to be absolutely true,” says Mr. Whitman, “that the entire cost of publishing and distributing the newspapers of the United States and the magazines is one of the great contributory causes to the cost of merchandise, and is borne by the consumer.”

Senator Lodge who, in his way, is as typical as Mr. Whitman, denies that the tariff is materially related to this problem. In 1910 Mr. Lodge was chairman of a Senate committee investigating the cost of living. He did not go quite as far as Mr. Whitman—that is, he did not dismiss the subject by declaring it merely a newspaper yarn. But he did find that “the tariff was no material factor.” His chief reason for this conclusion amounted to this: The increased cost of living is world-wide. There are several causes, therefore the tariff is not a material factor. It is much like saying that because a log jam is made up of several logs no one log has anything to do with the jam.

Another curious bit of reasoning in Mr. Lodge’s report was this: He had offered a list of 257 articles—almost all of them protected to some extent—the prices of which he had shown to have increased between 1900 and 1909 by 14.5 per cent. Out of this list Mr. Lodge selected fourteen articles on which the duty was highest. He found that the average increase on these fourteen articles was only 13.1 per cent. Therefore, he concluded, the tariff is no material factor in the increased cost of living!

Still another reason for exonerating the tariff from any guilt in the matter was this: The increase of cost in all kinds of farm products between 1900 and 1909 has been much greater than the increase of manufactured products. Now, says Mr. Lodge, there has been practically no change in the tariffs on farm products in this period, therefore the tariff has nothing to do with increased prices.

This same quality of argument is used in regard to the trust. There are several causes, therefore the tariff is not a cause. The tariff contributed nothing to the foundation of the Standard Oil Company, therefore it has had nothing to do with the foundation of any other trust. Frequently the stand-patter is so unfamiliar with his own formula, or so indifferent to it that he will insist that the trust is an industrial surprise—a species of highwaymen of whose presence on the road he had no warning and for whose ravages he consequently cannot be held accountable. If he knew his own formula, or, knowing, was willing to regard it, he would be ashamed of this sort of pleading. No evil concealed in the doctrine of protection was ever more thoroughly advertised than monopoly. At every stage, since Hamilton’s time, we have been warned that it waited us just around the turn. For the last twenty-five years, especially, we have seen it pour down upon us,—an army whose ranks yearly grew thicker, stronger, and more cruel. This is the very army which we have been cautioned for decades to be waiting in ambush. There was a counter force provided, of course, for this waiting enemy—domestic competition. Now, we know what has happened to domestic competition in the last thirty years in this country. Freed from foreign competition—something which the doctrine never intended should happen—the home manufacturers have by a succession of guerilla campaigns, often as ruthless and lawless as those of wild Indians or Spanish freebooters, coralled industry after industry so completely that they could control its output, and at once cheapen the quality and increase the price.

Any one who wants to know more than he already does of the power and extent of industrial monopolies in this country should read the vigorous report of Attorney-General Wickersham presented to Congress in December, 1910. Consider the relations to the vicious combinations Mr. Wickersham enumerates, of the protection so many of them enjoy. Take away the protection of the window-glass trust, and does any one believe its high-handedness would not be gradually checked? If the tobacco trust and sugar trust and paper trust and powder trust and beef trust, all of which Mr. Wickersham attacks for extortions and brigandage, had to meet world competition, does anybody doubt that they would not find many of their present methods impractical? Protection is so obvious an aid to them that it seems like insisting that two and two make four even to refer to it. But put this up to a stand-patter who knows his formula, and what do you get? Why, the answer that protection was never intended to foster trusts, and therefore it cannot be that it is doing so! Protection, he will tell you, provides for domestic competition, and, since it provides for it, his idea seems to be we must have it! Whatever is in the formula is in practice! It is no backwoods member from a remote Pennsylvania iron-and-steel district who asserts this. It is the ablest man of them all—Senator Aldrich himself. “I cannot conceive of such a thing as a monopoly under protection” was the substance of Senator Aldrich’s argument on the point in the last tariff debate, as it had been for twenty-five years.