Curiously enough, the same intellect which declares that monopoly cannot exist under protection will under stress argue: Take the duty from those who have formed trusts, but give it to us who have not. “In order that you may?” one feels like asking. This was a link in the argument of the gentlemen who pleaded in 1909 that Schedules I and K (cotton and wool) should remain undisturbed. There is no “cotton trust”; therefore continue duties long unnecessary and wink at those which trickery forces through! True, there is no cotton trust—as yet. But how are trusts bred? Does our experience show us a more fruitful father of them than cutting off foreign competition, as the new duties on the higher grade of cottons seem to have done?
How are trusts bred? Is there any one left who does not know that when such privileges as prohibitive tariffs are dangled before men’s eyes they rush to seize them, build and build again, regardless of all laws of trade? Is there any one left who does not know that over-stimulated production pays a penalty in half-time and shut-downs as truly as a man’s intemperance pays one in physical and mental exhaustion? And in the period of depression the new and weak fall into the hands of the rich and long-established. This has been the history of many a cotton factory. Why should it not all end as it has in scores of other industries?
But there are other breeders of trusts. What else are the supposed agreements as to output and prices of which rumors come from the great cotton organization, the Arkwright Club? What else was the attempt of that club in 1909 to unite with European cotton manufacturers to restrict the consumption of cotton in order to lower its price?
But should we expect that in an industry which boasts so many men of great ability, daring, and ambition as cotton manufacturing, and in which the rewards are so tremendous, no man will ever be found strong enough to take advantage of the tendencies to combination which already show themselves and to work out a trust? Why should there not be a Rockefeller or a Carnegie in cotton as well as in oil or steel?
The woollen industry, like cotton, pleads to be allowed to retain its high protection because it is still unshackled by combination. That is partially but not entirely true. As a matter of fact, there does exist a strong combination in this industry—the American Woollen Company, which has earned the popular title of “woollen trust” largely because of its trust-like methods. The woollen trust is far from being a monopoly, though it is certainly a good nucleus for one. It already controls about one-third of our domestic production of woollens and worsteds for men’s wear. Its annual product is about $48,000,000. Its capital is $69,000,000. All things considered, there seems to be no reason why eventually the American Woollen Company, if it finds a Rockefeller or a Carnegie, should not follow in the steps of steel and sugar and oil and turpentine and bath tubs.
Juggling the formula under which he pretends to work, denying facts or shying from them, this is your typical stand-patter. Press your attack on his position, however, and you will find something more than negation. You will find an angry, alert opponent, threatening in fact, if not in so many words, to attack your position if you do not let him alone. Threats have been the very essence of the power the unholy wool alliance has had for so many decades, as Mr. Aldrich more than once admitted in the making of the tariff of 1909.
“I say to the Senator (Mr. Aldrich was addressing Senator Dolliver) that this wool and woollen schedule is the crucial schedule in this bill ... if by insidious or any other means he can induce the Senate to break down this schedule, that is the end of protection, for the present anyway, in this country.”
Mr. Aldrich was not defending the wool duties because they were fair. He was defending them because they have back of them the solidest vote in the Senate. Those to whom he talked knew it, and they knew that he was warning them that if they did not support these duties they could not expect to get what they wanted, however just from the protectionist standpoint that might be.
There has always been a fraction of Mr. Aldrich’s party in the Senate that could not be moved by threats—who if they had known enough about the tariff on which they were voting to realize that a threat was being held over them would have resented it. It is that fraction which openly confesses that they have “always voted as they were told.” The Congressional Record is full of such admissions. Mr. Aldrich could not sway them by appeals to their cupidity. He could, however, by an appeal to their loyalty to the doctrine, to their hatred of their political opponents. For years he has silenced those who had qualms about a duty by a sneering allusion to “Democratic talk.” “We heard all of that from Mr. Vest in 1890,” was his answer to Senator Dolliver’s criticism of the wool schedule. When it came to revising the duties on tin plate the stand-patters tried the same argument—“false to protection.” The shame of it finally drew from Senator Dolliver this outraged protest:
“Is it possible,” he said, “that a man, because he voted for the Allison tin-plate rate of 1889 and heard poor McKinley dedicate the first tin-plate mill in America, can be convicted in this Chamber of treachery to the protective tariff system, if he desires that schedule reëxamined, after seeing the feeble enterprise of 1890 grown within a single decade to the full measure of this market-place, organized into great corporations, overcapitalized into a speculative trust, and at length unloaded on the United States Steel Company, with a rake-off to the promoters sufficient to buy the Rock Island system? If a transaction like that has made no impression upon the mind of Congress, I expose no secret in saying that it has made a very profound impression on the thought and purpose of the American people.”