But this man would be impossible were it not that he has the backing of politicians and law-makers. Behind and allied with every successful high tariff group is a political group. That is, under our operation of the protective doctrine we have developed a politician who encourages the most dangerous kind of citizenship a democracy can know—the panicky, grasping, idealless kind. This is the most serious charge that can be made against the man who holds or seeks office, that he injures the quality of the citizen.

The man who is a candidate for Congress in any district, city or country, has two courses open to him: He can appeal to greed or to the ideal. He has the opportunity to discuss with his constituents the questions and measures of his day and to win them by the enthusiasm he awakens for ideals. He has equally the opportunity to win them by the promises he makes—the promises of individual local benefits, like pensions and public buildings, or the promise of securing protection for local industries. Take the case of “Pig Iron,” Kelley—a man who clung to protection with the passionate faith of a fanatic, who saw in it the great panacea for the country’s poverty, who believed himself an incorruptible man, and yet who allowed the protectionists of both parties in his own Philadelphia district to return him without effort on his part, because they knew he would get for them what they wanted. Mr. Kelley, honest man as he thought himself to be, educated his constituents in the pernicious notion that a Congressman’s first business is to look after their business. The hopelessly sordid mental and moral attitude of Pennsylvania toward politics is due chiefly to the training in selfishness which for sixty years her Congressmen have given her. Throughout this period those who sought her suffrage have held up the promise of protecting taxes. Vote for us and we will take care of you. One of the most immoral of the many immoral trades which belong to the period of our Civil War was the bargain the state made with the Republican party to support the Union in return for the duties they wanted on their manufactures. For years almost the sole appeal made by candidates to the people of the state has been selfish. They have had a steady education in the notion that government is something from which to get a personal advantage. Is it strange that the Pennsylvanian should come to regard all public undertakings, even the building of a state capitol, as legitimate prey? It is a logical enough chain from the instructions of Thaddeus Stevens and “Pig Iron” Kelley to a tariff-made Pittsburg, blind to the appalling inhumanity of her mills, or to the shameless looting of a great state building. Once the appeal to men’s greed is the established rule of a state’s politics, the inevitable outcome is every degree and species of baseness. On the other hand, a people trained by its leaders to think of the general good, to consider principles and ideals as of first importance to national life, to feel that our fundamentals must be preserved before everything else—such a people will rise to any height of enthusiasm and sacrifice.

The legislator who is so indifferent to the moral effect of his appeal on the country’s citizenship, who refuses to see the connection between the appeal to selfishness and corruption such as that which in 1884, 1892, and partially in 1910 swept the Republican party from power, can hardly be expected to be nice about the methods he employs to get the things he has promised. Indeed, there is political necessity for just such methods as have been discussed in the previous chapters of this book. They are a part of the whole, perfectly consistent with the appeal, not a whit more immoral. If Mr. Aldrich promises the cotton manufacturers of New England to support their demands, allowing them to raise the money and do the work to reëlect him, can you expect him to do less than he did in the Payne-Aldrich Bill—allow a tricky revision of the cotton schedule to go through?

Let us admit that reasonable people must not expect in a popular government to arrive at results save by a series of compromises. As long as men disagree as to what is desirable to accomplish, as well as on the methods which are to be employed in getting what they all agree to be desirable, each successive step comes by one side agreeing to take less than it believes should be given, and the other yielding more than it believes wise. No reasonable person can expect the protective system to be handled without compromises, backsets, and errors of judgment, but he can expect it to be handled as a principle and not as a commodity. The shock and disgust come in the discovery that our tariffs are not good and bad applications of the principles of protection, but that they are good or bad bargains. Dip into the story of the tariff at any point since the Civil War and you will find wholesale proofs of this bargaining in duties; rates fixed with no more relation to the doctrine of protection than they have to the law of precession of the equinoxes. The actual work of carrying out these bargains is of a nature that would revolt any legislator whose sensitiveness to the moral quality of his acts has not been blunted—who had not entirely eliminated ethical considerations from the business of fixing duties. And this is what the high protectionist lawgiver has come to—a complete repudiation of the idea that right and wrong are involved in tariff bills. There is no man more dangerous, in a position of power, than he who refuses to accept as a working truth the idea that all a man does should make for rightness and soundness, that even the fixing of a tariff rate must be moral. But this is the man the doctrine of protection, as we know it, produces, and therein lies the final case against it,—men are worse, not better, for its practice.

INDEX

The following pages contain advertisements of Macmillan books by the same author and on kindred subjects.

SIX IMPORTANT BOOKS BY IDA M. TARBELL

The History of the Standard Oil Company

With many illustrations, portraits, and reproductions of important documents. Two volumes. Cloth, 8vo, second edition, $5.00 net; postage extra