Let us take this next step. Everybody, of course, cannot be a farmer. Everybody cannot be a mechanic. All the people in the world cannot go at one business. We must have a diversity of industry. I say, the greater that diversity, the greater the development of brain in the country. We then have what you might call a mental exchange; men are then pursuing every possible direction in which the mind can go, and the brain is being developed upon all sides; whereas, if you all simply cultivated the soil, you would finally become stupid. If you all did only one business you would become ignorant; but by pursuing all possible avocations that call for taste, genius, calculation, discovery, ingenuity, invention—by having all these industries open to the American people, we will be able to raise great men and great women; and I am for protection, because it will enable us to raise greater men and greater women. Not only because it will make more money in less time, but because I would rather have greater folks and less money.
One man of genius makes a continent sublime. Take all the men of wealth from Scotland—who would know it? Wipe their names from the pages of history, and who would miss them? Nobody. Blot out one name, Robert Burns, and how dim and dark would be the star of Scotland. The great thing is to raise great folks. That is what we want to do, and we want to diversify all the industries and protect them all. How much? Simply enough to prevent the foreign article from destroying the domestic. But they say, then the manufacturers will form a trust and put the prices up. If we depend upon the foreign manufacturers will they not form trusts? We can depend on competition. What do the Democrats want to do? They want to do away with the tariff, so as to do away with the surplus. They want to put down the tariff to do away with the surplus. If you put down the tariff a small per cent, so that the foreign article comes to America, instead of decreasing, you will increase the surplus. Where you get a dollar now, you will get five then. If you want to stop getting anything from imports, you want to put the tariff higher, my friend.
Let every Democrat understand this, and let him also understand that I feel and know that he has the same interest in this great country that I have, and let me be frank enough and candid enough and honest enough to say that I believe the Democratic party advocates the policy it does because it believes it will be the best for the country. But we differ upon a question of policy, and the only way to argue it is to keep cool. If a man simply shouts for his side, or gets mad, he is a long way from any intellectual improvement.
If I am wrong in this, I want to be set right. If it is not to the interest of America that the shuttle shall keep flying, that wheels shall keep turning, that cloth shall be woven, that the forges shall flame and that the smoke shall rise from the numberless chimneys—if that is not to the interest of America, I want to know it. But I believe that upon the great cloud of smoke rising from the chimneys of the manufactories of this country, every man who will think can see the bow of national promise.
"Oh, but," they say, "you put the prices so high." Let me give you two or three facts: Only a few years ago I know that we paid one hundred and twenty-five dollars a ton for Bessemer steel. At that time the tariff was twenty-eight dollars a ton, I believe. I am not much on figures. I generally let them add it up, and I pay it and go on about my business. With the tariff at twenty-eight dollars a ton, that being a sufficient protection against Great Britain, the ingenuity of America went to work. Capital had the courage to try the experiment, and the result was that, instead of buying thousands and thousands and thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of tons of steel from Great Britain, we made it here in our own country, and it went down as low as thirty dollars a ton. Under this "rascally protection" it went down to one-fourth of what free trade England was selling it to us for.
And so I might go on all night with a thousand other articles; all I want to show you is that we want these industries here, and we want them protected just as long as they need protection. We want to rock the cradle just as long as there is a child in it. When the child gets to be seven or eight feet high, and wears number twelve boots, we will say: "Now you will have to shift for yourself." What we want is not simply for the capitalist, not simply for the workingmen, but for the whole country.
If there is any object worthy the attention of this or any other government, it is the condition of the workingmen. What do they do? They do all that is done. They are the Atlases upon whose mighty shoulders rests the fabric of American civilization. The men of leisure are simply the vines that run round this great sturdy oak of labor. If there is anything noble enough, and splendid enough to claim the attention of a nation, it is this question, and I hope the time will come when labor will receive far more than it does to-day. I want you all to think of it—how little, after all, the laboring man, even in America, receives.
[A voice: "Under protection.">[
Yes, sir, even under protection. Take away that protection, and he is instantly on a level with the European serf. And let me ask that good, honest gentleman one question. If the laborer is better off in other countries, why does not the American laborer emigrate to Europe?
There is no place in the wide world where, in my judgment, labor reaps its true reward. There never has been. But I hope the time will come when the American laborer will not only make a living for himself, for his wife and children, but lay aside something to keep the roof above his head when the winter of age may come. My sympathies are all with them, and I would rather see thousands of... '' palaces of millionaires unroofed than to see desolation in the cabins of the poor. I know that this world has been made beautiful by those who have labored and those who have suffered. I know that we owe to them the conveniences of life, and I have more conveniences, I live a more luxurious life, than any monarch ever lived one hundred years ago. I have more conveniences than any emperor could have purchased with the revenue of his empire one hundred years ago. It is worth something to live in this age of the world.