"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.
And what has made us such a great and splendid and progressive and sensible people?
[A voice: "Free thought.">[
Free thought, of course. Back of every invention is free thought. Why does a man invent? Slavery never invents; freedom invents. A slave working for his master tries to do the least work in the longest space of time, but a free man, working for wife and children, tries to do the most work in the shortest possible time. He is in love with what he is doing, consequently his head and his hands go in partnership; muscle and brain unite, and the result is that the head invents something to help the hands, and out of the brain leaps an invention that makes a slave of the forces of nature—those forces that have no backs to be whipped, those forces that shed no tears, those forces that are destined to work forever for the happiness of the human race.
Consequently I am for the protection of American labor, American genius, American thought. I do not want to put our workingmen on a level with the citizens of despotisms. Why do not the Democrats and others want the Chinese to come here? Are they in favor of being protected? Why is it that the Democrats and others object to penitentiary labor? I will tell you. They say that a man in the penitentiary can produce cheaper. He has no family to support, he has no children to look after; and they say, it is hardly fair to make the father of a family and an honest man compete with a criminal within the walls of a penitentiary. So they ask to be protected.