There is little for me to add to this. It is but ten years since the last attempt was made, by means of lowering the tariff, to prevent some people from prospering too much. The attempt was entirely successful. The tariff law of that year was among the causes which in that year and for some time afterward effectually prevented anybody from prospering too much, and labor from prospering at all. Undoubtedly it would be possible at the present time to prevent any of the trusts from remaining prosperous by the simple expedient of making such a sweeping change in the tariff as to paralyze the industries of the country. The trusts would cease to prosper; but their smaller competitors would be ruined, and the wage-workers would starve, while it would not pay the farmer to haul his produce to market. The evils connected with the trusts can be reached only by rational effort, step by step, along the lines taken by Congress and the Executive during the past three years. If a tariff law is passed under which the country prospers, as the country has prospered under the present tariff law, then all classes will share in the prosperity. If a tariff law is passed aimed at preventing the prosperity of some of our people, it is as certain as anything can be that this aim will be achieved only by cutting down the prosperity of all of our people.
Of course, if our opponents are not sincere in their proposal to abolish the system of a protective tariff, there is no use in arguing the matter at all, save by pointing out again that if on one great issue they do not mean what they say, it is hardly safe to trust them on any other issue. But if they are sincere in this matter, then their advent to power would mean domestic misfortune and misery as widespread and far-reaching as that which we saw ten years ago. When they speak of protection as “robbery,” they of course must mean that it is immoral to enact a tariff designed (as is the present protective tariff) to secure to the American wage-worker the benefit of the high standard of living which we desire to see kept up in this country. Now to speak of the tariff in this sense as “robbery,” thereby giving it a moral relation, is not merely rhetorical; it is on its face false. The question of what tariff is best for our people is primarily one of expediency, to be determined not on abstract academic grounds, but in the light of experience. It is a matter of business; for fundamentally ours is a business people—manufacturers, merchants, farmers, wage-workers, professional men, all alike. Our experience as a people in the past has certainly not shown us that we could afford in this matter to follow those professional counselors who have confined themselves to study in the closet; for the actual working of the tariff has emphatically contradicted their theories. From time to time schedules must undoubtedly be rearranged and readjusted to meet the shifting needs of the country; but this can with safety be done only by those who are committed to the cause of the protective system. To uproot and destroy that system would be to ensure the prostration of business, the closing of factories, the impoverishment of the farmer, the ruin of the capitalist, and the starvation of the wage-worker. Yet, if protection is indeed “robbery,” and if our opponents really believe what they say, then it is precisely to the destruction and uprooting of the tariff, and therefore of our business and industry, that they are pledged. When our opponents last obtained power it was on a platform declaring a protective tariff “unconstitutional”; and the effort to put this declaration into practice was one of the causes of the general national prostration lasting from 1893 to 1897. If a protective tariff is either “unconstitutional” or “robbery,” then it is just as unconstitutional, just as much robbery, to revise it down, still leaving it protective, as it would be to enact it. In other words, our opponents have committed themselves to the destruction of the protective principle in the tariff, using words which if honestly used forbid them from permitting this principle to obtain in even the smallest degree.
Our opponents assert that they believe in reciprocity. Their action on the most important reciprocity treaty recently negotiated—that with Cuba—does not bear out this assertion. Moreover, there can be no reciprocity unless there is a substantial tariff; free trade and reciprocity are not compatible. We are on record as favoring arrangements for reciprocal trade relations with other countries, these arrangements to be on an equitable basis of benefit to both the contracting parties. The Republican party stands pledged to every wise and consistent method of increasing the foreign commerce of the country. That it has kept its pledge is proven by the fact that while the domestic trade of this country exceeds in volume the entire export and import trade of all the nations of the world, the United States has in addition secured more than an eighth of the export trade of the world, standing first among the nations in this respect. The United States has exported during the last seven years nearly ten billions of dollars’ worth of goods—on an average half as much again annually as during the previous four years, when many of our people were consuming nothing but necessaries, and some of them a scanty supply even of these.
Two years ago, in speaking at Logansport, Indiana, I said:
“The one consideration which must never be omitted in a tariff change is the imperative need of preserving the American standard of living for the American workingman. The tariff-rate must never fall below that which will protect the American workingman by allowing for the difference between the general labor cost here and abroad, so as at least to equalize the conditions arising from the difference in the standard of labor here and abroad—a difference which it should be our aim to foster in so far as it represents the needs of better educated, better paid, better fed, and better clothed workingmen of a higher type than any to be found in a foreign country. At all hazards, and no matter what else is sought for or accomplished by changes of the tariff, the American workingman must be protected in his standard of wages, that is, in his standard of living, and must be secured the fullest opportunity of employment. Our laws should in no event afford advantage to foreign industries over American industries. They should in no event do less than equalize the difference in conditions at home and abroad.”
It is a matter of regret that the protective tariff policy, which, during the last forty-odd years, has become part of the very fibre of the country, is not now accepted as definitely established. Surely we have a right to say that it has passed beyond the domain of theory, and a right to expect that not only its original advocates but those who at one time distrusted it on theoretic grounds should now acquiesce in the results that have been proved over and over again by actual experience. These forty-odd years have been the most prosperous years this Nation has ever seen; more prosperous years than any other nation has ever seen. Beyond question this prosperity could not have come if the American people had not possessed the necessary thrift, energy, and business intelligence to turn their vast material resources to account. But it is no less true that it is our economic policy as regards the tariff and finance which has enabled us as a nation to make such good use of the individual capacities of our citizens, and the natural resources of our country. Every class of our people is benefited by the protective tariff. During the last few years the merchant has seen the export trade of this country grow faster than ever in our previous history. The manufacturer could not keep his factory running if it were not for the protective tariff. The wage-worker would do well to remember that if protection is “robbery,” and is to be punished accordingly, he will be the first to pay the penalty; for either he will be turned adrift entirely, or his wages will be cut down to the starvation point. As conclusively shown by the bulletins of the Bureau of Labor, the purchasing power of the average wage received by the wage-worker has grown faster than the cost of living, and this in spite of the continual shortening of working hours. The accumulated savings of the workingmen of the country, as shown by the deposits in the savings banks, have increased by leaps and bounds. At no time in the history of this or any other country has there been an era so productive of material benefit alike to workingman and employer as during the seven years that have just passed.
The farmer has benefited quite as much as the manufacturer, the merchant, and the wage-worker. The most welcome and impressive fact established by the last census is the wide and even distribution of wealth among all classes of our countrymen. The chief agencies in producing this distribution are shown by the census to be the development of manufactures, and the application of new inventions to universal use. The result has been an increasing interdependence of agriculture and manufactures. Agriculture is now, as it always has been, the basis of civilization. The six million farms of the United States, operated by men who, as a class, are steadfast, single-minded, and industrious, form the basis of all the other achievements of the American people and are more fruitful than all their other resources. The men on those six million farms receive from the protective tariff what they most need, and that is the best of all possible markets. All other classes depend upon the farmer, but the farmer in turn depends upon the market they furnish him for his produce. The annual output of our agricultural products is nearly four billions of dollars. Their increase in value has been prodigious, although agriculture has languished in most other countries; and the main factor in this increase is the corresponding increase of our manufacturing industries. American farmers have prospered because the growth of their market has kept pace with the growth of their farms. The additional market continually furnished for agricultural products by domestic manufacturers has been far in excess of the outlet to other lands. An export trade in farm products is necessary to dispose of our surplus; and the export trade of our farmers, both in animal products and in plant products, has very largely increased. Without the enlarged home market to keep this surplus down, we should have to reduce production or else feed the world at less than the cost of production. In the forty years ending in 1900 the total value of farm property increased twelve and a half billions of dollars; the farmer gaining even more during this period than the manufacturer. Long ago overproduction would have checked the marvelous development of our national agriculture, but for the steadily increasing demand of American manufacturers for farm products required as raw materials for steadily expanding industries. The farmer has become dependent upon the manufacturer to utilize that portion of his produce which does not go directly to food supply. In 1900 fifty-two per cent, or a little over half, of the total value of the farm products of the Nation was consumed in manufacturing industries as the raw materials of the factories. Evidently the manufacturer is the farmer’s best and most direct customer. Moreover, the American manufacturer purchases his farm supplies almost exclusively in his own country. Nine-tenths of all the raw materials of every kind and description consumed in American manufactories are of American production. The manufacturing establishments tend steadily to migrate into the heart of the great agricultural districts. The centre of the manufacturing industry in 1900 was near the middle of Ohio, and it is moving westward at the rate of about thirty miles in every decade; and this movement is invariably accompanied by a marked increase in the value of farm lands. Local causes, notably the competition between new farm lands and old farm lands, tend here and there to obscure what is happening; but it is as certain as the operation of any economic law that in the country as a whole farm values will continue to increase as the partnership between manufacturer and farmer grows more intimate through further advance of industrial science. The American manufacturer never could have placed this Nation at the head of the manufacturing nations of the world if he had not had behind him, securing him every variety of raw material, the exhaustless resources of the American farm, developed by the skill and the enterprise of intelligent and educated American farmers. On the other hand, the debt of the farmers to the manufacturers is equally heavy, and the future of American agriculture is bound up in the future of American manufactures. The two industries have become, under the economic policy of our Government, so closely interwoven, so mutually interdependent, that neither can hope to maintain itself at the high-water mark of progress without the other. Whatever makes to the advantage of one is equally to the advantage of the other.