pound, constituted the compensatory duty. The remaining 15 cents, plus the ad valorem duty, constituted the avowed protection afforded by the schedule.

The transfer of wool from the free to the dutiable list is one of the crowning features of the new law from the protectionist standpoint. It has been strenuously demanded by the woolgrowers of the far West ever since the crisis in 1893 and the fall in the value of sheep which followed. This fall in value has been destructive of the sheep herds, because it has not paid to breed largely, and many sheep have been sacrificed for mutton which might otherwise have been preserved as wool producers. A table printed by Senator Mantle, of Montana, in his speech in the Senate on June 4, shows that the number of sheep in the United States has been declining since the enactment of the tariff of 1883. The number reported in 1884 was 50,626,626, which fell in 1889 to 42,599,079. There was then a revival, attributed by the friends of the McKinley law to its operation, which carried the number of sheep up to 47,273,553 on January 1, 1893. The decline again set in until the number was reduced on January 1, 1896, to 38,298,783 and, according to unofficial estimates, to 32,000,000 on January 1, 1897. It is to stimulate

the culture of American sheep that the new wool schedule has been devised. It restores duties which average from 40 to 50 per cent., although expressed in specific form, which come near being the highest ever levied upon raw wool. The rates upon clothing wool are 11 and 12 cents per pound, according to character, and rates upon carpet wool are 4 cents per pound for the cheaper and 7 cents per pound for the finer grades.

This

The

The growing complication of modern protective tariffs is nowhere shown in a more striking manner than in the textile schedules. The tariff of 1883 gave 62 lines to the cotton schedule. was expanded to nearly 150 lines in the McKinley law and to nearly 200 in the Wilson law. new law introduces several new elements of complication which will extend its length still farther. Silk goods, which filled 14 lines in the act of i883, will fill more than 100 in the new law. The woolen schedule has always been complicated, and in all of the textile schedules it has become the modern plan to apply specific duties, which require the service of experts to enforce. The new silk schedule, for instance, provides for woven fabrics different rates when weighing less or more than one and one-third ounces per square yard, when containing 20 per cent., 30 per cent., or 45 per cent. of silk, whether the silk is in the gum or boiled off, and whether the goods are

dyed or printed in the piece. All this complication of duties is thought to be necessary in order to distribute protection with an equal hand upon different grades of goods and in order to prevent injustice to honest importers by the undervaluations of dishonest ones under the system of duties based upon declared value. Every new industry adds an item to the free list or the dutiable list of the tariff, and the number of paragraphs has only been kept in restraint in recent years by the transfer of whole classes of small articles to the free list.

MANUFACTURES OF IRON AND STEEL.

The history of iron and steel manufactures in the United States is one to which many protectionists are pointing with pride as one of the ripe fruits of the protective system. Senator Aldrich, of Rhode Island, in his opening speech upon the tariff bill on May 25, called attention to the fact that the rates on metals had not been increased by the pending bill and that some of them had been reduced. He presented a somewhat novel doctrine regarding the effect of protection upon revenue by the declaration that when the protective policy gives the American market to American producers "the revenue growing out of protective duties disappears." He might have added that the metal industry now stood upon such an independent footing, whether as the result of protection or of abundant natural resources, that American manufactures of metal were competing successfully in the markets of the world with their foreign rivals. Exports from the United States for the eleven months ending with May, 1897, included $2, 124,324 in pig iron, $6,070,154 in builders' hardware and tools, $2.952,446 in sewing machines and their parts, and $23,878,044 in other machinery. Among the most significant of American exportations, composed largely of metals, are those requiring peculiar skill and inventive genius in their production and improvement. The exportations of cycles and their parts for eleven months ending with May last were $6,122,339, and of electrical and scientific apparatus $2,795,810. An attempt was made to put a duty upon copper ingots in the Dingley bill, but when it appeared that exports for the fiscal year 1896 had been $18,646,407 and that imports had been only $1,123,083, even the strongest protectionist admitted the wisdom of continuing copper upon the free list.

THE ASSAULT UPON EDUCATION.

One of the peculiar features of the new tariff bill is the restoration of the old duties upon works of art. The fight for free art" was waged for many years by artists and their patrons.

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until they attained partial success in the McKinley law by the reduction of the duty upon paintings and statuary to 15 per cent. The same law made free of duty books and pamphlets printed exclusively in languages other than English." This liberality was partly dictated by the redundancy of revenue which it was then sought to cure. The framers of the Wilson law went a step farther and made all paintings and statuary free of duty. This provision was abused, in the opinion of the appraising officers at New York, by the introduction as paintings and statuary of cheap daubs produced by beginners and filled in from penciled outlines. The search for revenue led the framers of the Dingley bill to transfer paintings and statuary to the dutiable list at 25 per cent. and even to make foreign books subject to duty under the general provisions for printed matter. The educators of the country were aflame in a moment over this attempt to restrict their means of broadening American education, and almost unending mirth followed the declaration of the committee report that of foreign books "we already publish an abundance."

The suggestion that the quantity of cheap novels, mingled with a few religious books published in this country, made the subject a question of quantity rather than of quality only added fuel to the flame. Petitions from nearly every educational institution of importance in the country began to rain upon Congress, and the Senate committee drew the blue pencil through all these obnoxious provisions. They yielded in conference, however, in regard to works of art, and they will hereafter pay a duty of 20 per cent.

THE TARIFF AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES.

The enactment of a new tariff greatly raising rates upon many articles has not failed to cause protests by foreign countries, whose products seemed to be directly aimed at. These protests have not come from England and France, for the opposite reasons that England is willing to trust to her policy of free trade against the world and France does not wish to encounter protests against her own measures when she wishes to strengthen her protective policy. The Argentine Republic was quick to protest against the levy of a duty on

Ger

hides, which have been free of duty for nearly a quarter of a century, upon the ground that it would restrict our export trade to her people as well as hamper our own manufacturers. many and Italy also have dropped informal intimations that the countervailing duty on sugar and the high rate on fruit were not dictated by a spirit of international comity. The strongest protests have come from Japan, whose silks and straw mattings have appeared to be singled out for special attack. The duties in both cases were levied at the demand of American interests, which felt the effect of Japanese competition. In the case of matting, however, the demand for a high duty did not come from matting manufacturers so much as from the manufacturers of woolen carpets, who have felt the effect of the substitution of matting for carpeting. The Japanese have represented that if the matting trade was destroyed, they would be compelled to go elsewhere for the large quantities of cotton cloths, machinery, and breadstuffs which they take from the United States, because the vessels which now carry them these articles would have no return freights.

The policy of reciprocity inaugurated in the McKinley law was intended to offset some of the effects of high duties in our relations with foreign nations. The effects of the reciprocity arrangements made under that law were not striking except in the case of Cuba, whose natural market in the United States was thrown open by the reduction of the high Spanish duties. Canada has several times offered reciprocity to the United States, but it has usually been in natural products alone. Mr. Blaine, as Secretary of State, rejected one of the last of these offers as valueless to the United States. The present Liberal ministry of Canada sent some gentlemen here during the framing of the new tariff law, prepared to make more liberal terms than their predecessors, but they found little encouragement at the hands of the protectionists of the Ways and Means Committee. The reciprocity clause which has been embodied in the new law cannot be judged until it has been tried. It is somewhat broader in the list of articles covered than the provision of 1890, and the United States may be able to secure some concessions under it.

TWO

WO little republics under the Southern Cross have attracted more than their fair share of the world's attention during the last twelve months. These two States are the South African Republic, or the Transvaal, as the land across the river Vaal is indifferently called, and the Orange Free State, to the south of the Transvaal, which took its name from valiant William of Orange, and in honor of its name covers its coat of arms with fruitful orange-trees in full bearing.

The South African Republic, it is true, has rather monopolized the world's attention, to the exclusion of its smaller sister. Telegraph wires and cables have been kept hot with news more or less (usually less) authentic which would have been exceedingly important if true. Its old Dutch president, Johannes Stephanos Paul Kruger, has been treated by reporters and newspaper correspondents as though he was one of the world's great potentates-as indeed he is if a man's power is measured by the amount of commotion he is able to make in the cabinet councils of the nations. His goings out and his comings in have been recorded, his down-sittings and his up-ris ings, and when he sneezes it is almost as though Queen Victoria herself had taken cold.

One of the anomalous things of present-day politics is the power which this old, illiterate

I use

Boer has been able to exert in the world. these adjectives with the utmost respect, simply in the interests of accuracy, for with all his power and deserved influence, the old ruler of the Transvaal is, from the scholar's ordinary standpoint, one of the most ignorant men who ever sat in a presidential chair. There is but one book which he can read, and that is the Bible. But, it may be asked, how does it happen that if he can read one book he cannot read all books? The explanation given in the Transvaal is that, being gifted with a remarkably tenacious memory, he has, from constantly hearing the Bible read in public from his boyhood up, committed all of its more familiar passages to heart; so that when he takes up a copy of the Scriptures and his eye lights upon a well-known verse, he can go on indefinitely from memory.

Nor can this modern South African Colossus write any better than he can read. To be sure, he can sign his name to public documents, but in somewhat the same way that Osman the Great, the founder and first sultan of the Osmanli Turks, used to sign his name to public documents-by dipping his hand in a saucer of ink and spreading it out on the paper, thus literally making his sign manual. Not that President Kruger has not got beyond Osman the First, for he can guide the quill sufficiently to sign his name to papers of

state; but to write one of those papers, or even an ordinary letter, with his own hand, would be quite beyond his powers, is the story often told in Pretoria. And yet should I leave the impression with my readers that he was simply an ignorant old Boer, it would be a very false impression. From the scholar's standpoint, possibly he is that, but from the standpoint of the politician and man of affairs he is one of the shrewd great men of the time. If he cannot write a state document he can dictate one. knows what is in every one that he signs, and his native shrewdness enables him to get the better of far more scholarly rulers of mightier realms than his when the interests of his "poor burghers," as he pathetically calls them, are concerned.

He

To call him the Lincoln of South Africa is altogether extrav agant praise. He has

none of the broad, farseeing, statesmanlike views of Lincoln; his integrity is far from spotless if common report is not utterly libelous; and he has little of the brilliant eloquence that made possible a Gettysburg oration. But he is like Lincoln in this important respect -he knows the common people thoroughly and accurately. He sprang

knit her heavy woolen stockings like any venerable housewife of the Transvaal.

This is the secret of the power of the President of the South African Republic. He is one of the people-a representative Boer; a typical Dutch farmer, with all the limitations and all the sturdiness, conservatism, strong religious feeling, and native common sense of his race developed in an unusual degree. These qualities, too, characteristic in a greater

from them; he is one of them. With all his wealth and power, he has never set himself above them. When I called upon him in Pretoria a few weeks ago a young Boer farmer was sitting upon the veranda of the presidential mansion, which, by the way, is a very unpretentious cottage. The young farmer was collarless and dirty, and his mud-splashed brogans showed that he was a son of the soil; but he evidently felt that there was nothing in his appearance or his clothes which should debar him from a familiar interview with his president. The president, too, seemed to be of the same opinion, and they chatted together as unconstrainedly as any two cronies, while the old vrow Madam Kruger, sitting near by, placidly

or less degree of the Boers as a race, account for the prominence of their remote little republicamong the greater nations of the world. Here is a new race, a distinct type of mankind, a unique people that has found its home in the heart of South Africa. Except in the matter of language, they are no more Dutch than they are French or Scotch.

In fact, many

A

of them dislike and distrust the Holland Dutch more than they do the English themselves. large admixture of French Huguenot blood flows in the veins of many of them, and many families have French names, corrupted often into their Dutch equivalents.

In religion the people are far more like the Scotch Covenanters of two centuries ago than like the modern ration alistic, sacerdotal church of Holland. In fact, so alarmed were the Boers some seventy-five years ago at the spread of rationalistic formalism in their nation that they sent to Scotland for some young ministers who were sound in the faith. Among those who responded to the call was Andrew Murray, the father of the Andrew Murray of the present day-that prince of mystics whose books are read by the whole Christian world. This young Scotchman and his descendants and a few others of his stamp have wonderfully molded the religious life of the two republics and have imparted a sturdy, God-fearing, Bible-loving character to all their inhabitants

The Puritan type of character is very strongly developed among the Dutch Boers, and this it is which the Rt. Hon. Joseph Chamberlain must reckon with in dealing with that handful of Dutch farmers that inhabit the Transvaal. I do not mean to aver that the Boers are either as

intelligent or as morally spotless as the Pilgrim fathers, and it is very sure that they are not actuated by as lofty religious motives, nor have they

OLD DUTCH CHURCH AT PRETORIA.

(Taken at time of quarterly "Nachtmaal," or communion season, when Boers come with their families from fifty miles around and camp in their wagons on the church square.)

been tested by such stern experience as were the Mayflower's passengers and their descendants. But they certainly are imbued with the Puritan spirit, with many of its excellences as well as many of its defects, and this spirit makes them a people to be reckoned with by the mightiest of nations.

upon

Moreover, it must be borne in mind that they look the recent hordes of British and Americans and Germans-in fact, Uitlanders generally-as interlopers and usurpers, and that they have some reason for this opinion. Until gold was discovered on the Rand no one cared for the Transvaal. The Boers might keep it to themselves for all England cared. Who wished for a huge barren sheep farm where the prickly pear was the only thing that really seemed to thrive? Especially undesirable was a great tract of ground where the city of Johannesburg now stands. was so exceedingly barren that scarcely could the hardy African sheep find anything to nibble. On one side was the farm of the Bramble Fountain, on the other, a mile away, the farm of the Thorn Fountain. Their very names were unpromising and hopeless. But one fine morning pay streaks of gold were found on the ridge of land that connected the Bramble Fountain with the Thorn Fountain, and from that moment the Transvaal was a different place. For weal or woe the old

It

chapter of its poverty-stricken history was closed and a new Golconda-like chapter was opened, and all eyes were dazzled with visions of unbounded wealth.

Then adventurers poured in from all quarters of the globe-British and German, French and Dutch, American and Portuguese. The land which Great Britain would scarcely take as a gift a few years before was the prize of many covetous eyes. The exchequer which had been as bare as Mother Hubbard's cupboard was soon almost bursting with golden guineas. Beggars suddenly became choosers of champagne and truffles, and the poor who walked yesterday were riding in their chaises to-day.

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Upon the wretched soil of the farms of the Thorn Fountain and the Bramble Fountain arose the stately city of Johannesburg, with its tall brick buildings, its churches, its big hotels, its shops resplendent with plate glass, its electric tramways, its gambling hells and gin palaces. In ten years the desert blossomed, not with the rose-nothing so innocent and fragrant as thatbut it did blossom into a great rustling," bustling, busy, wicked city of a hundred thousand inhabitants. The mines, which now almost surround the city, continued to pour out their almost unbounded stores of yellow metal. Some of them pay 120 per cent. a year on the capital invested. New mines were constantly opened up, some of them as valuable as the great originals, others of them utterly worthless. Companies were floated with enormous capital, many of them worth about as much as the paper on which the stock certificates were printed. Speculation grew wild and rampant. Men lost their heads and women lost fortunes in stocks.

Kimberley, which in the early days of its diamond mines had passed through a similar era of