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that seeks to perpetuate high rates. Hamilton is quoted, in 1791:

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'The continuance of bounties on manufactures long established must always be of questionable policy; because a presumption would arise in every such case that there were natural and inherent impediments to success."

Clay is quoted, in 1833:

"The theory of protection supposes, too, that after a certain time the protected arts will have acquired such strength and perfection as will enable them, subsequently, unaided to stand against foreign competition."

The theory that a tariff protects labor by furnishing it employment is the old theory of "the maximum of toil and the minimum of profit," whereas the true economic theory is "the minimum of toil and the maximum of profit."

A tariff favors a class and tends to monopolies and the formation of trusts, with power to regulate prices and burden consumers.

A protective tariff and protective policy is not such a public policy as needs to be supported by the people at large. The principle and fact are denied that protection of an article by levying a duty on it tends to cheapen the price of the article, after its manufacture has been established.

To defend protection is to justify the taking of one man's money and putting it in another's pocket.

The tariff that looks to the protection of labor really injures labor when it leads to the production of articles in this country cheaper than abroad.

Gladstone defends free-trade on moral grounds-the commercial doing as you would wish to be done by.

Patrick Henry said:

"Commerce should be as free as the winds of heaven; a restricted commerce is like a man in chains, crippled in all

his movements and bowed to the earth; but let him twist the fetters from his legs and he stands erect."

Protection has invoked many wars and rebellions. The head-spring of the American Revolution was the Navigation Act, an English system of protection which sacrificed to English monopoly the natural rights of her colonies.

In keeping with the Navigation Act were other English laws suppressing important manufactures as well as internal trade in the colonies. In the land of the beaver no man could be a hatter unless he had served seven years as an apprentice at the trade. No American hat could be sent out of one province into another. Steel furnaces, plating forges and slitting mills were prohibited as nuisances. Lord Chatham said that in a certain contingency he would prohibit the manufacture in the American Colonies of even so much as a horseshoe or a hobnail. Lord Sheffield declared that the only use England had for the American Colonies was "the monopoly of their consumption and the carriage of their produce." These violations of natural law worked their own overthrow, and the mother ountry lost the brightest jewel in her crown. This event led England to re-examine her commercial system and to adopt the policy of free-trade.

Adam Smith completed his great work, "Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations," the very year America declared her independence, 1776.

In 1817, when Parliament repealed the duty on salt, the agents of the salt monopolies plead for a prohibitory duty on it. "Thus fell," says Thomas H. Benton, “an odious, impious and criminal tax."

"The leaven of free-trade principles continued to work in England under the wise and skilful supervision of Rich

ard Cobden, and reached its culminating triumph in the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846."—Richard Hawley.

In 1842 England exported goods to the amount of $570,000,000, and in 1865 to the amount of $1,815,000,000. In the same time her imports rose from $326,000,000 to $909,000,000. In 1842 the number of articles subject to duty was 1,150; in 1870 only 43 articles were subject to duty, and the duty was not protective. Yet her revenue from customs was about the same in 1870 as in 1842. She now levies duty only on about a dozen articles, such as tea, coffee, tobacco, spirits, wines, etc.

Hon. David A. Wells makes an argument for free-trade, or free exchange, thus:-" Population in the United States increased from 1860 to 1870, 22.2 per cent. The products of our manufactures increased in the same period 52 per cent. This tendency of manufacturing products to increase faster than population gluts our home markets and shows the necessity for larger and freer commerce."

"There is no nation," says he, "or country, or community, nor probably any one man, that is not, by reason of differences in soii, climate, physical or mental capacities, at advantage or disadvantage as respects some other nation, country, community or men in producing or doing something useful. It is only a brute, furthermore, as economists have long recognized, that can find a full satisfaction for its desires in its immediate surroundings; while poor indeed must be the man of civilization that does not lay every quarter of the globe under contribution every morning for his breakfast. Hence-springing out of this diversity in the powers of production, and of wants in respect to locations and individuals-the origin of trade. Hence its necessity and advantage; and the man who has not sufficient education to read the letters of any printed book perceives by

instinct, more clearly, as a general rule, than the man of civilization, that if he can trade freely, he can better his condition and increase the sum of his happiness; for the first thing the savage, when brought in contact with civilized man, wants to do, is to exchange; and the first effort of every new settlement in any new country, after providing temporary food and shelter, is to open a road or other means of communication to some other settlement, in order that they may trade or exchange the commodities which they can produce to advantage, for the products which some others can produce to greater advantage. And, obeying this same natural instinct, the heart of every man, that has not been filled with prejudice of race or country, or perverted by talk about the necessity of tariffs and customhouses, experiences a pleasurable emotion when it learns that a new road has been opened, a new railroad constructed, or that the time of crossing the seas has been greatly shortened; and if to-day it could be announced that the problem of aerial navigation had been solved, and that hereafter everybody could go everywhere, with all their goods and chattels, for one-tenth of the cost and in one-tenth of the time that is now required, one universal shout of jubilation would arise spontaneously from the whole civilized world. And why? Simply because everybody would feel that there would be forthwith a multitude of new wants, an equal multitude of new satisfactions, an increase of business in putting wants and satisfactions into the relations of equations in which one side would balance the other, and an in crease of comfort and happiness everywhere."

"All trade," he says, "is at the bottom a matter of barter; product being given for product and service for service; that in order to sell we must buy, and in order to buy we must sell; and that he who won't buy can't sell, and he who won't

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sell can't buy. The United States, for now a long series of years, has, in its fiscal policy, denied or ignored the truth of the above economic, axiomatic principles. It has not, indeed, in so many distinct words said to the American producers and laborers, You shall not sell your products and your labor to the people of other countries; but it has emphatically said to the producers and laborers of other countries, We do not think it desirable that you should sell your products or your labor in this country; and, as far as we can interpose legal obstructions, we don't intend that you shall! But in shutting others out, we have at the same time, and' necessarily, shut ourselves in. And herein is trouble No. 1. The house is too small, measured by the power of producing, for those that live in it. And remedy No. I is to be found in withdrawing the bolts, taking off the locks, opening the doors, and getting out and clear of all restrictions on pro ducing and the disposal of products."

Mr. Wells illustrates his theory by the failure of the United States to compete with England for the trade of Chili, Argentine and other countries. For though we could place our cotton manufactures in those countries as cheaply as England could, we refused to take their products freely in turn, or except by first imposing a duty on them. The position assumed by Mr. Wells that "all trade is at the bottom a matter of barter," ignores, in part, the function of money in the making of exchanges. He was answered thus by a "Protection" writer:

"The function of money, or its representatives, is that of enabling indirect exchanges to be made. The shoemaker buys his cabbages from one man and sells his shoes to an other. Trade, in place of being a right line between two points, becomes, so to speak, triangular and polygonal.

"This applies pre-eminently to nations, which are aggre

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