of navigation for the nurture of man; and to protect the manufactures suited to our circumstances."

"The restrictive legislation of 1808-15 was, for the time being, equivalent to extreme protection. The consequent rise of a considerable class of manufactures, whose success depended largely on the continuance of protection, formed the basis of a strong movement for more decided limitation of foreign competition."-Prof. Taussig.

Adam Smith, the father of free-trade, admits that could any number of communities, producing what each other wants, be brought into commercial contact, there would have been no need of his evolving the doctrine of freetrade. In this country there are forty-four, and more, of such communities.

What was a theory with Hamilton, that protection tended to lower the price of protected articles, became a fact under the operation of our tariff legislation.

The genius of a nation is at its best when not subjected to conditions foreign to it. To let institutions have sway here which are born abroad, and which may be best for abroad, would be for us to subject ourselves to monarchy. It would be just the same if we lost our commercial or industrial Americanism and became subject to the codes which demean labor by caste and enslave it by hereditary

custom.

The protection which monarchical countries, without exception, patronized and by which they exist was never in the interest of labor as now in this country.

The conditions which exist in America are wholly different from those which gave color to free-trade as a doctrine with European economists. Had they been situated as we are, and known what we know, they would have collated and deduced differently. In one hundred years

America has established a set of statistical facts which utterly destroy the deductions based on facts of an older regime and on conditions never dreamed of. Protection in the United States is really a new political economy, of far more worth to us than the economic visions of one hundred years ago, indulged by men who knew no distinction between labor and serfdom and who saw no hope for enterprise outside of capital linked with landed aristocracy and lordly title.

Protection has long since triumphed over the argument that it was unconstitutional. This argument is not urged to-day except by the very ignorant or very prejudiced. But the argument reappears in the charge that protection fosters monopoly. This was Calhoun's standing argument. He saw that it enured more to the benefit of free paid labor than of slave unpaid labor, and that it encouraged the manufacturing as against the planting classes. The industries which involved invention, skill, competition, live capital and paid labor were the ones which protection favored. Those which involved none of these received no benefit from protection and did not need it. His views of monopoly turned on this point. Since the downfall of slavery the heart has been taken out of the monopoly argument, for it has become plain to all that what improves the condition of the entire people does not savor of monopoly.

Protection protects against monopoly. Before the tariff of 1824 American cottons sold at 24 cents a yard. After that tariff, they sold at 734 cents a yard. New mills, improved machinery and increased competition, put a better material in the market at a third of the price.

The monopoly may be foreign. England sold us steel rails, for railroads, at $150 per ton. She continued to do this till 1870, when a duty of $28 a ton was levied. Under

this protection we began to build mills for their manufacture. The price of steel rails began to decline. They are now sold at a profit at from $33 to $40 a ton. English monopoly was costing us five prices for a ton of rails.

Protection gives us competing power abroad. Our cotton textiles are recognized as the best in the markets of the world. The same is true of our edge-tools and agricultural implements. European manufacturers imitate these American goods and use American labels in order to hold the markets of South America and the Orient. When this competing power is amplified by reciprocity and by direc steam communication, both of which are protective, no na tion can rival us in South American and Chinese markets.

A tariff for revenue is a tax. A tariff on tea, coffee and sugar, raises the price to the consumer, because it offers no inducement, and cannot, by reason of soil and climate, for their home production. Sugar is partly an exception, as we can raise some sugar-cane. It may become wholly an exception if the experiment with beets prove a success. As to trading in manufactured articles, articles of art and handicraft, the application of the doctrine of natural right as claimed by free-traders, is suicidal to the younger or weaker nation. No nation recognizes it except in theory. Nations are not natural, one to the other, as to trade, except in the respect that they are selfish. They all claim the natural right to exist, to grow, to develop, to be independent. The natural right to be what nature intends is higher than any other. Nature never intended that one nation with numer ous, large, long and swift streams, equal to billions of horsepower, should buy for all time the manufactures of nations with fewer, smaller, shorter and duller streams, equal to only millions of horse-power, even though the latter nations had

by reason of age, so far turned their power to account as to be able to furnish products cheaper than the former.

Nature never intended that one nation with a riches of coal and ores far exceeding that of another, should perpetually buy the manufactures of that other, because it had delved in its mines for ages, and could offer products cheaper than the first.

Nature never intended that a new nation with infinite resources of climate, soil, mine, genius and industry should subordinate its traffic to nations of inferior resources, but with the temporary advantage of age.

Nature never intended that nations that had grown old, ripe and rich by means of a protection, which was absolute in comparison with any that prevails to-day, should claim naturalness for a trade established by agencies they deny to others.

Nature never intended that conditions of labor under which a laborer can be an earner, saver, head of a family, house owner, voter and public-spirited citizen, should be subjugated to conditions of labor which give caste to occupation, demean calling, yield bare subsistence, crush manhood, stifle ambition, beget slavish routine, reduce to tread-mill task.

Nature never intended that the genius and capital of one nation with opportunity should forever obey the commands of another, with less opportunity, but whose opportunity had the advantage of age.

But nature did intend that each nation should profit by its gifts. If young and undeveloped, it should employ the arts of development that are commensurate with its gifts. If weak, it should cultivate strength. If dependent, it should learn independence. The art of doing this is its own affair. The art should be rational, based on what it knows of itself— its people, geography, topography, climate, soil, ores, streams,

woods, facilities and resources in general. If, in obedience to books and theories, it is wrong in doing this, no other nation is so white as to call it black. The consensus of nations in this respect is nature. The precise form of protection and development is immaterial. English free-trade is the highest, severest, most arbitrary form of protection of which she is capable. It is no more condemnatory of the American idea than was her duty of $250 on every $500 worth of iron, not otherwise enumerated, she imported from her colonies. It is no more acceptable to the American idea than was her stamped paper and tea-tax which brought on the Revolution.

The highest duty of a nation is to cultivate nature, for nature means its people, institutions and resources. In this respect America means far more than professors dream of, far more than books teach, far more than little, narrow men with sectional or foreign predilections prate of, far more than England, all Europe, or all the world can in their selfishness impress us with. As a nation we have escaped the thraldom of monarchies, the shackles of caste, the hindrances of mediæval institutions, the limitations of soil, climate and natural resource incident to a continent which last emerged from polar ice. As to people we are composite. Where and when the mentality and physique of civilization blend for the production of a type, that type will be what nature calls for, the survival of size, shape and qualities, fitted for, or rather shaped by, an environment such as has not hitherto existed. As to institution, we have inverted the pyramid of monarchy whose tip is on the throne and base in the air. Here the base is below, on the people, and the tip is in the air, a sublimation of popular will and not a matter of family or blood. As to areas and climate we blend orient and occident, tropic and arctic. It is Italy and Russia, London