Of what use is it for the state to provide schools, and compel the children of the people to acquire in them the education of mind and hand which fits them for the occupation of mature life most congenial, and in which they may do their best work, if the economic system we adopt simply casts them adrift to become a part of a great army of hopeless, mendicant workers in occupations for which they are least fitted-alternately starved in enforced idleness and exhausted by ill-paid over-labor-because of the intermittent and gambling market provided by that economic system, such as obtains under the free-trade tariff system in England?

We cannot and we ought not to fit the children of the toiling masses for superior occupations in life, unless we see to it that those superior occupations are not driven to other countries and out of their reach, by unrestricted foreign competition in them. If it is right for the state to control the first part of the worker's life as it does here, why is it not necessary for it to protect the second by our economic system, as it does here? The state, the government, cannot take up and control and direct the preparatory part of the life of the citizen, and abandon him wholly during the productive part of it, to seek a superior industrial occupation, which is known in advance to be non-existent, because productive capital cannot place it within his reach, since foreign unlimited competition prevents.

It is not the province of the government to undertake to carry on the vast and varied industrial pursuits, necessary to provide work and wages for its industrial classes, but it by no means follows that because it ought not to do everything, therefore government ought to do nothing. It is the province of government to direct by fiscal legislation the forces of capital, so as to guide it into those industrial channels where it will provide superior wages, and homes, and comforts for industrious American labor, where it will prevent workingmen from being reduced from the position of intelligent, well clothed, well fed, and contented men, to an army of human beasts, driven by the lash of starvation to soulless and ill-requited toil.

If it be thought that this language is exaggerated, the following words of Cardinal Manning, on the condition of the British working masses, will justify it. He says:

"Is it possible for a child in the agricultural districts to be educated who may be sent out into the fields at nine? I will ask, Can a woman be the mother and head of a family who works sixty

hours a week? You may know better than I, but bear with me if I say I do not understand how a woman can train her children in the hours after they come home from school if she works all day in a factory. The children come home at four and five in the afternoon; there is no mother in the house. I do not know how she can either clothe them, or train them, or watch over them, when her time is given to labor sixty hours a week. . What may be the homes in our great manufacturing towns I do not know, but the homes of the poor in London are often very miserable. The state of the houses, families living in single rooms, sometimes many families in one room, a corner apiece,- these things cannot go on; these things ought not to go on. The accumulation of wealth in the land, the piling up wealth like mountains in the possession of classes or of individuals, cannot go on if these moral conditions of our people are not healed. No commonwealth can rest on such foundations."

In this aspect of its relations to labor, protection becomes the great moral as well as the great industrial question of the hour, and as its final argument against free-trade it returns continually to that one which has by its common sense touched the reason of mankind oftener than any other through eighteen hundred years, i. e., “By their fruits ye shall know them."1

1 British Consul Strachey reports of the effect of the German protective system in Saxony, under date of Feb. 11th, 1886, as follows: "I do not hear or read of want of employment or destitution amongst operatives in Germany similar to what is visible in England." Second Rep. Royal Commission, Appendix, par. 2, p. 193.]

British Consul Deering reports, Dec. 31st, 1885, on the Duchies of Saxe-Coburg, Gotha and Meiningen, that "no depression can be said to have taken place in the Duchy within the last few years,' ," and that "no diminution has taken place in the number of hands employed; if there has been any change it has rather been in the opposite direction." [Ibid, p. 191.]

British Consul Jocelyn reports, Feb. 15, 1886, on the German districts of Hesse, Darmstadt and Baden, that "the increase of wages which is general is partly owing to the dearness of living and of provisions, industries which previously [to protection] had no existence having sprung up in Germany." [Ibid., p. 188.]

British Consul-General Scott reports from Berlin, (Oct. 2, 1885,) that "the rate of wages for skilled and unskilled labor in the Berlin district is fifteen to twenty-five per cent above the average of the last twenty years." [Ibid., p. 184.]

Lest it may be questioned whether the above quotations from British authorities relate to only exceptional cases, the following statements of eminent Englishmen upon the condition of their laboring classes, gathered by the American Economist [Sept. 24, 1890], are added. They also serve to mark the contrast with German labor conditions, for it is what the worker gets out of life, and not the mere rate of wages, that tells.

JOHN BRIGHT: "In the city of Glasgow alone 41,000 out of every 100,000 live in homes having only one room, and, further, nearly one-third of the whole people dwell in homes of only one room, and more than two-thirds of the people of Scotland dwell in homes of not more than two rooms. We find poverty and misery. What does it mean, when all these families are living in homes of one room, to us who have several rooms and all the comforts of life? It means more than I can describe and more than I will attempt to enter into; and as need begets need, so poverty and misery beget poverty and misery. And so in all our great towns, and not a little in our small towns, there is misery and helplessness, much as I have described. In fact, looking at the past, to me it is a melancholy thing to look at; there is much of it which excites in me not astonishment only, but horror. The fact is,

there passes before my eyes a vision of millions of families-not individuals, but familiesfathers, mothers, children-passing, ghastly, sorrow-stricken, in never-ending procession, from their cradles to their graves.'

JOHN RUSKIN: "Though England is deafened with spinning wheels, her people have not clothes; though she is black with the digging of fuel, they die of cold; and though she has sold her soul for grain, they die of hunger."

KAY [in "Social Condition of the People of England"]: "If we have enormous wealth, we ought to remember that we have enormous pauperism also; if we have middle classes richer and more intelligent than those of any other country in the world, we have poorer classes, forming the majority of the people of this country, more ignorant, more pauperized and more morally degraded than the poorer classes of most of the countries of Western Europe."

JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN: "The class of agricultural laborers of this country are never able to do more than make both ends meet, and have to look forward, in time of illness or on the approach of old age, to the workhouse as the one inevitable refuge against starvation. Children are stunted in their growth and dulled in their intellects for want of proper nourishment and proper food. The houses of the poor are so scanty and so inefficient that the most horrible immorality prevails, which seldom comes to the surface, but which is known to all those who move among the poor, while the ordinary conditions of life among the large proportion of the population are such that common decency is absolutely impossible; and all this goes on in sight of the mansions of the rich. Private charity of all forms and religious organizations can do nothing to remedy the evils which are so deep set in our social system.'

JOHN MORLEY; "It is an awful fact-it is really not short of awful-that in this country [Great Britain], with all its wealth, all its vast resources, all its power, 45 per centthat is to say, nearly one-half-of the persons who reach the age of 60 are, or have been, paupers. I say that it is a most tremendous fact, and I cannot conceive any subject more worthy of the attention of the legislature, more worthy of the attention of us all."

HENRY FAWCETT: "There are few classes of workmen who, in many respects, are so thoroughly wretched as the English agricultural laborers. They are, in many respects, so miserably poor that if they were converted into slaves tomorrow it would be for the interest of their owners to feed them far better than they are at present. Throughout large agricul tural districts not a single agricultural laborer will be found who has saved so much as a week's wages. A life of toiling and incessant industry offers no other prospect than a miserable old age."

CHAPTER XI.

OF TRUSTS AND TARIFFS.

Trust not the "Trust."

It would be difficult to find a more obnoxious organization than the modern commercial trust, or combination to extort unreasonable profit out of the necessities furnished to mankind. A brief examination of the nature and history of these organizations will show, that they can have a continued existence only under certain special conditions of trade in the commodity to which they are applied. The chief and most indispensable of these conditions is, that the commodity shall be capable of being concentrated in a few hands, comparatively, either in its production or at some stage of transportation on its way to the ultimate consumer. The second condition is that it shall pass through few channels of transportation, to reach its market with the ultimate consumer. This condition may be found, by fuller experience, to be antecedent to the first one named, since the concentration of the commodity into these few channels of transportation would appear to facilitate, if not to give its temporary control into the hands of the few. Be that as it may, given these two conditions and the formation of a trust to control the commodity is practically easy.

For example, petroleum and sugar would at first sight appear to be two commodities differing so widely in their nature and mode and source of production, that trusts to control them in a similar manner would appear impossible. But in transportation, the oil must pass through a pipe line to reach its market, as the safe and economical channel which defies competition. Only a few pipe lines suffice to transport to market all the oil produced in our oil regions, and only a limited number of refineries are required to handle all of it. Here the trust steps in and assumes control, for the conditions exist which favor it. The fame of the Standard Oil Company is world-wide.

So with sugar; it is brought into a very few of our seaports, and a few huge refineries employing vast capital can handle it for the whole country, for raw sugar must go through the refinery to prepare it for use, when below a certain standard. Here, again, are found our two named conditions, and the sugar trust springs into existence and flourishes. No one would dream of organizing a sugar trust, to control its price to the ultimate consumer, in the country where it is produced on every plantation, any more than he would dream of forming a permanent grain trust in this country, where we raise grain on every farm.

The sugar trust only becomes possible when sugar is gathered and poured through the narrow conduits of a few refineries, to fit it for use by our people. It is there that the trust shuts down the gate, and dams back the supply, until we consent to pay its extortionate price. Equally, when a commodity is gathered into the narrow conduits of a few seaports for export from the country of its production, and can be commanded there by a comparatively few exporters, we find the trust established as a permanent agent to control its export price to the consumers in a foreign nation; provided only that the country exporting the commodity controls its production or means of transportation to market in the world economically, or so nearly controls it as to command the markets of the country consuming it. For instance, the Brazilian rubber trust, controlling crude india-rubber, and the foreign borax trust, controlled by the Rothschild's for many years, are notable examples of the latter class of exporting trusts.

It will be seen that the development of modern steam ocean commerce is largely responsible for the existence of the sugar trust, and, in fact, all others in either the importing or exporting nation, and for this reason: Modern steam commerce on the ocean concentrates trade, by its economy, in a few great seaports of both the exporting and importing nation. To conduct it with the maximum economy requires larger and larger steamships, sailing from only a few ports, at which goods are assembled, to only a few ports from which they are distributed. This concentrates trade into a few narrow channels. It affords the narrow conduit at which the trust may concentrate its action, if only other conditions be favorable. The trust may be located at either the export or import seaport; it is equally efficacious. Furthermore, by the aid of the ocean telegraph cable, through which the trust can talk with its agents in every part