free trade essential. It is said that foreign countries now cannot compete with the United States, first because they are crippled, second because wages have advanced abroad practically to the American. standard. Wages in France have not advanced to the American standard, and in Japan still are at a low level. Furthermore all Europe is rapidly recuperating and preparing to send goods to America the moment the "economic barriers" are removed. Why encourage imports in order to extend exports? Why lose the home markets to secure the world's markets? Foreign trade should never be extended at the expense of domestic trade. Protection is needed now more than ever. Is it good business policy to finance foreign institutions in order that those institutions may be shipping us

manufacured goods? Is it good business to operate temporarily a few industries and ultimately cripple more? Is it good business to inaugurate a policy which finally will increase our imports beyond our normal needs thus increasing unemployment?

A million investors in foreign industrials are a million workers for increased imports and ultimate free trade. Their interests will be alien not American. Five billion dollars invested in foreign securities will be a powerful force for the "removal so far as possible of economic barriers.” The plan spells disaster to protection and to American industry.

The American people for two years before April 1917 lived in a "fool's paradise." Facing a commercial war let us not live in another "fool's paradise."

Whatever is said by so able a man as the head of the Baldwin Locomotive Works is naturally, inevitably read by a large number of persons. The reputation of Mr. Johnson, the standing of the great plant, the place of Philadelphia among the manufacturing cities of the world combine to win circulation for his words.

Periodically similar interviews must be expected. A prominent busi ness man rises to declare that he has always been a protectionist, but that the country must have an enlarged foreign trade, and his words invariably delight the editors who live in hopes of a free trade victory and perhaps die in despair because their

theories never square with the facts. It is to the average free trader a moral certainty that the country cannot have a large foreign market and a protective tariff at the same time. Therefore he dwells on any comforting word he can get from William McKinley or from Alba B. Johnson, or any other celebrity, and he usually magnifies these expressions. We doubt if any protectionist ever made a speech of this kind without having cause to regret the strained constructions and oftentimes the deliberate misquotations that followed.

But in the period between 1783 and 1789, when European goods poured in upon us, did our widening foreign

markets compensate us for our bankruptcies at home? Did the influx of English goods after 1815 bring with it a gigantic sale of our own products abroad? We tried the low tariff plan again in 1833, and spoiled our home market, but we did not capture the markets of the world. Similar lessons were taught us in 1846 and in 1857.

market beyond all expectations, and our sales in foreign lands have been the marvel of the world. In what land and at what time has protection retarded our growth as an exporting nation? What substantial exports save foodstuffs, cotton and tobacco had we before we settled down on a protective basis? The assumptions are with the free traders, the facts

By Professor Robert

It may seem preposterous to invite a comparison of Ireland with our own country in any respect. But there are resemblances as well as contrasts in their history, especially on the economic side. I myself became a protectionist through studying these; and there are thousands of Irish Americans who have had the same experience.

In what we call the colonial times of America, Ireland was probably the less depressed country of the two, as it was the more populous, and had cheaper and more immediate access to such markets as were allowed it. Both were living under the jealous and restrictive policy of Great Britain, which aimed at repressing the growth of every industry but the production of food and raw materials for the British market, and at making them buy of British producers their supply of manufactured goods.

The Board of Trade and Plantations on this side of the Atlantic discouraged or forbade the development of varied industry by forbidding the importation of sheep, the making of

iron in any shape but pigs, and the transportation of colonial manufactures from one colony to another. In Ireland the same results were sough: by laws forbidding wool export to any country but England, and others shutting it out of England. Nor did this stop with wool. Lord Dufferin says in his "Irish Emigration and Land in Ireland":

The easiness of the Irish labc: market and the cheapness of provisions still giving us the advantage, even though we had to import ou materials, we next made a dash at the silk business but the silk manufacturer was pitiless as the wool stapler. The cotton manufacturer. the sugar refiner, the soap and candle maker (who especially dreaded the abundance of our kelp). and any other trade or interest that thought it worth while to petition. was received with the same cordiality, until the most searching scrutiny failed to find a single vent for the hated industry of Ireland to respire.

The British Parliament claimed the supreme control of Ireland and its subordinate parliament, and used this to hold the country down to indus

trial dependence and poverty. But even among the Protestants a nationalist sentiment began to assert itself. Their demand was that Irish industry should be controlled in the interest of the Irish people. Bishop Berkely went so far as to wish there were a wall of bronze a mile high around Ireland.

Both America and Ireland rose about the same time against the commercial restraints imposed by Great Britain. This came out even before America went to war as when the women of Boston appeared on the Common with their spinning-wheels, to show that they could contribute to the economic independence of their country; and when the graduating class at Harvard came forward for their degrees in suits of American cloth. That the similarity of the situation of the two countries was well understood was shown by the address sent to the Irish people by the Continental Congress-written by William Jay-regretting the impossibility of exempting Irish manufactures from the operation of the non-importation agreement.

While America went to war, Ireland secured her rights through the perils created for Great Britain by our Revolution. The British claim to control the Irish Parliament was withdrawn, and almost the first use made of legislative independence was the enactment of a protective tariff. From 1782 until the legislative Union of 1801 Ireland went ahead under protection faster than any other European country in manufactures, agriculture and commerce, says the Earl of Clare, the implacable enemy of Irish independence. When the first

advances toward a legislative Union were made from Great Britain in 1798, the Irish Parliament rejected the proposal because of the havoc it would make among the new manufacturing industries.

But the Union was carried through the Irish Parliament in 1800, without warrant or authority from the constituency by wholesale bribery. The duties of the Irish tariff were abolished by degrees; and as fast as this was done, the protected industries disappeared also, ending by about 1826. The people fell back upon the land as the only means to a living, paying rack-rents to the heartless among the landlords, and facing famine when the crops failed, as every merely agricultural country For if all the eggs are in one basket, and that basket falls, ruin follows.

While America was proceeding in her career of industrial development under the national policy suggested by her struggle for independence, Ireland fell back into a worse slough than before 1782. It was not now the repression wrought by positive law, but that achieved no less thoroughly by the unfair competitions of capital. The infant industries of Ireland could not stand up against those which had been developed in Great Britain by four centuries of protection. So the reign of famine set in with that of free trade.

First small and local failures of the crops visited the island, and then on the fifth of August, 1845, the blow fell upon the whole island in a single night. There was no relief for three years, four hundred thousand were carried off by hunger, or by the diseases which follow in its wake. Since

that dreadful time famine has visited Ireland almost periodically, with the same lamentable results, although the country produces more food than her people could consume, and has to export it to buy almost everything but food from Great Britain. A Parliamentary Commission of some twenty years back reported that every dish and plate, every knife, fork and spoon, every chair and table, every spade and shovel, almost every piece of cloth or of paper, used in Ireland is brought from abroad, and paid for with the products of Irish farms. Every vessel that leaves the eastern or southern coast of Ireland is loaded to the gunwale with food. Even in the dreadful years of the great famine, food had to be exported to the value of millions of pounds.

Why do not the Irish resist? They have resisted. Every county in Ireland contains the ruins of works and factories erected to supply Ireland with what she is importing from Great Britain. Every class and creed in Ireland have shared in the effort to establish these, laying aside the antagonisms of race, politics and religion to sit on the same boards of directors and to share the same defeat.

Ireland has hundreds of millions of tons of coal within easy reach. She has water-power enough to turn all the machinery of Great Britain. She has iron-ore so good that it used to be brought to America, before the discovery of the Lake Superior deposits. She has a people who have. shown their readiness and capacity for labor in every great field of American, Canadian and Australian

employment. She has a fertile soil, and a climate whose only fault is an excessive rainfall. She has rivers and harbors sufficient to accommodate fifty times her shipping. Yet she is the country of Europe where the area of cultivation and the number of the people have declined since 1801, the fateful year of the Union. She has not half the population she had when I was added to the number in 1844 The charm of the country has been confessed by every class of immigrants from the Norse Vikings. But her people fly from her under the compulsion of want and hunger.

Of course "the dominant partner" in the Union of 1801 has been abundant in explanation of her palpable failure to give Ireland a government which does not mean poverty and famine. They have tried to throw the blame upon the Irish landlords and their unfair rents. This ignores the fact that the power of a mean landlord grows out of the absence of any living except by tilling the land. But if the landlords have ruined the tenants, who have ruined the freeholders?

In Ulster especially there were large numbers of farmers who held from the crown at a nominal quitrent; and they too have been driven out of Ireland. The property on which I was born was such a freehold, and had been such since the days of Cromwell. Originally the rent had been a pepper-corn an acre; bút one of my remote ancestors neglected to pay it one year, and it was doubled on him, becoming half a farthing an acre! All around us were free-holds of the same antiquity, but the free

holders are in America, highly successful men some of them in this country, but with no field for their abilities at home.

Be it noticed that no English plan for the revival of Irish prosperity contemplates the gift of the power to any Irish parliament to protect Irish industries. All of the Liberal plans for Home Rule keep customs duties

in the control of the British Parliament. When Mr. Lloyd George was convoking his hand-picked convention of Irish notables in Dublin to discuss a possible plan for the pacification of the country, he gave them distinct notice that they need not expect to have matters of revenue left to the discretion of any government they might try to construct. That, Great Britain would keep in her own control. And yet that is exactly what the Irish people are more agreed about than any other. An American free trader, Mr. George Pellew, after making a careful investigation of the opinions of all classes, reports that on just one point he found them unanimous they are all Protectionists; and he had to confess that he could not answer their arguments from the needs of their country and its history.

*At the centenary of Trinity College, Dublin, the American delegates were entertained at a dinner in their honor. The "Don" who presided asked them why it was that Americans generally favor Home Rule for Ireland. A few said they did not, but most of them gave various reasons for favoring it. When it came to the representative of the University of Pennsylvania, he said his reason was different from the others. He had studied Political Economy under an Irish-American, and had learned that so long as Ireland remained under British rule she would not be allowed to do anything to favor the growth of native manufactures, but that a separate parliament might effect that. The Don pounded

the table with his fist and said, "If we could get that by Home Rule, we would all be Home Rulers."

The profitableness of Ireland to English manufacturers and traders is shown by the government statistics. In the fiscal year 1914, just before the outbreak of the war, the hundred millions of Americans purchased British goods to the value of seventy-five million pounds, while the less than five millions of Irishmen, mostly impoverished, bought fifty-five million pounds worth. Ireland is the most. valuable market Great Britain possesses, after the home market of her own people. And she does not mean to part with it if she can help it. Her spirit in that matter was shown by the protest of her makers of automobiles against allowing Mr. Ford to establish a factory of freight automobiles at Cork. They called upon the British Government to stop him; but that was too strong a measure for even Mr. Lloyd George.

Here then we have a country which claims almost a monopoly of economic wisdom, both scientific and practical. Its spokesmen lament that there is not such intelligence of economic principles in America as they would like to see, and that we are still following the narrow-minded policy of favoring our own people in the construction of our tariffs. And to the control of this wise country has been given an island close at hand, abounding in natural wealth, and inhabited by a people industrious by instinct and capacity. Over this island this wise country has exercised absolute legal and economic control for over a century, with every reason to desire its prosperity and contentment. And if at the close of that cen