women employees eighty cents to one dollar a day, men one dollar and twenty-five to one dollar and fifty. Yet with this high-priced labor he has almost gotton control of the gunny-bag market in South America and this country. He says if you will let him have jute free he will undersell the Indian pauper labor in the streets of Calcutta itself.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE TARIFF.

BY HON. Wм. P. FRYE.*

R. PRESIDENT: The Senator from Texas [Mr.

MR. Coke] on Tuesday last used the following language:

"The word protection should be expunged from our vocabulary. It means monopoly; it means exclusive privilege; it means subsidy; it means that all shall be taxed and made to pay tribute to the favored few. It means combinations and lobbyists; a diversion of legislation from legitimate channels from the great public interest to the interests of a few favored ones. It means a wholesale robbery of the people, and especially of the American workingman, in whose behalf it is invoked."

The Senator from Kentucky [Mr. Beck] in his speech, indicated very clearly that his opinion was, that protection was simply a pliant tool of New England monopolists, and his colleague [Mr. Williams] succeeding him, declared it was a legalized tyranny. Mr. President, you may consult the Democratic party for the last sixty years, go back to the heyday when Mr. Hayne of South Carolina declared in the United States Senate that protection would prove to the country worse than an Egyptian plague, and that free trade would abound in blessings next to the Christian religion, and come down to now, and you will find that it has denounced a protective tariff as "robbery," as "plunder,"

* Speech in the United States Senate, February 10, 1882.

as "a system of swindling," as "a means by which to make the rich richer and the poor poorer," as a specter grim and ghastly which takes its place at the head of every poor man's breakfast-table, which scowls at him every time he lights his pipe, and yet, sir, right in the teeth of these sav age denunciations, fidelity to truth compels me to declare that I am a protectionist from principle. If there was no public debt, no interest to pay, no pension list, no army and no navy to support, I still should oppose free trade and its twin sister, "tariff for revenue only," and favor protective duties.

Mr. President, it seems to me that protection is absolutely essential to the encouragement of capital, and equally necessary for the protection of the American laborer. Capital needs the former more than the latter, I admit, for capital can easily take care of itself. If it gains no adequate returns in one business, it can readily seek it in another; if it reaps no profit at home, may try new fields abroad; may even let all effort alone, hide itself in Government bonds, and, enthroned there in perfect security, draw regularly its interest. Capital, too, is fearfully timid. The distinguished Senator from Ohio [Mr. Sherman] a few days since declared that there was nothing in the world so easily frightened as money. And yet the prosperity of the country imperatively demands its constant use, its investment in every industrial enterprise. The opening of mines, the forcing from the hiding places of the earth coal, iron, and copper, the smelting of ores, the erection of forges, foundries, and factories, the employment of men who must work or starve, demand its help. To inspire it with the requisite courage, to induce it to a useful activity, I would encourage it. But the labor of this country beyond that of any other demands protection against the cheap labor of Europe, for the laborer here has responsibilities, duties, and necessities unknown there. His wages can never go down to theirs without

absolute destruction to him and imminent danger to the Republic. The large majority of our men must earn their bread by the sweat of the brow. Under our Constitution they are the Government. How can hungry men govern? How can a half-paid, half fed, half-educated citizen rightly and intelligently understand and perform the duties of citi zenship? He must have good food, enough of it, good cloth ing, school-houses for his children, comforts for his home, and a fair chance to improve his condition. To this end I would protect him against competition with the half-paid laborers of European countries who have never enjoyed his privileges, experienced his comforts, shared his duties and responsibilities, to whom his very necessities would seem luxuries.

The Senator from Texas joins issue with me on this question of labor, and in the same speech declares: "But it is said that much higher wages are paid to American operatives than to European workmen, and that to enable the manufacturers to pay these higher wages they must have a protective as distinguished from a purely revenue tariff, in order to exclude European competition. Do American manufacturers pay their operatives higher wages? Nominally and ostensibly they do, but really and in fact they do not." That is a most amazing declaration. If it is right, I am wrong; if it is right, every conclusion of the argument of the Senator from Texas is entirely logical and legitimate. If that declaration made by the Senator is false in fact, then the three hours' argument founded upon it is an entire fallacy. Now, sir, I hold in my hand a book entitled "The State of Labor in Europe," printed by authority of Congress, "reports from United States consuls," and the Senator from Texas may take it, turn from blank leaf to blank leaf. he may read every page from beginning to end, and I defy him to point to one single statement of fact, to one single table of statistics, which does not prove conclusively that

his statement is not correct and that labor in Europe is paid from one-half to two-thirds less than it is in America to-day.

Again, I have now in my hand a book entitled "Labor in Europe and America," by Mr. Young, chief of the United States Bureau of Statistics. Let the Senator take this, turn it from blank leaf to blank leaf, and he cannot find a single fact stated in the whole book which justifies his statement.

Now, Mr. President, I do not propose to rely entirely upon consular reports. I am aware of some difficulties attending the getting at labor statistics in England and France and Belgium and Germany. Let an American consul go to the superintendent of an English mill, step into the counting-room, and ask him for his price-list paid for wages for his laborers; will he be treated politely; will he receive the same kind treatment he would in America? By no manner of means. They are determined, if possible, that information as to wages shall not go out. I am willing to admit that in some favored localities, in some particular class of work, for instance, if you take some of the most skilled spinners and weavers in an English cotton mill and in an English woolen mill, you will find that for two or three in a room, the wages will come nearly up to the wages in an American cotton or woolen mill; but you take the wages of the laborers right through the mill, and 1 defy any man on earth to show that they are not as much as one half below the wages in the cotton and woolen mills of America?

I do not rely upon these consular statements alone; I happen to know men in this country who own mills in Great Britain and in the United States, who hire laborers there and here, and I obtained from them information so that there could be no mistake about this. The Senator from Texas must remember that wages paid to the operatives in the cotton factory by no means represent the cost of manu