CHAPTER XXXV.

THE INTERESTS OF THE FARMER INDEFI

NITELY POSTPONED.

BY PROF. JOHN BASCOM,

President of Wisconsin State University.

FA

ARMERS may well claim, and claim with more emphasis than any other class, that protective duties should be rapidly and finally removed. Farmers are one.half the community; the direct benefits of protection lie almost wholly with the other half.

It follows, then, that the burdens of protection fall chiefly on farmers.

The one grand promise of the theory of protection, that with which it fills the mouths of its friends, and assails the ears of its enemies, that on which all its justness as a theory turns is, that if the burdens of protection are quietly borne for a limited period, they will, at its expiration, be withdrawn, and will be replaced by free trade, diversified industry, and general prosperity.

The success of protection must be found in its fulfillment of this promise. I am not disposed to deny that the promise may be made in good faith, and, under favorable circum. stances, if fulfilled in good faith, may be followed, at least in part, by the results indicated.

This portion of the problem it is no longer necessary for us to consider. We have accepted the theory; liberal protection has been granted for many years to many industries.

We are a great productive people, - hardly any greater. Personal energy and natural advantages have wrought marvels in our behalf. Capital has accumulated with us in large amounts, even when we compare ourselves with the nations of the Old World.

Our material resources are unbounded. Skill has been acquired and enterprise called out. The various industries sustain each other through the entire circle of production. Our home labor has guaranteed to it forever the natural protection of a broad ocean.

Now, having borne protective duties for a long period, has not the time come in which that early and ever renewed promise should be fulfilled?

More than one generation has passed away while the hope of cheap goods has been deferred; how many are to follow in its steps still waiting on these renewed assurances to be met somewhere in the future?

Is all time to be given to this theory to evolve itself in? We may well insist that the place and, date of settlement should now be named; that we should no longer be put off with the gains of our own labor and the incidents of our own civilization as if they were the returns of this special theory. It looks as if there were profound justness in the objection to protection, that its promises are not to be trusted, that it adds reason to reason for indefinite postpone ment, that its resources of excuse and apology are inexhaustible, that it has never been known to say enough. We have to deal with the horseleech's daughters, crying, Give! give!

CHAPTER XXXVI.

THE GROUND OF PROTECTION CHANGED.

BY HORACE WHITE.

RAW MATERIALS.

HE curious disputation which has taken place in the

Committee of Ways and Means lately, and which is not yet ended, discloses one fact with remarkable clearness that the grounds upon which protection is defended and supported are no longer what they formerly were, but have been radically and wholly changed. In the time when Henry Clay was the champion of what he called the "American system," and at the earlier time when Hamilton favored some slight advantages in the tariff for the benefit of home manufactures, the reason assigned for such a policy was that our manufacturers required a chance to get started. The perils attending our "infant industries" were held up as the justifying motive for a system of taxation which it was admitted, laid more or less burden upon the whole com. munity. It was intended that this burden should be suffi cient merely to put the new and untried and struggling industries fairly on their legs, and that they should then enter into competition with similar industries abroad and with other industries at home on equal terms. The moving cause for protection was found in the greater skill, experience, and capital employed in foreign countries, which it was hoped to counteract by a protecting duty for a limited period. In the whole course of the tariff debate in Congress

down to the close of the civil war, it would be difficult to find a single suggestion that a protecting duty is a good thing in itself, apart from its supposed tendency to naturalize and establish some industry to which the resources of the country are so evidently adapted that it might within a reasonable time maintain itself without legislative aid.

Now, however, protection is defended on the ground that it is a good thing and a right thing per se. We hear little or nothing about infant industries. It is a long time since we have seen that designation applied, except in the way of derision, to any American trade. The infant industries of Henry Clay's time are full-grown if not decrepit. We are capable of turning out as many tons of pig iron and of steel rails in a year as Great Britain. The period of infancy is long past and the period of decay has begun in some quarters where this industry was once flourishing and dominant. needs no prophet's vision to see that the supremacy of Pennsylvania in the production of pig iron will very soon pass away, and that in order to keep her furnaces in blast she will need protection against Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alabama, more than she ever needed it against England.

It

But this is not all the change that has come over the spirit of protection. We have not merely dropped the argument founded upon infancy, inexperience, and defi ciency of capital, but we have taken up the advanced position that one trade has as good claim to protection as another, irrespective of infancy, want of training, or want of capital. The producer of iron ore, requiring nothing but common labor, which any Italian immigrant will perform at a dollar and twenty-five cents per day, must be protected to the same degree as the manufacturer of plate glass or the producer of the highest class of woven fabrics. The doctrine of equal rights has surmounted and stifled all the oldtime ideas regarding protection. The tariff must be applied now not because a particular industry needs to be set agoing,

but because it is already going and has been going a hundred years. More than this—the favors of the tariff must be awarded to the industry peculiar to one locality or region, because it has been given to those of another locality or region, even though the former (as in the case of copper) may have given indisputable proof of its ability to defy foreign competition by underselling foreigners in foreign markets.

This is not all the change that has come to pass. The early arguments for protection, founded exclusively upon the idea of encouraging manufactures, have so far succumbed to the doctrine of equal rights that duties are now imposed which expressly cripple and discourage manufactures, and we hear the most appalling threats of vengeance to be visited upon this or that political party if the duty on raw wool, for instance, is lowered or if the former high duty is not speedily reenacted. The anaconda of protection has wrapped itself around the woolen and worsted manufacturers till they can scarcely breathe. The producers of iron ore actually got an increase of duty last year in a bill intended to reduce the general tariff. The Morrison bill now pending seeks, among other things, to bring the tariff back to its ancient moorings by placing on the free list most of the raw materials of manufacturing industry. If the champion of the "American system" were alive he would be filled with astonishment that anybody should oppose a measure so obviously calculated to promote the interests which he desired to build up. He would not be able to understand how the principles which he advocated could ever be distorted to the protection of shepherds and spade laborers, to the detriment of weavers and puddlers. He would probably be classed by the protectionists of the pres ent day with the emissaries of the Cobden Club.

Let us not blame the iron and coal and copper miners, and wool growers, and lumber-men too severely. They dis