great sacrifices even, but he has no security that he will ever reap the fruits, unless the home market is secured to him. He fears the foreign competition more than that of his competitors at home, because the latter stand on an equality of power and capacity with him, while the former are able and ready to make large sacrifices simply to drive him out of the market and secure it to themselves. It is not a matter as to which we are left in any doubt that artificial fluctuations are produced for this purpose. "It has already been shown," says Coleridge in 1834, "in evidence which is before all the world, that some of our manufacturers have acted upon the accursed principle of deliberately injuring foreign manufacturers, if they can." "Experience," says Blanqui, one of the free trade economists of France, "has already taught us that a people ought never to deliver over to the chances of foreign trade the fate of its manufactures."

A report presented to the British Parliament in 1864 by a commission appointed to investigate the state of industry in the mining districts, says:

"The laboring classes generally in the manufacturing districts of this country, and especially in the iron and coal districts, are very little aware of the extent to which they are often indebted for being employed at all to the immense losses which their employers voluntarily incur in bad times in order to destroy foreign competition, and to gain and keep possession of foreign markets. Authentic instances are well known of employers having, in such times, carried on their works at a loss amounting in the aggregate to £300,000 or £400,000 in the course of three or four years.

"If the efforts of those who encourage the combinations to restrict the amount of labor and to produce strikes were to be successful for any length of time, the great accumula tions of capital could no longer be made which enable a few of the most wealthy capitalists to overwhelm all foreign competition in times of great depression, and thus to clear

the way for the whole trade to step in when prices revive, and to carry on a great business before foreign capital can again accumulate to such an extent as to be able to establish a competition in prices with any chance of success.

"The great capitals of this country are the great instruments of warfare against the competing capital of foreign countries, and are the most essential instruments now remaining by which our manufacturing supremacy can be maintained; the other elements-cheap labor, abundance of raw materials, means of communication, and skilled laborbeing rapidly in process of being equalized."

*And be it remembered that nobody asks that protection as a system shall be permanent. Its chief purpose is to give our manufacturers a chance to show "what life and energy there is in them"; for when our industrial growth shall have brought us abreast with rival nations it will no longer be needed, except in rare cases, such as Belgian competition with the English iron-men in the British market. Protection with this object has the sanction of the greatest free-trade economists. Adam Smith surlily conceded that a manufacture may sometimes be naturalized more readily in this way than in any other. Of his French disciples, Say, Blanqui, Ressi, Chevalier, make the same concession more fully and heartily. The last named says: "Every nation owes to itself to seek the establishment of diversification in the pursuit of its people, as Germany, England, and France have always done; and this is not an abuse of power on the part of the governOn the contrary it is the accomplishment of a positive duty. Governments are, in fact, the personification of nations, and it is required that they should exercise their influence in the direction indicated by the general interests.

ment.

John Stuart Mill says: "The superiority of one country over another in a branch of industry often arises only from its having begun it sooner. A country which has the skill and experience to acquire, may, in other respects, be better adapted to the production than those earlier in the field. A protecting duty, continued for a reasonable time, will sometimes be the least inconvenient mode in which a country can tax itself for the support of such an experiment." Prof. Thorold Rogers, scolding Mr. Mill for this mischievous concession, adds that the circumstances of the United States and British colonies "exactly square with the hypothesis of Mr. Mill. The countries are young and rising industries as yet nascent are thoroughly suited to the natural capacity of the region and of the people, the latter being of the same stock as the mother country.

There is no reason apparently, except that of priority in the market, why the industry of the old country should not be transplanted to the new.-Johnson's Encyclopedia, 1887.

R. E. THOMPSON.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

DOES PROTECTION RAISE PRICES ?

BY PROF. A. L. PERRY.

SOM

OME protectionists make bold to deny that protective tariff-taxes raise the prices of corresponding domestic goods. But this cannot be logically denied; it can not even be decently denied, when the light of the following propositions is cast upon it:

1. It is the sole design and end of these protective tariff. taxes to lift the level of the prices of home-manufactured goods above the level that prevails in other countries for corresponding goods; that is the whole theory and purpose of a protective tariff. The men who get these taxes actually put on, and it is a simple historical truth that no protective tarifftax was ever put on in this country except at the instance and under the pressure of men directly interested in such rise of price; these men know what they are about, and why they are about it; and it is a safe step to take to conclude that what such men shrewdly design to bring about is actually accomplished by their device.

2. It has been constantly avowed by protectionists in the tariff debates in Congress-and never more loudly than last February-that these home-made goods could not be made and sold here for the prices at which foreigners sell them. The mere proposal to take off the protective tax angers the protectionists beyond measure, because, as they themselves say, domestic prices would then fall at once to the foreign level.

Where does the "protection" come in if the tariff-tax do not raise the price of home-made ware? What is the motive for putting such a tax on? Why did the Onondaga Salt Company sell salt in Canada cheaper than in Syracuse itself? and why have the copper companies of Michigan sold copper this very year to foreigners for less than any American citizen could buy it of them at wholesale?

3. Foreign manufacturers are controlling, in spite of protective tariff-taxes, our own home market more and more year by year. How can they actually pay these import duties at our custom-houses, and still sell and undersell in our domestic markets, unless the range of our home prices of manufactures is artificially and abnormally high? Our tariff-taxes are designed to make and do make prices so high in our markets, so high above their level in other countries, that foreigners, after adding the taxes at each custom-house to the price of their wares, can still undersell our own manufacturers at our very doors. Glassware, for example, is very highly protected" by the tariff, and yet the imports of glassware in 1882 through our custom-houses, and actually paying the duties, were more than ten times greater than the exports of glassware, because the artificial prices here invite foreigners to come with glass in their hands. We imported that year $7,443,211 of glassware. Just so of other wares. The increase of the importations in 1882 over 1881 was, in silk goods, twenty-five per centum; in cotton goods, twentyfive; in woolen goods thirty-four, and even in iron and steel. goods, seven per centum. This increase in the imports of foreign manufactures, owing to the high prices caused by the tariff, has been going on for years. Comparing 1877 with 1882, the increase in silk goods was from $21,830,000 to $41,400,000; in cotton goods, from $18,923,000 to $40,000,000; in woolen goods, from $25,000,000 to $42,000,000; and in iron and steel goods, from $9,570,000 to $50,000,000.

4. In October, 1871, occurred the great fire in Chicago. In the winter following a bit of legislation took place in Congress in consequence, which unmistakably shows the sense of that body to be that tariff-taxes raise the price of home products. A bill received the signature of President Grant, April 5, 1872, which had passed both Houses by large majorities, to exempt for one year all building material, except lumber, from the operation of tariff taxes for the benefit of Chicago alone. Why did Congress hasten to take off the taxes for the benefit of Chicago unless the taxes raised the price of building material? Here is a public confession of the most striking kind that the tariff is used to raise prices for United States citizens to pay. And why was lumber excepted from the operations of that bill of remissions? Because Michigan and Wisconsin lumber lords, who had got the tariff-tax on foreign lumber put on on purpose to raise the price of domestic lumber, went to Washington in haste to get lumber excepted from the materials to be cheapened for the relief of burnt Chicago. No proposition in the world can be more certain than this, that protective tariff-taxes are put on and kept on for the sole sake of raising the prices of certain wares, and the taxes do in fact what they are meant for.

The question every workingman is asking is, whether free trade will lower wages or not. That is the practical question

in this tariff issue.

Every laboring man who has considered the subject, knows this, that a protective tariff raises the prices of nearly every thing he has to buy and makes living more costly. No intelligent protectionist denies this. But protectionists tell the laboring men that the increased cost of living is more than made up by the higher wages protection gives.

Free-traders deny absolutely that protection raises wages. They go further. Free-traders assert positively that protec. tion, in the end, lowers wages.

Fortunately there is no need of arguing the matter. We