pity for our condition (as this country has been in several instances in the case of other countries since then), several of the governments of Europe had contributed out of their resources so that the English and other nations' goods sent here could have been sold at half what we actually paid for them, or suppose they had all been given to us outright, would it have injured this country to receive them? Most people still suppose that after disaster, losses, poverty, and suffering, it benefits those who have thus suffered to receive assistance, either at diminished cost or even without cost.

No one denies that after the close of the war in 1815 there was severe depression in cotton manufacturing. But through the operation of the minimum duty clause and the general introduction of power looms, some after the Lowell pattern, some after the English pattern, the manufacture soon became profitable. Taussig says there is abundant evidence to show that shortly after the crisis following the war, the cotton manufacture had fully recovered from the depression that followed the war, and that the profits were such as to cause a rapid extension of the business. Then it did not need more protection.

CHAPTER XIV

PROTECTION NOT NECESSARY IN THE
UNITED STATES (CONTINUED)

EARLY SUCCESS OF MANUFACTURES IN THE UNITED STATES

IN

N a series of interesting articles on the tariff acts of this country, published in the Providence Journal in 1912, J. B. Bowditch has given us much interesting and valuable information, showing that in 1816 the customs duties rose to $36,306,874, or more than double the amount received during any previous year, and more than was thus received in any subsequent year until 1850. With peace came a great increase in prices. Cotton doubled in price. The first importations of foreign goods yielded great profits, but the market was soon glutted and prices fell. Many inferior cotton and woolen mills were compelled to close. But it is illustrative of the value of superior efficiency to note that the mills with power looms kept on running at a profit. The Waltham Cotton and Woolen Manufacturing Company, incorporated in 1812 with a capital of $450,000, and the Boston Manufacturing Company, with a capital of $400,000, which built a

large cotton mill at Waltham in 1813, were examples of the ability of well-equipped factories to withstand foreign competition and a twenty-five per cent duty only, at a time when over sixty-one per cent of the value of the product of the cotton mills was paid out in wages.

Bishop tells us that the proprietors of this mill stated to Congress that they were making a profit of twenty-five per cent and stood in no need of further protection. But constant applications to Congress for more protection were made by the owners of poorly equipped mills. These facts prove the absurdity of the contention by protectionists that the measure of protection afforded must be the difference in the cost of production at home and abroad. The cost of production at home of which mills of those that can be run at a profit if all duties were abolished, or of those that are only saved from bankruptcy by a high protective duty? The latter are certainly to be appropriately called pauper industries."

The mills at Nashua were founded in 1823. Fall River grew rapidly from 1820 to 1830. Lowell, named after the inventor of the American power loom, was so successful from its start in 1823 that in 1824 one of the originators said: "If our business succeeds as we have reason to expect, we shall have here [at Lowell] as large a population in twenty years from this time as there was in

Boston twenty years ago." John Waterman, who collected an assessment of one cent a spindle to pay the expenses of an agent to Washington in behalf of the interests of the cotton manufacturers, in 1815, found the number of cotton mills in or near Providence to be 170, of which ninety-nine were in Rhode Island. At that time, according to Bishop's History of American Manufactures, $40,000,000 had been invested in cotton manufactures, employing 100,000 persons, only 10,000 being men above seventeen years old. Child labor problems did not then disturb manufacturers. The wages paid amounted to $15,000,000, or 61.7 per cent of the value of the product. It is further noteworthy that during this period of a low tariff, the population of the country increased faster, although there was but little immigration, than it has ever increased under high protection, showing that the people were well off. The population nearly doubled from 1790 to 1810. New York increased from 33,000 inhabitants to 96,000 during those twenty years; Philadelphia increased from 42,000 to 91,000; Baltimore, from 13,000 to 35,000; and Boston, from 18,000 to 33,000.

Bearing in mind that this so-called protective tariff was lower than the so-called free trade tariffs of 1846 and 1857, and only about one-third as high as the abominable Wilson-Gorman tariff of 1894, it is evident that the cotton manufacturing business

had already become established by 1815. When a new tariff act was called for in 1816, it was the least efficient manufacturers who wanted the highest duties, and it was the most successful ones, like Lowell, who were moderate in their demands. This is to be borne in mind in examining the claims of the hungry horde of pauper manufacturers that hastens to Washington every time a change in the tariff is under agitation. It is but natural that every one of them wants at least that amount of protection that will enable him to carry on his otherwise losing business at a profit, and they long ago found out that by combining they could succeed in getting protection enough to save the least efficient of their number, while saving dissension among themselves and opposition from each other. The vultures and jackals over the carcass take, each one, what he can, instead of fighting each other.

Taussig mentions the fact that careful and selfreliant men, like the founders of the Waltham and Lowell enterprises, were the most urgent in advising the adoption of low rates in 1816, but this was before protection seekers had found out the advantage to be gained by combining.

In his desire to be impartial and to sum up in a judicial manner, Taussig is rather inconsistent, for he says: "On the whole, although the great impulse to the industry [cotton manufactures] was given during the war, the duties on cottons in the