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 natural. ize 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. It 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.

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 deficiency 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 new 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 manufac tures, 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

covered long ago that the tariff is a game of grab. They have simply grabbed what they could in competition with others. They are under no delusions respecting infant industries and American systems, or other mildewed and moss-grown catch-words of a past generation. They have no higher reverence for the arts of spinning and smelting than for those of shearing, and quarrying, and wood-chopping. They know a dollar when they see it. They find it more confortable to have the dollar in their own pockets than to muse over it in some other man's. Fine phrases regarding the state of general beatitude which results from multiplying spindles and forges at their expense are in their eyes such frightful rubbish that they would knock the whole tariff system into kindling wood without a moment's hesitation, if the doctrines of Henry Clay were revived, and put in force by taking the duties off the raw materials of manufactures. Their contention is that we have as many spindles and forges as can be profitably employed now; at all events, that the reasons for framing a tariff with a view to increasing the number of them no longer exist, and hence that a reduction of the duties on raw materials means simply a diversion of their earnings to other people's tills. There is a good deal of force in this view. Nevertheless it is important that the bill should be pushed to a general debate in Congress and the country in order that the people may understand how great a change has taken place, in the grounds upon which protection is defended, during the past twenty years. If the country after a full discussion is ready to sanction the policy of taxing itself in order to give profitable employment to common laborers rolling logs in the forests or digging in ore beds and coal mines-newly arrived perhaps from Italy, Belgium, or Hungary,-so let it be. But let us have the discussion at all events.

I

CHAPTER XXXVII.

PROTECTION DOGMAS.*

BY HON. WM. M. SPRINGER,

HAVE been somewhat amused, at times, at the arguments

used by gentlemen on the other side, the advocates of the protective system, in order to sustain their theories. From these arguments I have heard enunciated as among the great principles of protection the following propositions: First. That it is the duty of the Government to protect American laborers from competition with the "pauper labor" of Europe by the imposition of duties on articles manufactured abroad which will compensate for the difference in the price of labor in this country and Europe. This is called "filling the gap" between the wages of home and foreign labor.

Second. That the amount of duty required in order to "fill the gap" must be such as will cause the price of articles manufactured at home to be increased to the amount of the duty on the imported article of like character.

Third. That the imposition of import duties does not increase the cost of imported articles; that the foreign manufacturer pays the duty for the privilege of selling his goods in this country.

Fourth. That the imposition of duties on imported articles will have the effect to reduce the cost of like articles manufactured in this country.

*March 3, 1883, House of Representatives.