timber and boards wherewith to build him a house, while the rich can build in brick, or freestone, or marble, or iron. I say nothing of the folly of giving the manufacturer of the East a bounty on his cottons and his woolens when you thus tax his timber and planks and boards of which his manufactory is made. All is folly, all is wrong, from beginning to end, and the wonder is that such folly has advocates in a free-school land. I come now to the article of pig iron. It should be recollected that two or three years ago we reduced the internal revenue taxes on all manufactured articles. It will be recollected, too, that when at the opening of the war Congress imposed a high internal revenue duty upon all manufactured articles it, at the same time, as a matter of equity, made a corresponding tax increase on imported articles of the same kind. But, though we have greatly reduced internal revenue from the manufacturers and manufactured articles of the country, we have not yet made one cent of reduction in the external tariffs. We have not at all relieved the consumer of the four or five thousand taxes on what he imports. We took off the internal revenue tax upon iron, but we have left the external tax upon iron just where it was.

Mr. Kelley had denied that the bill increased the duty on manufactured iron. Mr. Brooks analyzed the bill

to show that it did. He then continued:

Mr. Chairman, I shall not detain the House longer, further than to call its attention to one document which has been sent to us by the Secretary of the Treasury, and that is the report of the gentleman who has the custody of the statistics of the commerce and the navigation of the country, Mr. Nimmo. He records that there are now 117 foreign steamers bringing imports and emigrants into the country, and carrying off our exports, and all under a foreign flag.

When I recapitulate these melancholy facts, Mr. Chairman, with difficulty do I repress the pulsations of my heart, and the passion such a record of national folly and crime inspires. Our great Republic opens upon two oceans, upon the Gulf of Mexico south, and the great lakes north; our continent overflows with all the material necessary for shipbuilding. We have harbors unrivaled; we have seamen, who, from the days of Paul Jones to the days of Farragut, have known no fear nor shrunk from any adventure, who have stormed the fires of Tripoli and of New Orleans, and yet now our commerce scarcely

ventures beyond our capes and headlands, or, if so, it is swept from the open seas by the superior and better maritime administration of England, France, Germany, and even Sweden and Norway. We, who in the Old World have seen, in Asia and in Africa as well as in Europe, the star-spangled banner everywhere and who have seen it with pride and pleasure— we, who have traced it from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from the Pacific and the Atlantic to the Indian Sea, and from the Indian Sea to the Behring Straits-we, who have seen that flag carried in grandeur and glory all over the earth, now see it scarcely anywhere on any of the broad seas of that earth. It has been banished, swept away, killed, damned, by our accursed tariff. It is gone-almost all gone; the wrecks of it only saved by our exclusive coast wise navigation, or upon the distant shores of the Pacific, too far from England, too far for the mariners of the Baltic to crush it, as it is otherwise crushed and crumbled everywhere upon the open seas.

The most melancholy picture now on the earth, the most deplorable for the American who loves his country, is to see in the harbor of New York, flying from the fleets of shipping there assembled, the British cross of St. George, the tri-colors of France, of Belgium, and of Italy; the red, black, and gold of Germany, and the yellow of Spain-foreign flags everywhere, and the star-spangled banner nowhere but upon some coastwise craft. How is this? Why is this? Are the days of Preble and Decatur rubbed out of the American calendar? Are the Constitution and the Guerrière forgotten? Are the memories of Tripoli and of the Algerines no more? Have the industry and enterprise of our country gone-all gone? Do we, the sons of glorious ancestral fame, mean to give up the dominion of the seas? Never, never, sir. Even now, while the accursed tariff is pouring into our ships its fatal grape and canister, and the star-spangled banner is going down, every true-hearted American reëchoes the dying words of Lawrence:

"Don't give up the ship."

The effects of the enormous duties which are levied upon our shipping we find set forth in Nimmo's "Statistics," which is a most valuable work. The duties upon a ship are so numerous that it is difficult to remember them all. Even upon the flag that floats over an American ship-the flag of freedom-one, one only, I believe, grasping manufacturer in Massachusetts has laid his clutches and demanded a bounty from that flag;

so that every part of a ship, from its keel and the copper on its sides to the bunting that floats from the masthead, is enslaved to monopoly.

One hundred and forty per cent., and that a bounty to one bunting manufactory on the flag of our country! And, sir, it is but justice that such a tariffed flag should float over such a tariffed country; for the 140 per cent. prohibition bounty on it but represents the almost innumerable bounties of the four or five thousand tariffed articles upon which forty millions of people are now paying taxes.

There will be no finality until justice is done to the great body of the people. There will be no finality until monopoly is brought down and equality is brought up. There will be no finality as long as legislation is so wielded as to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. There will be no finality so long as immense fortunes, with the sluiceway of a Niagara, are pouring into the coffers of a few men to the impoverishment of the great masses of the people.

On March 25 Mr. Kelley1 replied to Mr. Brooks.

Mr. Chairman, I apprehend that no enlightened student of political economy regards a protective duty as a tax. Even the gentleman from Iowa [William B. Allison] admitted that in most cases it is not; yet influenced, as I think, by a clever story which the chairman of our committee, who is somewhat of a wag, tells, he does not think the principle applies to pig iron. It runs thus: some years ago, during the days of the Whig party, when the chairman of the committee [Mr. Schenck] was here as a Representative of that party and a friend of protection, he met as a member of this House a worthy old German from Reading, Pennsylvania, a staunch Democrat, but strongly in favor of protection on iron. The gentleman from Ohio, who is fond of a joke, said to him one day, "Mr. R., I think I shall go with the free-traders on the iron sections of the tariff bill, especially on pig iron." "Why will you do that?" was the response. "Well, my people want cheap plows, nails, horseshoes, etc." "But," replied the old German, "we make iron in Pennsylvania; and if you want to keep up the supply and keep the price down you ought to encourage the manufacture." "But you know," said our chairman, "that a protective duty is a tax, and adds just that much to the cost of the article?"

'Mr. Kelley was familiarly known as "Pig Iron" Kelley from his faithful advocacy of high duties upon that article.

"Yes, I suppose it does generally increase the cost of the thing just so much as the duty is; all the leaders of our party say so, and we say so in our convention platforms and our public meeting resolutions; but, Mr. Schenck, somehow or other I think it don't work just that way mit pig iron." [Laughter.]

The gentleman, while admitting that protective duties do not always or even generally increase the price of the manufactured article, thinks "that somehow or other it don't work that way mit pig iron." Now, I think that iron in all its forms is subject to every general law, and that the duty of $9 per ton on pig iron has reduced the price measured in wheat, wool, and other agricultural commodities and increased the supply to such an extent as to prove that the duty has been a boon and not a On nothing else produced in this country has the influence of protection been so broadly and beneficently felt by the people of the country at large.

A few years more and we will produce from our own coal and iron our entire supply of iron and steel and compete with England in supplying the demands of the world. The gentleman from Iowa was constrained to admit yesterday that the price of English iron has gone up steadily during the last year, because the demand is in excess of her capacity to produce; yet the price of American pig iron has fallen at least $6 per ton on all grades within the last 10 months. What is the cause of this reduction? Not British competition-and that is the only possible competition-for the price of British iron has risen. No, sir; the price of American iron has gone down under domestic competition and the general depreciation of prices. Keep your duty high enough to induce other men to build furnaces and rolling mills and before five years you will find American iron cheapened to the level of the markets of the world, and that without a commensurate reduction of wages.

The friends of free trade say we do not import enough English iron; we do not import enough English cotton goods; we do not import enough English woolen goods, considering how cheap we can buy them all. If we are to reduce our duties and import more I beg the Representatives of the farming States of the West to demand something like reciprocity on behalf of their constituents, for whose grain there is no market. Every yard of cotton and woolen goods and every ton of iron represent the grain and meat consumed by the families of the men who produced it; and, while our grain goes to waste for the want of purchasers, the friends of protection protest against importing that grown in other countries, even when converted

into cloth or iron. The cloth and iron would be as good if made where well-paid laborers eat freely of American wheat, butter, and meat; and to those who cannot sell their crop at any price a neighboring furnace, factory, or rolling mill would be a blessing, even though they could not buy cloth or iron at English prices.

Of the $108,000,000 England raises by her tariff she gets $32,712,300 by duties on one of our agricultural staples. Her duties on tobacco are taxes, for England has no tobacco fields to develop. They are, therefore, not protective duties. England's duty on spirits is an absolute discrimination against our grain. Were that duty removed the farmer and distiller would be working together, and instead of exporting wheat and corn at prices that will not cover the cost of production and transportation their produce would be manufactured into alcohol, pork, and lard oil; and while our own laboring people would have cheaper provisions the farmer would greatly reduce the cost of transportation and have an ample market for his grain manufactured into alcohol, pork, and oil. Yet gentlemen representing agricultural districts plead with us to admit British goods at lower rates, while she gathers $54,599,865 in a single year by imposing such duties on tobacco as greatly diminish its consumption and such on spirits as preclude the importation of our grain in the only forms in which it can be profitably exported.

MR. BROOKS.-Let me state that our great agricultural products-cotton, which is an immense product, and wheat, corn, etc. are admitted duty free.

MR. KELLEY.-To that I reply that they take our cotton because they cannot live without it, and our wheat and corn when they cannot buy cereals cheaper elsewhere. France has a duty on wheat and flour even when imported in French vessels. We are too far from the seaboard, and the cost of transportation from our grain fields is too great for us to send them grain in bulk at present prices. The cheapest way of transporting corn is in the form of alcohol. In this form we could send it profitably were their duties not prohibitory. England will take raw materials from countries from which she can buy cheapest. But her much-lauded free trade does not offer any advantage to the American. Gentlemen talk about monopolists, and aver that protection fosters monopolies. Sir, the world has never seen so heartless, so unrelenting, and so gigantic a monopoly as the British Government and the manufacturing power that sustains it. It is a monopoly which has desolated