respect for the opinions and sensibilities of each other. We need forbearance and charity, a spirit of justice and moderation, and a profound regard for the equal rights of all under the Constitution and laws of the land.

Brothers in a common humanity, we are coheirs of liberty under constitutional law and copartners under Providence of a virgin continent, midway between European progress and Asiatic stagnation, washed by two great oceans and permeated by innumerable channels for interstate trade; with a soil teeming with products, which will bless the world with abundant food and raiment; with a coast and harbors for boundless commerce and unlimited merchant marine. Oh, my brothers of America! God helping us, have we not something nobler to do than to rake up the ashes of our former strife and stir again its fires? Something higher and better than to revive the enmities, the jealousies of the past, and to fill these halls with criminations and outbursts of passion? Yes, let the dead past bury its dead; let us cease bickerings and disputings as to the right and the wrong of the great struggle; let us strive to forgive and forget the angry feuds which filled the land with blood and mourning and desolation; and, turning from these passions which disturb the balances of the judgment, paralyze duty for the busy present, impair faith and hope in our great future, with mutual respect for each other's virtues and mutual forbearance for each other's faults, let us clasp hands and join arms in the pledge of earnest coöperation, under the dictates of a divine duty, in pressing forward the destiny of this mighty people in a career of honor, prosperity, and civilization, which will make our constitutional Union of States the glory of the world and a blessing to our children's children to the remotest generations. [Great applause.]

On May 9, 1878, William D. Kelley [Pa.], a minority member of the Committee of Ways and Means, opposed the bill.

Doctrinaires and editors of commercial organs have persistently criticised some of the details of our present tariff law and objected to the principles upon which our revenue system is based; but no part of the people have petitioned Congress to engage at this time in a revision of the tariff.

The loom and the spindle stand still. The mine is unwrought and the fires are out in the forge, the furnace, and the rolling mill. The captains of industry by thousands are pass

ing into bankruptcy and the laboring people of the country by millions into want, if not into absolute pauperism. They are not permitted to endure the primal curse and earn their bread in the sweat of their brows. They implore us to relieve them, but not one of them has suggested that it can be done by a revision of the tariff in the interest of foreign producers and their agents who are supplanting American merchants in New York and elsewhere. They are told by school men and the organs of these foreign commercial agents that they are suffering from "over-production"; that they are hungry because they have produced too much food; that they are naked or in rags because they have spun and woven too many fabrics; that they are shoeless and footsore because they have produced too many boots and shoes; and that they are houseless "tramps" because they have erected too many homes and constructed too much furniture.

They do not believe these preposterous assertions and ask us to legislate in quite another direction than the revision of the tariff in the interest of the employers of foreign labor.

I must ask the committee to pardon a brief digression. I cannot abstain from saying in this connection that I am more than half persuaded that the magnificent denunciations of the protective system uttered yesterday by the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Tucker] were, notwithstanding his apparent earnestness, only in a Pickwickian sense. In support of this surmise I refer to the facts that, while the highest manufactures of the North are stricken at by this bill, the blossoms or leaves of sumac, an indigenous bush which infests the hillsides of Virginia and which are gathered by old women and children as an amusement, are to be protected by a duty of 10 per cent. and tobacco shooks are made free by special provision.

I do not think it will be suspected that any gentleman outside of Virginia caused those provisions to be inserted in the bill; and from their presence there I infer that the gentleman would accept a little protection if Virginia had any manufacturing industries to be protected. [Laughter.]

I do not complain, Mr. Chairman, that these articles are made free. They ought all to be free except perhaps the shooks. Were competition in that important article possible it might stimulate some stalwart Virginian to cut a few trees and shape them into shooks. But I take no special exception even to that item. What I do complain of is that there is not a full and specific free list. I assert without the fear of plausible contradiction that the absence of such a list is a fatal defect,

No tariff has ever been made by a manufacturing nation that did not embody a specific free list. The commercial and manufacturing nations of the world have agreed that raw materials which cannot be produced within the country of their conversion, especially those which come from tropical or other countries which will take their manufactures in exchange for raw material, should be admitted free of duty. We alone impose duties upon any of them and if we are to manufacture either for home consumption or in the hope of reaching a foreign market we must adopt this part of the policy of other nations which puts us under bonds to maintain a free list embracing all such raw materials.

Now, a tariff is not a matter of inspiration. It is a thing of slow growth and of adaptation to the extent, resources, and development of a country. Switzerland, with her few miles of territory, her snow-capped mountains, and her lakes, enriched with no native resources in the way of metals, may need free trade. But it is not adapted to a young and sparsely populated country which extends, as ours does, from ocean to ocean, embraces all climates, is more richly endowed than any other country with soil and climate for varied agricultural productions, and is still more richly endowed with minerals, useful and precious, and whose people, having been trained in the industrial centers of all countries, are in the enjoyment of schools of art and science such as the magnificent one founded by the munificence of the venerable man who does me the honor to listen to me (Mr. Peter Cooper), which, with its stores of literature, its models, its drawings, its scientific apparatus, and other educational appliances, is open to the poorest child of either sex in the country.

Such a country needs a protective tariff that will enable its people to employ whatever faculties Heaven has endowed them with; the feeble, with a taste for art to embellish our productions and adorn our homes and public halls; the vigorous and enterprising, to explore our mountains and develop their wealth; those with mathematical or mechanical gifts, to advance the arts and industries and carry them forward with the advancing line of civilization into our unpeopled wastes. The inhabitants of such a country develop their faculties and aptitudes by laboring to supply and gratify each other's needs and desires; but to enable them to do this the Government must secure to them at least equal chances with the foreigner in their own markets; and this can only be done by a tariff ample for the purpose of protection. This is all that a judicious tariff is.

It is all that the manufacturers of this country ask, and had the Committee of Ways and Means met them they would have indicated reductions of duties that could be made with safety and extensions of the free list which might be made and which when made would justify a further reduction of duties upon the articles derived from such materials. They do not seek to injure their countrymen by the establishment of protected monopolies.

There is unhappily much evidence in the bill that its aim is to prostrate manufacturers as a class. But the blows are often aimed so unskillfully and awkwardly that over the shoulders of the manufacturer they strike the head of the farmer.

The bill is a nondescript. When going over it to make an analysis of its provisions, I could not help thinking of the mule so pathetically described by the witty Senator from Oregon, Mr. Nesmith, and made up my mind that like it this bill was a thing that could have no pride of ancestry, for it was unlike anything that had ever gone before, and could have no hope of posterity as it was not possible that any deliberative body would accept it as a model.

It retains duties which yield little or no revenue, and repeals those which yield large sums. It retains duties on some things and repeals them on other articles identical in character and use. It imposes duties on materials and removes them from the articles into which these materials have been wrought.

Gentlemen say we can go through this bill in Committee of the Whole and correct these errors. They are mistaken. It is utterly wanting in governing principle, and its provisions are so helter-skelter and incongruous that it would be easier to blot the whole thing out and begin anew. From now until next December would not be long enough for the Committee of the Whole on the state of the Union, proceeding as rapidly as I have ever seen it proceed with a tariff bill, to correct the blunders, stupidities, incongruities, and absurdities embodied in the committee's bill.

But time will not permit me to examine details. Let me, however, hastily consider some of the doctrines of the chairman of the committee. He assumed throughout his speech, and so did the gentleman from Virginia, that duties add themselves to the price not only of imported articles but of like articles produced in this country. Let me ask them do competition in the market and increase of supply increase prices? Are the prices of cotton, woolen, worsted, and silk goods, of locomotives, iron or steel rails, machine tools, agricultural implements,

mechanical toys, or any of the thousand other articles we now produce, as high as they were under the free-trade tariff of 1857 or at any time prior to the increase of the rates of duty in 1861? No, sir; all kinds of American goods can be bought cheaper under the higher duties of to-day than they could be under the lowest rates ever fixed by our tariff laws, and it is the very madness of theory to assert, as the gentlemen have done, that duties which stimulate production and add to the world's supply enhance prices.

I was amused by the chairman's expression of sympathy with the overtaxed farmer. It was so amusing to note the gravity and pathos with which he started his poor farmer out to buy taxed hardware, shoes, etc., for himself and clothes and medicines for his wife. When I first read that gem of his speech in my youth or earliest manhood, just after Sydney Smith had produced it, it made an impression upon my mind that still lingers. [Laughter.]

Sir, for the last twenty years I have been so in the habit of laughing, at least in my sleeve, when hearing gentlemen reproduce that admirable novelty that I could not help doing so when the chairman of my committee startled me by reciting it. I have it before me as uttered by the gentleman, then from Ohio, but who has carpet-bagged to New York [Samuel S. Cox], and who is sometimes known by the sobriquet of "Sunset," as he delivered it in 1864. [Laughter.]

Subsequently I heard it from my friend the late James Brooks. Then from our friend, Samuel S. Marshall, of Illinois, and there has never been a tariff bill under discussion that I have not heard it three or four times; and I repeat that I could not help laughing when the chairman of the committee got it off with such solemnity.

MR. COX.-As original?

MR. KELLEY.-He did not indicate that he had ever read Sydney Smith's works or heard of Sam. Marshall or Sam. Cox or any other Sam who has sent the poor farmer out to make purchases? [Laughter.]

Now, concerning the witty remark of the gentleman from Virginia, that, if Mr. Carey's theory that brings to proximity the producer and the consumer was sound doctrine, then the man was best off who made everything for himself and consumed all he made, I must say that it was hardly worthy of him, as it showed that he had not made himself familiar with the principles of the great matter of social science. Mr. Carey starts out with the proposition that association is the first and