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paramount want of a human being. He also teaches that from diversity of employment come unity of interests and freedom of association, and shows that this diversity is produced by protection.

A duty, no matter how high it may be, if required to enable an ingenious and industrious people to supply their own wants out of the raw material with which Providence had endowed them, is the proper duty; and being high enough to do that it will so increase production as to reduce prices; and this is in accordance with Mr. Carey's doctrines. Therefore a duty is never too high when in a country of such native resources as ours the supply of the home market may be vitally interfered with by foreign competitors nothwithstanding that duty. That question furnishes the measure of a just duty, in the mind of an intelligent protectionist.

And now let me state that the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Tucker] has unconsciously paid me what I shall cherish as the most magnificent tribute received during my now somewhat extended congressional life. Referring to the tariff of 1870, he said that it had placed on the free list a large number of articles; and he added that in consequence our manufactures had grown and our exports had increased from $60,000,000 to $160,000,000 a year.

I had the honor of initiating that enlargement of the free list. It cost me the labors of a whole vacation and correspondence with consumers of raw material in every branch of industry. By this work and my labors in that Congress I earned the honorable sobriquet of "Old Pig Iron." Those who hoped by inaugurating what they called revenue reform to destroy the industries of this country saw that to make raw materials free was to enter wisely on the march toward free trade. While by the prevalence of the teaching of British economists they could keep our raw material under heavy duties they could compete with us in our own market and prevent the growth of our foreign trade. Then it was that their well-paid lobby, with its open rooms in every elegant portion of Washington City, set upon my devoted head the scribblers of the nation and bestowed upon me the sobriquet that I now cherish of "Old Pig Iron," which is said to be significant of the fact that through good report and ill report I had stood by my intelligent convictions and the interest of the laboring people of the whole country.

The gentleman from Virginia and the chairman of the committee support the proposed bill as a free-trade measure. Is it that or something else? Its provisions are so haphazard and

incongruous that no man can tell whether it most promotes free trade or protection. Mr. Moore, the Parsee merchant, protests against it, because of its violations of free-trade principles, and Mr. D. C. Robbins protests with even greater emphasis that it is violative of every principle of free trade; while I and gentlemen around me say that its provisions would prove to be alike destructive to the free-trader and the protectionist.

But, if it could be shown that it favors free trade, it would simply prove that it is an attempt to resist the tendency and drift of the age. England herself begins to realize the sad mistake she made when she failed to confine freedom of trade with her ports to raw materials and food. Many of the ablest thinkers of that country are now asking that the errors of Cobden and Bright may be corrected. On the 3d of last month, Mr. Ernest Seyd, than whom there is no more proficient statistician in England, addressed the British Society of Arts in London. He said:

Although I am a thorough free-trader, I am of the opinion that, unless there is soon a better balance between our imports and exports, there is really no other method of effecting this than by a partial return to protection.

The cotton lords of England, as her manufacturers were called, are demanding the protection of their investments against the terrible competition from India.

In characterizing the last quarter of the first century of our existence the chairman of the committee alluded to the Civil War as its distinguishing feature. History is made up of the story of great wars, and, though ours may have had distinguishing features, it did not characterize the last quarter of our first century. The crowning glory of that period was a triumph of the arts of peace and the testimony the United States gave to the world of the power of the protective system in developing the resources of a continent and the attributes of a people. The crowning glory of that century of American history centered in the buildings in the shadow of whose magnificent proportions stands my humble home, and to the construction and maintenance of which a niggardly Congress refused to permit the Government to contribute a dollar. It was an illustration of the capacity of a free and self-governing people. We behold it in the display there made of machinery the most wonderful that man had ever beheld; in the products of genius, taste, skill, and industry put forth in the field, the workshop, the mine, the mill, the laboratory, and the studio. It was there

in the habits, manners, and apparel of our people who gathered there by millions, and who, thanks to the general principles of the protective system, and especially to the tariff of 1867 on wool and woolens and to the stimulus the additional duties it imposed on ready-made clothing gave to that industry, were clad, the rich and the poor, the capitalist and the laborer, the farmer and the denizens of cities, in garments of the same texture, cut, and make, and presented to foreigners an undistinguishable mass, so that, as they loitered through the immense buildings or among the crowds which swarmed in the beautiful grounds, they inquired of their American friends, "Where are the people, the artisans, the paysans, the laborers?" No matter from what country they came, none of them had ever seen the laborer and farmer so clad and so orderly that they could be crowded together a quarter of a million within a single inclosure without the presenec of troops, or gens d'armes, or even the appearance of a palpable police. This exhibit of the developed resources of our country, of the skill and attainments of our people, of the influence of self-government upon the social habits of a people, was the crowning glory of the first century of our history. It came as the result of our challenge to the world to peaceful competition, and it is for this that we are receiving the benedictions of the scholars, statesmen, and thinkers of the world in grateful recognition of the instruction the American people have imparted to all nations by their example.

On June 4, James A. Garfield [O.], a member of the Committee on Ways and Means, spoke upon the bill.

A few days ago the distinguished gentleman from Virginia, who now occupies the chair [Mr. Tucker], made a speech of rare ability and power, in which he placed at the front in his line of discussion a question that was never raised in American legislation until our present form of government was forty years old; the question of the constitutionality of a tariff for the encouragement and protection of manufactures.

He insists that the two powers conferred upon Congress, to levy duties and to regulate commerce, are entirely distinct from each other; that the one cannot by any fair construction be applied to the other; that the methods of the one are not the methods of the other, and that the capital mistake which he conceives has been made in the legislation of the country for many years is that the power to tax has been applied to the regulation of commerce, and through that to the protection of

manufactures. He holds that if we were to adopt a proper construction of the Constitution we should find that the regulation of commerce does not permit the protection of manufacturers, nor can the power to tax be applied, directly, or indirectly, to that object.

I will not enter into any elaborate discussion of that question, but I cannot refrain from expressing my admiration of the courage of the gentleman from Virginia, who in that part of his speech brought himself into point-blank range of the terrible artillery of James Madison, one of the fathers of the Constitution, and Virginia's great expounder of its provisions. More than a hundred pages of the collected works of James Madison are devoted to an elaborate and exhaustive discussion of the very objections which the gentleman [Mr. Tucker] has urged.

I will close this phase of the discussion by calling the attention of the committee to the language of the Constitution itself:

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United States.

Language could hardly be plainer to declare the great general objects to which the taxing power is to be applied.

It should be borne in mind that revenue is the life-blood of a government, circulating through every part of its organization and giving force and vitality to every function. The power to tax is therefore the great motive power, and its regulation impels, retards, restrains, or limits all the functions of the Gov

ernment.

What are these functions? The Constitution authorizes Congress to regulate and control this great motive power, the power to levy and collect duties; and the objects for which duties are to be levied and collected are summarized in three great groups: First, "to pay debts." By this, the arm of the Government sweeps over all its past history and protects its honor by discharging all obligations that have come down from former years. Second is "to provide for the common defence." By this the mailed arm of the Government sweeps the great circle of the Union to defend it against foes from without and insurrection within. And, third, is to "promote the general welfare." These are the three great objects to which the Constitution applies the power of taxation. They are all great, beneficent, national objects and cannot be argued out of existence.

Protection has received the support of the most renowned names in our early history; and, though the principle has some

times been carried to an unreasonable extreme, thus bringing reproach upon the system, it has nevertheless borne many of the fruits which were anticipated by those who planted the germ.

Gentlemen who oppose this view of public policy tell us that they favor a tariff for revenue alone. I therefore invite their attention to the revenue phase of the question. The Secretary of the Treasury tells us that it will be necessary to cut down the expenditures eleven millions below the estimates in order to prevent a deficit of that amount. The revenues of the last fiscal year failed by three and a quarter millions to meet the expenditures required by law. In the face of these facts can we safely diminish our revenues? But we are told that some of the reductions made in this bill will increase rather than diminish the revenue. Perhaps on a few articles this will be true; but as a whole it is undeniable that this bill will effect a considerable reduction in the revenues from customs.

Gentlemen on the other side have been in the habit of denouncing our present tariff laws as destructive to rather than productive of revenue. Let me invite their attention to a few plain facts:

During the fifteen years that preceded our late war—a period of so-called revenue tariffs-we raised from customs an average annual revenue of forty-seven and a half million dollars, never in any year receiving more than sixty-four millions. That system brought us a heavy deficit in 1860, so that Congress was compelled to borrow money to meet the ordinary expenses of the Government.

Do they tell us that our present law fails to produce an adequate revenue? They denounce it as not a revenue tariff. Let them wrestle with the following fact: during the eleven years that have passed since the close of the war we have averaged one hundred and seventy and one-half million dollars of revenue per annum from customs alone. Can they say that this is not a revenue tariff which produces more than three times as much revenue per annum as that law did which they delight to call "the revenue tariff"? Can they say that the present law does not produce revenue? It produces from textile fabrics alone more revenue than we ever raised from all sources under any tariff before the war. From this it follows that the assault upon the present law fails if made on the score of revenue alone. I freely admit that revenue is the primary object of taxation. That object is attained by existing law. But it is an incidental and vitally important object of the law to keep in healthy growth those industries which are necessary to the well

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