bowl as the recipient of the contents of its tender stomach. And though she "wash it with niter and take to it much soap, yet the iniquity is marked before me, saith the Lord," for the soap is taxed 40 per centum! God help the child! RICHARD W. TOWNSEND [Ill.].-How about candy? MR. Cox.-I am coming to that in a moment, my honey. [Great laughter.] If she wraps the little dear in a plain bleached cotton nightshirt, it has a nightmare of 52 cents per square yard specific [laughter]; when the child awakes in the morning fretful, she combs its little head at 35 cents ad valorem [laughter]; if she would amuse it, she rolls it over a Brussels carpet at 90 cents per square yard, or gives it confectionery made of refined sugar at 4 cents a pound tax, and 25 per cent. ad valorem; if it tears its little panties, the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Kelley] sews them up with spool-thread taxed at three-quarters of its value. [Laughter.] Why, if she used a shingle to bring the little "toddling wee thing" to its senses, as the honorable gentlemen can recall, the cost would be enhanced at the rate of 17 per cent. taxation. [Laughter.] If the youngster has a patriotic inclination on our Fourth of July, his firecrackers are taxed as a patriotic luxury at $1 extra a box, and the bunting which furnishes the flag, though but 23 cents a pound, costs 121 per cent. extra, while the band plays on instruments taxed at 30 cents. She takes him to the menagerie to study natural history. There is the zebra, symbolic of a mixed ad valorem and specific [laughter], and the stately giraffe, high protection [laughter], the royal tiger, and unicorn of Holy Writ at 20 per cent. And the procession of elephants. Every one 20 per cent. True, Jumbo, for purposes not to be mentioned, is excluded by the affidavit of a consistent protectionist! but the log-chain that holds his huge legs binds the monster in protective chains! [Laughter.] Mr. Chairman, I have come to this debate with no very sanguine hope. The commission bill will pass. We are speaking at a funeral, but it is a funeral which suggests the resurrection and the hope of liberty. America, sir, may yet pioneer the way among the nations in the cultivation and elevation of science, art, manufactures, taste, and amenities which are the result of that intellectual and moral condition that flows from unrestricted interchange, when the differences of soil, climate, production, and society will be so far obliterated that the human race will be advanced in its spiritual and loftier aspira This progress commands the inner and solemn agencies that mark our own race, land, and era. The pauseless energy of steam and the fleet forces of lightning are harnessed for the triumph of liberty-liberty to the plow, the loom, and sailliberty to dispose of one's labor, the precious pearls of which upon the brow of this century are set as crown jewels of democratic-republican exaltation of individual and national life. Is it not time for the toilers of our time, so fruitful in progressive thought, to recognize the idea that the greatest economy and morality is to be found in freedom? If, sir, to conserve law with liberty burdens must be laid upon labor, then let it be remembered when we create taxes and tariffs that All that freedom's highest aim can reach, [Applause.] On May 4 William R. Morrison [Ill.] opposed the bill. The highly protected manufacturing industries do not sustain 10 per cent. of our people. Rates of wages are fixed by what is earned by nine men employed in agricultural, railroad, and other industrial pursuits, not by the one in manufactures. Changes from one employment to another for any cause often bring with them some hardships, but laboring men have the intelligence common to their fellow citizens. If wages are higher in one industry than another, protected or unprotected under like conditions, labor goes from one industry to another and thus wages are equalized in all. When labor is oppressed in the Old World its only escape is to the New, over what is too often an impassable sea. It is compelled to accept the wages offered by its taskmaster, and wages therefore are low. In this newer and better country democratic statesmanship blazed the trees to the other ocean toward which laborers find homes and profitable employment, and therefore wages are not so low. When we have no more cheap lands labor will be lower. In protected and unprotected industries employers pay what will obtain the needed service and no more. But the gentleman from New York [Mr. Hewitt] seems to be one protected manufacturer who continued his business in the interest of labor at the expense of his own interest, and this is not the only inconsistency of which he is accused. Both politician and manufac turer, he is actually accused of abandoning the protective policy which those who accuse him say is supported by the majority of all the people. Sir, let us all take courage, when the protective era produces a man, both legislator and manufacturer, who can be accused of devoting himself to the public interest at the expense of his own. The opponents of revenue reform convert untruths a century old into arguments by restating them. Their first argument was based on a home market for farm products as one of protection's promised results. In 1860 we sent to foreign markets 4,153,153 bushels of wheat, and 153,252,795 bushels in 1880. The value of grain, flour, and meal exported was $23,493,510 in 1860 and $284,126,760 in 1880, with other agricultural products in like increased proportion. The price for our surplus in foreign markets regulates the price of the entire product sold at home or abroad. Two of every three bales of cotton go to a foreign market and one-third of our wheat. Large as our harvests have grown, we must find a foreign market for a larger proportion than before the enactment of the present tariff, and each succeeding year finds us farther from the promised home market. Less than one-fifth of our population produces the manufactures which all consume. Protected or unprotected, the country can sustain less than one-fifth of its population in manufacturing for its own consumption. At our second centennial, when our people number two hundred millions, manufactures can sustain but forty millions. The value of our agricultural export, now $730,000,000, will be then. twice two thousand millions to be sold in competition with the product of the cheapest labor in the Old World, whose cheaper goods our agricultural labor is not permitted to buy in exchange for its own products. And then, as now, the advocates of this doctrine will produce from the protective storehouse of broken promises and false pretences arguments based on the necessity of protecting our infant industries, to provide a home market for farm products. The protectionists, who credit this tariff with all they consider good and see nothing but evil in every proposed reduction, present us with a long list of useful inventions, the alleged result of genius inspired by a tariff which puts a tax on salt for cattle and hogs and makes it free for fish, gives bounty to the manufacturer of the iron and steel in the plow, to be paid by him who holds it. Statistics are not so complete as to justify an estimate of the number of useful discoveries to be credited to the manufacturer who receives bounties and the number to be credited to those whom they pay 68 cents for a day's labor. When that list is furnished I venture the prediction that the useful inventions to be credited to highly protected manufacturers will be made up chiefly of useful inventions and methods for producing Congressional legislation, so largely as to justly entitle our tariff system to the dignity of a science, the science of winning ways. This paternal policy now affects great solicitude for new industries. It asks us to believe it would develop new industries, or old industries in new homes, and is especially concerned about the undeveloped resources of the new South. If the South needs protection from Old England, who will protect her from the New? Who from Pennsylvania's one-hundred-year-old and long-established industries and her capital accumulated from the bounties of a century? When capital invested in manufactures ceases to be pensioned on our own people it will successfully contend for the world's commerce, depending, it may be, upon the difference in cost of oneeighth of a cent per yard or one-twentieth of a cent per pound. Then capital will avoid waste and must go to the cotton and the ore. The manufacturing industries of the country, chiefly in the older States, are nearly or quite equal to the production of what all our people can use. If it be true that manufactures to prosper or survive must be protected in our own markets, as protectionists assert, and they cannot therefore compete in the world's markets, what is to become of our old "infant industries" in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania when new "infants" are born in Georgia, Alabama, Illinois, and Iowa? Who, then, will pay for Massachusetts school-houses and the musical instruments upon which the honorable chairman [Judge Kelley] has his laboring people playing whenever he does not have them starving? The anxiety of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts to cut off their own markets in the interest of the new South is another evidence that protection quickens inventive genius and develops resources for securing Congressional legislation. In conclusion, sir, this question in its higher aspects is not a party but a political question, affecting the distribution of property and the proceeds of labor and going back to the foundation rocks of our political system. But it is also a business question. In this view what we need is a business settlement of a business question-reasonable and practical treat ment to avoid excessive changes, and we must begin at once, for our surplus revenue is becoming the great corruption fund of the age. Wages in shops and mills are the same as in other works of like kind, or less. Wages are not the criterion of cost; it is efficiency of labor that counts. Our wages are higher; they should be; and our cost is lower because the labor is more effective. When the courage of our textile manufacturers and our iron and steel makers is equal to their skill they will demand freedom from commercial shackles and bring the world's commerce to their feet. On May 5 William D. Kelley [Pa.] supported the bill. In conclusion he said: Mr. Chairman, it has been said that "events are written lessons glaring in huge hieroglyphic picture-writing that all may see and know them." Let me, therefore, turn from the unseemly wrangle into which I have been forced, and from the consideration of imperfect tables, which, like cobwebs, "will hold no conclusion," and contemplate our subject in the light of events-events not of mean but of magnificent proportions. The loss by England of the commanding position in commerce and manufactures she so long maintained and the recognition of the United States as the foremost member of the family of nations are events that all will read and know. By what terrible contest of arms has this reversal of the relations of these nations been wrought! What carnage and desolation marked its progress! Sir, this is the work of peace. It has been wrought by legislation and not by war; and it illustrates the importance of gravely considering every revenue measure which can influence the productive forces of a country. About thirty years have elapsed since Great Britain entered fully upon its present commercial system, and, throwing down the barriers of defence which secured her home market to her laborers, challenged the nations of the world to competition in manufactured goods in all its markets. The period was well chosen for the success of the experiment. The change was coincident with the discovery of the gold fields of California and Australia, which, by opening to settlement Australasia and the Pacific coast of North America, created large demands for wares and fabrics of every variety in new and highly remunerative markets. The sudden and unprecedented augmentation of the world's stock of gold caused great move |
