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and grapple with the stern realities that confront us. The census gives some facts that should not pass unheeded. While manufactured products increased from $5,249,000,000 to $9,054,000,000, or 69 per cent., the product of raw material increased from $3,395,000,000 to $5,018,000,000, or 47 per cent. No one will deny that the raw material increased in volume as much as the manufactured product; in fact, the census confirms that proposition. Why, then, should it not increase equally or more in value? To me the reason is plain-agriculture was plundered by this monopoly of money and manufactures. As long as the country is to be controlled by a system of protective duties the application of the doctrine of free raw material will, in my opinion, result in agricultural disaster. The farmer who takes a hide to town and exchanges it for a hitching strap gets a fair idea of the benefits of selling free hides and buying protected leather. [Applause.] Viewed in any light, considered from any standpoint, the doctrine of free raw material cannot with profit to the producer obtain while the finished product remains protected by customs duties.

Jonathan P. Dolliver [Ia.] supported the bill. He denied that sectional influence had been heeded in the preparation of its schedules.

No man has asked, "Where is this industry or that?" The only question has been, "Is this an American industry now suffering or likely to suffer a damaging foreign competition?" and with impartial consideration we have tried to bring the law to the rescue of every interest, whether of farm or mine or factory, in every State.

The movement of our industries, I will say to my friend from South Carolina, is west and south. Iron and steel, cotton and woolens are going west and south, drawn by natural forces which in the long run will set the finished output of labor by the side of the great resources with which it deals. But that will not do any harm to anybody. If the new cotton loom goes south, as it has gone, and as it is going, into the very heart of the State of South Carolina, New England will not take alarm, for the old cotton loom, in the hands of the skill that turns the fiber into textures as fine as woven silk, will remain on the banks of the busy river where the protective tariff first established the cotton weavers' art in America. [Applause.] If the woolen mill follows the sheepfold into the interior, as it undoubtedly will, nobody will be harmed, for the training and experience of

the old woolen factory will go on to that perfection which will one day tempt even the dudes of the United States into the experiment of wearing American clothes. [Laughter and ap

plause.]

There is another thing about this bill that suits me and that I think will suit nearly everybody whose attention is called to it, and that is the effort we have made to convert the existing ad valorem rates into a specific statement of the dutics levied. With an ad valorem rate no possible diligence can prevent inequalities almost as numerous as the imported cargoes, and business, instead of being a fair competition, becomes a mere contest of skill in the falsification of invoices. It is even worse than that; for, in the case of goods consigned and not sold directly to the trade, the invoice is useless and the mercantile community, especially of the interior ports, suffers a ruinous injury. These abuses adhere from necessity to any levy of duties on the basis of foreign values, and for that reason the ad valorem system has been condemned by nearly every secretary, without regard to party, from the beginning of the Government.

Again, I am in favor of this bill because its aim is in a practical way to increase the aggregate revenues of the United States. The transition of our affairs from the embarrassing affluence of Mr. Cleveland's first administration to the ragged edge of bankruptcy in the last presents an aspect almost comic and grotesque. The burden and misfortune of the years, it is true, are somewhat lightened by the American sense of humor which has been able to see and realize that the President's breathless proclamation against the surplus of 1887 has ever since appeared in Democratic newspapers and orations as a part of the general assets of the treasury. [Applause and laughter.]

Here Mr. Dolliver dwelt at length on the financial panic during Cleveland's administration.

James G. Maguire [Cal.] asked the speaker to account for the industrial depression between 1875 and 1878, "under the highest protective tariff that any country ever had up to that time-a depression which Mr. Carroll D. Wright, in his report, says was the severest depression we ever had before or since."

MR. DOLLIVER.-Well, Mr. Carroll D. Wright ought to be out in some parts of the country now. [Laughter.]

MR. MAGUIRE.-That is the retort which is always given to that question.

MR. DOLLIVER.-I wish to finish my speech. I am not ambitious to compose a catechism; but I will say to my friend that, as I understand, the panic of 1873 was produced by the depreciation and disorder of the currency of the United States.

MR. MAGUIRE.—I admit that as a cause which operated for two years before the commencement of the panic in 1875.

MR. DOLLIVER.-But that it disappeared and remained out of the sky of our politics from the day that the American dollar was of known and stable value throughout the world. [Applause on the Republican side.]

I say that, without regard to the character of the legislation proposed by the Congress, the mere election, the success of the threat at the polls, was enough to account for all that followed.

Mr. Chairman, there are no miracles in the everyday business world in which we live. It is a steady, arduous, difficult, and often discouraging movement. Congress can do something both for and against, but not everything either for or against, though vastly more against than for. If the American people ever get their prosperity back, it will come by their own individual enterprise and courage, not by edict and proclamation, but by the honest and careful settlement of conditions favorable to industry and investment. If William McKinley has been described as an advance agent, hastening to the seat of government in order to deliver prosperity to the people from the east portico of the Capitol in a few well-chosen words, the conception belongs to the world of dreams, and not to the earth on which we live. No man bears any such relation to the prosperity of a great people; but a man may stand, and I reverently believe that William McKinley does stand, as the chosen instrument in the hand of Providence to restore in the United States a public policy under which the American people have never yet failed, by their own hard work, to secure, out of the resources of their own country, a fair level of prosperity, a reasonable reward for their labor, and a reasonable dividend on their investments. [Continued applause on the Republican side.]

On March 24 John Sharp Williams [Miss.] opposed the bill. In replying to Mr. Dolliver he said:

The gentleman from Iowa, who has done as much as any man in this House to reproduce its old-time oratory, whose

high-flown periods of eloquent diction wrestled with an acute sense of humor for the mastery, "yearned for the factory bells calling millions back to work." May I ask the gentleman from Iowa, and through him the country, why he desires, or why anyone should desire, to open the mills? The object in opening a mill is to manufacture something; the object in manufacturing something is to sell something; the object in selling something is to make a profit out of it. Of what use, then, is it to open the mills if the mills have, already manufactured in their warehouses, more goods than they can sell to the jobber, although they offer them at the cheapest prices which have ever prevailed in the history of the world, and when the jobbers have on their shelves under the same conditions more goods than they can sell to the retailer, and when the retailer has on his shelves under the same conditions more goods than he can sell to the consumer, and when the consumer is hungering and is shivering for want of the goods for which he yearns, but which he cannot buy?

Mr. Chairman, how can increased duties upon manufactured articles aid the capital or labor engaged in manufacturing, except by increasing prices, and how can increasing the price enable the consumer to buy more goods than he is able now to purchase at the lower price? And how can it be said that the trouble with American manufacturing consists in foreign competition, when that competition is less to-day than it ever was in the history of the Republic? How can it be said that the distress of the laboring man engaged in manufacturing is due to the fact of the "importation of foreign goods made by the pauper labor of Europe," when the real fact is that importations are to-day less, comparatively, than ever before, and are growing day by day less and less, notwithstanding increased opportunities to import? The startling fact stands out, like Banquo's ghost, not to be downed by any amount of sophistry, by any amount of eloquence, by any amount of humor, or by any amount of false statement, that the volume of foreign goods imported into the United States during the last fiscal year was $160,000,000 less than the value of the importations during the fiscal year 1893, which was itself a year of restricted importations. Look on that dagger-like fact! [Applause.]

The gentleman from Iowa was right about one thing, which he said in reply to the gentleman from South Carolina; this tariff issue is not a sectional issue. It is a class question. A protective tariff proceeds upon the assumption that the manufacturing class is born booted and spurred to ride, while the

agriculturists walk; that the right exists to tax the capital and labor engaged in agriculture in order to give artificial, law-bred prosperity to the capital and labor engaged in manufacturing.

A tariff tax may legislate money into the pockets of an individual or class of individuals, but it must first legislate it out of the pockets of other individuals or other classes, for the simple reason that the money must be gotten from somewhere before it can be given anywhere. As a Democrat who believes in free trade, or the nearest possible approach to it, I rejoiced in the passage of the Wilson-Gorman bill. Not because the tariff features of it were Democratic-for, on the contrary, they were protective but because the act contained the income tax, and I regarded the passage of the income tax in time of peace as the first step on the high road toward a system of raising revenue for the Government from the net accumulations of wealth rather than from the backs and bellies of the people. There was within it a germ from which something approaching free trade might have come by evolution. But

Of all sad words of tongue or pen,

The saddest are these: "It might have been!"

Since one Shiras1, of the land of Pennsylvania, on the way to the goal-the Damascus of plutocratic desire a nullification of the income tax-saw suddenly a light or vision or something, even this germ has disappeared [laughter], and it would seem that we are condemned permanently to tariff taxation for Government revenues.

Benton McMillin [Tenn.] opposed the bill.

Mr. Chairman, after a careful and painstaking examination of this bill, I do not hesitate to declare it the most unconscionable effort at legislative robbery ever attempted upon a people. Neither the great fire of Chicago nor of Boston, nor the fearful flood that now devastates the Southland, could begin to compare with it as a calamity.

Mr. Chairman, this bill carries not only higher rates of duty than the present law, and higher rates than the McKinley bill, but higher than any law ever passed by an American Congress or groaned under by an American people. Sir, not only is the bill itself higher, but the different schedules average above those of the McKinley bill.

1See page 409.

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