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Nobody pretended to deny that if it was found on fair experiment that these results were impossible in a particular industry the protection must be withdrawn. Otherwise it amounted to supporting an industry at public expense-an unbusinesslike, unfair, and certainly undemocratic performance.

But what has happened when the formula has not worked? Take the failure after decades of costly experiments to grow all the wool we use, to make woolens of as high a quality and at a price equal to those of the English. Fully sixty per cent. of the raw wool used in the United States is brought from other lands, and a tax of 11 or 12 cents is collected on every pound of it. Our high grade woolens cost on an average twice what they do in Europe. The fact is, the protective dogma has not, and probably never can, make good in wools and woolens. It is one of those cases where we can use land, time, labor, and money to better advantage. The doctrine of protection as well as common humanity and common sense orders the gradual but steady wiping out of all duties on everything necessary to the health and comfort of the people, unless in a reasonable time these duties can supply us better and cheaper goods than we can buy in the world market. That time was passed at least twenty years ago in wool, but Schedule K still stands. It is supported by an interpretation of the formula of protection, which, as one picks it out to-day, from the explanations and practices of the wool growers and wool manufacturers, is only a battered wreck of its old self. It ignores utterly the time limit, the "reasonable" period in which an industry was to make good. It ignores the condition that the duty should not destroy fair competition. Moreover, it stretches the function of the duty from that of temporarily protecting the cost of production to one of permanently insuring profits. The chief appeal of those who employ this distorted notion is not to reason at all, but to sympathy-sympathy for the American working-man. Call their attention to the inequalities of the duties on raw wool, and they will tell you of the difference in the labor cost of dress goods here and in England. Tell them the quality of our goods

is deteriorating, and they will draw you a picture of the blessings of the American working-man. Tell them that the wool schedule has taken blankets and woolen garments from the sufferers from tuberculosis, who certainly need them, and they will tell you that "the American people are better clothed than any other people in the world and their clothes are better made."

Any one who has observed the life of the workingman on both sides of the Atlantic knows that wages, conditions, opportunities are vastly superior as a whole in the United States. It is a New World, with a New World's hopes. But it is only the blind and deaf who do not realize that the same forces of allied greed and privilege which have made life so hard for so many in the Old World are at work, seeking to repeat here what they have done there. The favorite device of those who are engaged in this attempt is picturing the contrast between the most favored labor of the United States and the least favored of Europe. It is a device which "Pig Iron" Kelley used throughout his career with utter disregard of facts. Mr. McKinley followed him. In the course of his defence of the tinplate duty he read, with that incredible satisfaction which the prohibitive protectionist takes in the thought that his policy may cripple the industry of another nation, an English view of the effect the proposed duty would have in Wales. "The great obstacle to tinplate making on a large scale in the States," said the article, "is the entire absence of cheap female labor." Mr. McKinley paused and said impressively, "We do not have cheap female labor here under the protective system, I thank God for that." And yet at that moment in the textile mills of New England, of New York, and of Pennsylvania, not only were thousands of women working ten, eleven, and more hours a day, because their labor was cheap, but thousands of children under twelve years of age were doing the same.

The average weekly earnings for 58 hours in cotton factories in 1907, a "boom" year in the industry, were: For the carding room, $7.80; for mule spinners, $12.92; for speeders, $10.62; for weavers, $10.38. In the woolen industry the picker received $8.00; the woman spinner,

$7.25; the man spinner, $12.91, and the weaver, $15.34. If a man could make these wages for fifty-two weeks a year throughout his working life, if he had a thrifty wife and healthy children, his lot, if not altogether rosy, would be far from hopeless; he might even be able to realize the dream of a little home and garden of his own which lurks in the mind of every normal man, and which, in the case of the textile operative, is almost imperative if he is to have a decent and independent old age. For this man, however husky he may be at the start, however skilful a laborer, has always a short working life. There are few old men and women in textile factories. By 55 they are unfit for the labor. The terrible strain on brain and nerve and muscle has so destroyed the agility and power of attention necessary that they must give up the factory, where, indeed, for several years their output has probably been gradually decreasing. As almost all textile operatives are paid by the piece the wage will gradually fall off as dexterity declines. By 55, then, if not earlier, he drops out, picking up thereafter any odd job he may.

It is this short working life of the father, with the declining wage for years before it actually ends, that makes woman and child labor an essential factor in the solving of the problem of the textile family.

The protectionist who answers every criticism of his rates by conjuring a picture of "pauper labor" is equally conscienceless in his attitude toward the relation of protection to the two most disquieting industrial phenomena of our day, the increase in the cost of living and the multiplicity of corporations which aim to become and often are monopolies.

In recent years the problems of the operative have been complicated by the soaring cost of living. Almost everything he buys is higher in price, or, if he insists on a standard price, the article is poorer in quality. Take the very protected articles from which a manufacturing State such as Rhode Island draws its wealth. All of the 68,000 textile workers in that State must have clothes. Now the price of women's all-wool dress goods increased in Providence, the center of the industry, over 33 per

cent. between 1891 and 1907. There was an increase in virtually all the cotton-warp goods, varying from 4 to 40 per cent. Underwear in which there was any mixture of wool cost a fourth more in 1907 than sixteen years before. Bleached muslin used for shirtings was 34 per cent. dearer. That is, their own industries are taking out of the textile operatives the increase in wages which this same period has seen!

No evil concealed in the doctrine of protection was ever more thoroughly advertised than monopoly. At every stage since Hamilton's time we have been warned that it waited us just around the turn. For the last twenty-five years, especially, we have seen it pour down upon us an army whose ranks yearly grew thicker, stronger, and more cruel. This is the very army against which we have been cautioned for decades as waiting in ambush. There was a counter force provided, of course, for this waiting enemy-domestic competition. Now, we know what has happened to domestic competition in the last thirty years in this country. Freed from foreign competition-something which the doctrine never intended should happen-the home manufacturers have by a succession of guerilla campaigns, often as ruthless and lawless as those of wild Indians or Spanish freebooters, corralled industry after industry so completely that they could control its output and at once cheapen the quality and increase the price.

One of the most serious results of this distortion of the protective system is the kind of man it encourages: a man unwilling to take his chances in a free worldstruggle; a man whose sense of propriety and loyalty has been so perverted that he is willing to treat the Congress of the United States as an adjunct to his business; one who regards freedom of speech as a menace, and the quality of his product of less importance than the quantity; one whose whole duty toward his working-man is covered by a pay envelope. This man at every point is a contradiction to the democratic ideal of manhood. The sturdy self-reliance, the quick response to the ideals of free self-government, the unwillingness to restrain the other man, to hamper his opportunity or sap his re

sources, all of these fine things have gone out of him. He is an unsound democratic product, a very good type of the creature that privilege has always produced.

But this man would be impossible were it not that he has the backing of politicians and law-makers. Behind and allied with every successful high-tariff group is a political group. That is, under our operation of the protective doctrine we have developed a politician who encourages the most dangerous kind of citizenship a democracy can know-the panicky, grasping, idealless kind. Moreover, we have developed a politician whose principal method of getting things done is by barter.

Let us admit that reasonable people must not expect in a popular government to arrive at results save by a series of compromises. No reasonable person can expect the protective system to be handled without compromises, backsets, and errors of judgment, but he can expect it to be handled as a principle and not as a commodity. The shock and disgust come in the discovery that our tariffs are not good and bad applications of the principles of protection, but that they are good or bad bargains. Dip into the story of the tariff at any point since the Civil War and you will find wholesale proofs of bargaining in duties; rates fixed with no more relation to the doctrine of protection than they have to the law of precision of the equinoxes. The actual work of carrying out these bargains is of a nature that would revolt any legislator whose sensitiveness to the moral quality of his acts had not been blunted-who had not entirely eliminated ethical considerations from the business of fixing duties. And this is what the high protectionist lawgiver has come to a complete repudiation of the idea that right and wrong are involved in tariff bills. There is no man more dangerous in a position of power than he who refuses to accept as a working truth the idea that all a man does should make for righteousness and soundness, that even fixing a tariff rate must be moral. But this is the man the doctrine of protection, as we know it, produces, and therein lies the final case against it-men are worse, not better, for its practice.

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