$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.

CHAPTER I

DIRECT VS. INDIRECT TAXATION

Tariff Acts of 1789-Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, Advocates Protection in His "Report on Manufactures'-Internal Duties Are Laid on Spirits-Debate in the House on the Excise: in Favor, James Madison [Va.], Samuel Livermore [N. H.], Theodore Sedgwick [Mass.], William B. Giles [Va.]; Opposed, James Jackson [Ga.], Jonathan Parker [Va.], John Steele [N. C.], William L. Smith [S. C.]— Revenue Act of 1794-Debate in the House on Direct vs. Indirect Taxation: in Favor of Direct Taxation, John Smilie [Pa.], Mr. Madison, William Findley [Pa.], Samuel Smith [Md.], John Nicholas [Va.]; in Favor of Indirect Taxation, Uriah Tracy [Ct.], Mr. Sedgwick, Fisher Ames [Mass.], William L. Smith [S. C.]-Debate on the Land Tax: in Favor, Thomas Scott [Pa.], Mr. Sedgwick; Opposed, William Lyman [Mass.], Samuel Dexter [Mass.]; It Is Negatived.

B

EFORE the Confederation the tariff had never been a leading American issue. But during the period in which this plan of union was in operation it was the tariff question, together with that of internal revenue, as we have seen in Vol. I, which brought to light the underlying weakness of the existing system of government, and subsequently led to the adoption of the Constitution.

The first tariff act was passed on July 4, 1789. By this act Congress laid specific duties on many articles, and ad valorem duties, varying from 71⁄2 to 15 per cent., on others. There was also a large free list, for the act was only a slight beginning of the protective system. The preamble to this act declared:

It is necessary for the support of the Government, for the discharge of the debts of the United States, and the encouragement and protection of manufacturers that duties be laid.

8

On July 20, to provide additional revenue, an act laying a tonnage duty was passed. This act discriminated in favor of American shipping, higher duties being imposed on foreign than on American bottoms. This system of protection was defended and explained by the Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, in his "Report on Manufactures" (1791), in which he gave the arguments for protection which have been used and elaborated by various writers since his time.

In 1790, the customs receipts having proved inadequate for the purposes of the tariff acts, Hamilton outlined a system of internal revenue. Though this plan was not adopted until four years later, an act was passed in 1791 by which alcoholic beverages were subjected to a moderate tax. This act was extremely unpopular, and in 1794 caused an uprising in western Pennsylvania known as the "Whisky Insurrection."

In the debate on this measure in the House of Representatives the leading speakers in favor of excise were James Madison [Va.], Samuel Livermore [N. H.], Theodore Sedgwick [Mass.], and William B. Giles [Va.], while among the most important of those opposed to this system of taxation were James Jackson [Ga.], Jonathan Parker [Va.], John Steele [N. C.], and William L. Smith [S. C.].

DUTIES ON SPIRITS

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, JANUARY 5-25, 1791

MR. JACKSON said this mode of taxation was odious, unequal, unpopular, and oppressive, more particularly in the Southern States; in which he observed its unequal operation would be most sensibly felt, as the citizens of those States have no alternative to adopt by which they can diminish the weight of the tax-no breweries or orchards to furnish a substitute for spirituous liquors; hence they become a necessary article. He contended that they were not only necessary, but salutary in the Southern regions.

Mr. Jackson then gave a short sketch of the history of excises in England. He said they always had been considered by the people of that country as an odious tax from the time