I

IN THE May number of the Pacific Monthly Mr. Charles Erskine Scott Wood asserts, inter alia, that "the protective tariff is a violation of natural law that protection has brought untold ills to the country-that tariff is a bonus taken out of the pocket of the consumer and given to the privileged few-that the tariff is a steal-that the laborer is fooled by the statement that the tariff makes industries and furnishes employment."

Mr. Wood leaves wholly to conjecture how or in what manner the tariff violates natural law. I assume that if there were any facts to support such a statement he would have given them, and that as he gave none, there are none to give.

The ills which he says protection has brought to this country remain "untold" despite his diatribe against the system.

He

Mr. Wood, like other free traders, bases his antagonism to protection on the false premise that it is designed for the benefit of the few and against the many. quotes Alexander Hamilton as saying that "protection was a bonus given to encourage infant industries in an infant country." He omitted. however, to quote Thomas Jefferson, who advocated a high tariff, saying that "if the revenue derived therefrom was not needed to pay the running expenses of the government, to build roads with it.”

Our protective tariff was primarily designed to develop mills and factories and

incidentally to protect the owners thereof but it has now grown to be a necessity for the protection of the farmers and workingmen alike.

Free trade would reduce our workingmen to the wage scale of England, where one in every seven ends his existence in an almshouse, and would likewise rob our farmer of the home market that consumes ninety-seven per cent of his products.

For instance, an American hatter puts one dollar's worth of raw material into a hat. He pays his hat maker one dollar for making it, and wants fifty cents profit; hence he sells the hat for two dollars and fifty cents. An Englishman brings over a cargo of the same goods. He has put one dollar's worth of raw material into his hat, paid but fifty cents to the man who made it and wants fifty cents profit. He can, therefore, sell it for two dollars and have the same profit that the American gets in selling his for two dollars and fifty cents, with the tariff removed. It requires neither a genius nor a philosopher to see that the American must reduce his hat maker's compensation to fifty cents, forego his own profits or retire from business. The latter is what he would be constrained to do. In that event what becomes of the American farmer's market for the raw material that goes into the hat and the American hat maker's employment?

More than that. The American hatter pays taxes on his investment, why not require the English hatter to pay some sort of tax for the privilege of selling his

hats here? If so, why not by a tariff, and if by that method, what better schedule could be devised than the difference between the wages paid the hat maker by the Englishman and those paid by the American? In that case who pays the tax on the hat? Free traders claim that the consumer pays it, for the reason that if the tariff was removed he would get the hat fifty cents cheaper. Perhaps he would, until the American was driven out of business. Certainly not longer. But when American competition was silenced, the American farmer would be without a market for his raw materials and the American hat maker would be without employment.

Mr. Wood complains that the tariff enables the protected manufacturer to sell his wares in foreign countries cheaper than he sells at home.

If the talented gentleman had investigated this part of his subject, instead of taking a random shot at it, he would have ascertained that but a small percentage of American products are sold abroad for less than they are disposed of here, and then only where merchants were seeking new fields for trade, or the manufacturers were overstocked and preferred to sell products they had already shipped abroad at cost rather than reship them or close their factories, thereby throwing their employes out of work. This is only what our city merchants are constantly doing in advertising a specialty at less than cost to invite trade.

Mr. Wood also claims that the tariff produces trusts. Will he kindly enlighten us as to why free-trade England is the worst trust-ridden country on earth?

He also says that "laborers' wages and employment depend on open competition instead of the tariff." He overlooks the fact that there are in existence almost double the number of factories and mills required to perform the world's work and that the vital question is whose workingmen and mills shall be employed and whose shall remain idle.

Experience, that austere but efficacious teacher, has repeatedly demonstrated to us that protection keeps our whole country prosperous and workingmen profitably employed and that even the fear of free

trade paralyzes business, robs millions of employment and frightens capital into

retirement.

It is estimated that during Cleveland's second administration, two million American workingmen were the victims of enforced idleness. The loss in wages and the shrinkage in the values of property, during those four years of desolation and poverty, reached an amount exceeding the cost of the war of the rebellion, and thousands of industrious, wellmeaning men were ruthlessly driven from honorable and profitable employment to free soup-houses and into Coxie's army. This, too, because capitalists feared that Cleveland's free-trade policy would be put into practice and locked their money in vaults. Manufacturers for the same reason made goods only on orders, all kinds of business was first stagnated, then paralyzed and poverty, unchecked, stalked abroad in the land. Heaven only knows what the result would have been had a real free trade law been enacted.

There is no greater fallacy than the free trade contention that protection is only for the benefit of the rich manufacturers. Take the example of the hat, above given. If the tariff on hats was abolished, the American hatter would derive the same profit by selling the hat for two dollars that he now has by selling it for two dollars and fifty cents, simply by reducing the hat maker's compensation to fifty cents to meet that paid the hat maker in England. So that the hardship would fall on the poor man instead of the rich.

The rules that are applicable to the hat may be extended to all other manufactured articles and would perforce destroy the farmer's market for raw materials and other farm products and reduce the workingman's wages to the starvation point, thereby bringing poverty and distress to the whole country.

The tariff has nothing whatever to do with the ownership of the United States Senate Mr. Wood to the contrary notwithstanding. Some Senators were owned by corporations before trusts came into being and others will be slaves, so long as men value money above honor, and love power more than virtue.