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Be governed by the actual facts as they exist, that American production, the all-important source of American work, is almost wholly dependent on American consumption, which is fully developed only when the people have plenty of work and perfect confidence in their ability at all times to find more. The world over an abundant and permanent supply of work, is the only basis of genuine prosperity.

Low tariff advocates are highly elated with the idea that the immense foreign debt of the allied nations to the United States must be paid in competing products, consequently they expect to see cheap commodities to the American consumer.

It would be far more beneficial to the people and to the Government itself to cancel the entire debt of the allied nations, than to accept competing products as payment for these debts.

There was never a more striking illustration of the prosperity created by work and the adversity developed by idleness, than the effect of the payment of the indemnity of five billion francs, demanded by Germany and paid by France with industrial products after the Franco-Prussian War. That deal brought prosperity to France and adversity to Germany. The idleness in Germany brought about by the excessive importation of French products was the real cause of the great exodus of emigrants from that country to the United States in the following years.

Germany did not fail to heed the lesson taught by that experience; she plainly saw that her very low tariff

opened the way for France not only to pay her debts, but at the same time, turn her military defeat into industrial victory.

Accordingly in 1879 Germany completely reversed her policy, and enacted a very high tariff. Its effect was almost instantaneous. It dammed the flood of her imports. It was a clarion call to her industry. It gave work to her people, stopped the overflow of emigration, and changed adversity into prosperity for the nation. It furnished the means for Germany's wonderful preparedness for the world war. She continued her policy unchanged for the forty-five intervening years before the great war; the result was that work was always plenty, and wages more than doubled during that time, while in free trade England during the same period, work was always scarce and wages advanced less than twenty-five per cent.

It was a self-evident object lesson that should not be disregarded by the United States in her present emergency.

In this country with the broad highway leading to complete prosperity always open, the party that is so aptly represented by a donkey, sticks doggedly to the rough, obscure tow-path of foreign competition, vainly striving to pull the ship of state, through the dismal canal of hard times, to the stagnant pond of cheap commodities, which is located in the starvation pastures of poverty flats.

The existence and stability of American industry are wholly dependent on a market for its products;

no sane person will attempt to deny this positive fact. That market must be either the home market of the United States which we control, or the foreign market of the world which they control.

But the chimerical low tariff advocates can see no prosperity for the country except through foreign trade.

The profits of production the world over are not derived from what men buy to increase their products, but from what they sell, which must be above the cost of production to insure the stability of the business in every line of production.

Every free trade partisan takes it for granted that his policy will decrease the cost of production and increase the exports of the United States. This is in direct opposition to the actual facts as they have always existed. For over a hundred years, without an exception in normal times, with no counteracting influences, customs duties too low to insure American production have always increased the imports and decreased the exports of the United States. Under these conditions the balance of trade turns against the country, unemployment becomes general, while soup houses and bread lines flourish.

Where is our foreign trade to be expanded? With free trade England reversing her industrial policy by establishing an embargo against all industrial products; with every important nation increasing its tariff, in order to stimulate domestic production, what is the prospect of the United States increasing her foreign

commerce beyond the amount of the pre-war period?

South American trade is visionary. Brazil has just enacted a very high tariff for the express purpose of establishing industries of her own, and is now inviting capitalists from the United States to come there and enter business.

The United States is spending billions of dollars to create an immense merchant marine for American use, when under our existing shipping laws, we cannot in competition with subsidized foreign shippers carry a ton of freight without an actual loss.

All the nations of the world, highwaged, altruistic America alone excepted, are establishing tariff laws to increase their own industries, and all are expecting the rich American people to buy their products, while we, with the temerity of theorists, invite their competition.

Germany is now demanding peace on the basis of the President's original fourteen points; what she really wants is the removal of all artificial barriers of trade.

For the United States such a peace would completely nullify her military victory; it would be the industrial suicide of the nation.

It would do much to clarify the financial and industrial atmosphere if President Wilson should announce that he regarded the last election as the verdict of the people on the tariff question, and that he would sign a reasonable protective tariff bill as enacted by Congress. In doing so he would follow the precedent established by James Buchanan, and put

the will of the people above the traditions of his party, which would restore confidence and revive industry. More now than at any other time

in our national existence is an adequate tariff law demanded to perpetuate American prosperity and guarantee American work and wages.

THE PROBLEMS OF PEACE.
By Nicholas Murray Butler,
The problems of today are vast and
touch directly the life and interest of
every American, and for that reason
they are problems which Americans
must solve for themselves. How bet-
ter can they set out to solve them than
in the patient, long-suffering, and
deeply patriotic spirit of Abraham
Lincoln? He was born 110 years ago
into a world which men then thought
as troubled and as difficult as we now
think ours. The menace of Napoleon
hung over Europe, and the people of
Great Britain had undertaken, with
all their resourcefulness, their energy
and their determination, the task of
his overthrow in order that the new-
ly-established liberties of the people
might not be limited or lost. While
Lincoln was yet a child on the fron-
tier in southern Indiana, Napoleon
was a prisoner at St. Helena and was
no more to trouble Europe or the
world.

President Columbia University.
tell what might have happened to
America had Abraham Lincoln not
been elected to the presidency in 1860,
but of one thing we may be sure:
The history of the world from that
day to this would have been strangely
different. With that wonderful combi-
nation of qualities of heart and head
which enabled him to carry the coun-
try safely through the crisis of four
years of civil war, and which then
placed him in the Pantheon of the
world's noblest heroes and servants,
he made possible the America which
we know and love, the America of al-
most unlimited power, of lofty pur-
pose, and of stern determination not
to let liberty wither or die in its
hands.

Then, as now, American questions went hand in hand with international questions, and as Lincoln grew up his mind was turned toward matters of domestic government, of the settlement and organization of new territories, of human freedom and human slavery, and finally of the preservation of the Union itself. No man can

The question to be settled by the people in 1860 was whether the Union should be preserved or permitted to dissolve. Abraham Lincoln said that it should be preserved at all costs, and that under no circumstances should it be permitted to dissolve. The question to be settled by the people in 1920 will be whether the American nation shall remain upon its foundation of ordered liberty and free opportunity or whether it shall be so modified, or perhaps even so largely overturned, that there will arise in its stead a social democracy, autocracy's

nearest and best friend, to take over the management of each individual's life and business, to order his comings and his goings, to limit his occupations and his savings, and to say that the great experiment of Washington and Hamilton, of Jefferson and Madison, of Marshall and Webster, of Adams and Clay, and of Lincoln and Roosevelt has come to an end and gone to join the list of failures in free government with the ancient republics of Greece and Rome and their later followers of Venice and Genoa.

Lincoln quoted Scripture to his purpose when he said at Springfield in 1858: "A house divided against itself

cannot stand. I believe this Government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved-I do not expect the house to fall-but I do expect that it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other."

We may almost echo his exact words, and say that a house divided against itself cannot stand, a nation cannot endure half American and half bolshevik. I do not expect the nation to continue divided, but I do expect that under the leadership and guidance of the Republican party it will become all American.

THE PRESIDENT AND THE TARIFF.

Calls the Attention of Congress to the Subject—Indecisive-Unnecessary Delay in Calling Congress Hurtful.

From Our Washington Correspondent.

Washington, May 25, 1919.

The Government is in distress for lack of money, the result of neglect in the last Congress, and President Wilson's inexcusable delay in calling Congress in extra session. He did not intend to call the extra session until he got ready to come home, but Secretary Glass urged it in such a way that no further delay was excusable.

The Republicans responded so that Congress was ready to legislate the second day after assembling. The greatest vigor will be shown in pushing legislation, but it is impossible to dispose of more than a small part of it before the end of the fiscal year. MASSACHUSETTS WELL REPRESENTED.

Mr. Gillett of Massachusetts was elected speaker of the House by the

unanimous Republican vote, and Mr. Lodge was chosen in a similar manner, leader of the party in the Senate. There has so far been no trouble concerning committee apointments excepting the opposition of the so-called "progressives" in the Senate to the appointment of Mr. Penrose as chairman of the Committee on Finance, which has charge of the tariff, and to Mr. Warren as chairman of the Appropriations Committee. They have each held the respective places before, and their competence is not questioned. The Republicans have only two majority in the Senate, so cannot elect committee chairmen with the Borah and Johnson votes withdrawn. It is thought that the matter will be satisfactorily settled, though

just how is not now

apparent. Everything is being done to harmonize matters, as for instance, Mr. Cummins of Iowa was made president pro. tem. of the Senate to serve in the absence of the Vice-President, though he had not been closely in sympathy with his Republican colleagues on the tariff and other questions, and has been considered one of the light opponents of Penrose and Warren. Senators Gronna and La Follette were said to be opposed to Penrose and Warren, but they were not in the conference with Johnson of California, Cummins, Jones of Washington, McNary of Oregon, Kenyon, McCormick, Norris and Borah. WHAT WILSON SAYS OF THE TARIFF. President Wilson is showing the influence of the last election which resulted in Republican control of Congress, the tariff being a direct issue. In his message read at the opening of Congress he says:

There is, fortunately, no occasion for undertaking in the immediate future any general revision of our system of import duties.

No serious danger of foreign competition now threatens American industries. . . . Least of all should we depart from the policy adopted in the tariff act of 1913, of permitting the free entry into the United States of the raw materials needed to supplement and enrich our own abundant supplies.

Nevertheless, there are parts of our tariff system which need prompt attention. The experiences of the war have made it plain that in some cases too great reliance on foreign supply is dangerous, and that in determining certain parts ofo ur tariff policy domestic considerations must be borne in mind which are political as well as economic. Among the industries to which special consideration should be given is that of the manufacture of dyestuffs and related chemicals. Our complete dependence upon German supplies before the war made the interruption of trade a cause of exceptional economic disturbance. The close re

lation between the manufacturer of dyestuffs, on the one hand, and of explosives and poisonous gases, on the other, moreover, has given the industry an exceptional value. significance and The German chemical industry, with which we will be brought into competition, was and may well be again, a thoroughly knit monopoly capable of exercising a competition of a peculiarly insidious and dangerous kind.

The United States should, moreover, have the means of properly protecting itself whenever our trade is discriminated against by foreign nations, in order that we may be assured of that equality of treatment which we hope to accord and to promote the world over. Our tariff laws as they now stand provide no weapon of retaliation in case other governments should enact legislation unequal in its bearing on our products as compared with the products of other countries. Though we are as far as possible from desiring to enter upon any course of retaliation, we must frankly face the fact that hostile legislation by other nations is not beyond the range of possibility, and that it may have to be met by counter legislation.

Agencies of international counsel and suggestion are presently to be created in connection with the league of nations in this very field; but it is national action and the enlightened policy of individuals, corporations and societies within each nation that must bring about the actual reforms.

We have found the main sources from which taxation must be drawn. I take it for granted that its mainstays will henceforth be the income tax, the excess profits tax, and the estate tax. All these can so be adjustd as to yield constant and adequate returns and yet not constitute a too grievous burden on the taxpayer.

ABOLISH WAR TAXES.

Among special war taxes which the President in his message to Congress suggested should be eliminated are those on soda water and so-called luxuries, such as expensive articles of clothing and personal equipment; on proprietory medicinal and toilet preparations, and on such manufacturers' products as automobile trucks and accessories, pianos, sporting goods, chewing gum, candy, cameras and camera supplies, firearms, electric

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