MORRILL

JUSTIN SMITH MORRILL, an American politician of note, was born at Stratford, Vermont, April 14, 1810. He received a common-school education and was successively farmer and merchant. Both his taste and ambition inspired him to study deeply and to read widely, s0 that ere long he became one of the best informed men in his State. In 1855 he was sent as representative to Congress, where he was one of the founders of the Republican party. He was an able advocate of protection, the speech which he delivered on the Tariff Bill of 1857 attracting widespread attention. The next year he introduced the Land Grant College Bill, which became a law in 1862. During the Civil War period Morrill was in charge of all the tariff and other measures for revenue, and he was the principal framer of the Tariff Bill of 1861, called by his name. In 1867 he took a seat in the Senate, and at the time of his death in Washington, December 28, 1898, had been for several years the oldest congressman in point of years, as well as the one longest in continuous service. His latest speech was delivered against the annexation of Hawaii. In 1886 be published "Self-Consciousness of Noted Persons."

THE TARIFF AND THE PUBLIC DEBT

DELIVERED IN THE UNITED STATES SENATE, DECEMBER 8, 1881

'REE trade would almost seem to be an aristocratic dis

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ease, from which workingmen are exempt, and those that catch it are as proud of it as they would be of the gout-another aristocratic distinction.

It might be more modest for these "nebulous professors " of political economy to agree among themselves how to define and locate the leading idea of their "dismal science," whether in the value in exchange, or value in use, in profits of capital or wages, whether in the desire for wealth, or aversion to labor, or in the creation, accumulation, distribution, and consumption of wealth, and whether rent is the recompense for the work of nature or the consequence of a monopoly of prop

erty, before they ask a doubting world to accept the flickering and much disputed theory of free trade as an infallible truth, about which they have themselves never ceased to wrangle.

The weight of nations against it is as forty to one. It may be safe to say that when sea serpents, mermaids, and centaurs find a place in natural history, free trade will obtain recognition as a science; but till then it must go uncrowned, wearing no august title, and be content with the thick-andthin championship of the "Cobden Club."

All the principal British colonies from the rising to the setting of the sun-India alone possibly excepted - are in open and successful revolt against the application of the freetrade tryanny of their mother country, and European states not only refuse to copy the loudly-heralded example, but they are retreating from it as though it were charged with dynamite. Even the London "Times," the great "thunderer" of public opinion in Great Britain, does not refrain from giving a stunning blow to free trade when it indicates that it has proved a blunder, and reminds the world that it predicted it would so prove at the start. The ceremony of free trade, with only one party responding, solitary and alone, turns out as dull and disconsolate as that of a wedding without a bride. The honeymoon of buying cheap and selling dear appears indefinitely postponed.

There does not seem to be any party coming to rescue England from her isolated predicament. Bismarck, while aiming to take care of the interests of his own country, as do all ministers, on this question, perhaps, represents the attitude of the greater part of the far-sighted statesmen of Europe, and he, in one of his recent parliamentary speeches, declared:

"Without being a passionate protectionist, I am as a financier, however, a passionate imposer of duties, from the conviction that the taxes, the duties levied at the frontier, are almost exclusively borne by the foreigner, especially for manufactured articles, and that they have always an advantageous, retrospective, protectionist action."

Practically the nations of continental Europe acquiesce in this opinion, and are a unit in their flat refusal of British free trade. They prefer the example of America. Before self-confident men pronounce the whole world of tariff men, at home and abroad, "half-educated or half-witted," they would do well to see to it that the stupidity is not nearer home, or that they have not themselves cut adrift from the logic of their own brains, only to be wofully imposed upon by free-trade quackery, which treats man as a mere fact, no more important than any other fact, and ranks labor only as a commodity to be bought and sold in the cheapest or dearest markets.

So long as statesmen are expected to study the prosperity and advancement of the people for whose government and guidance they are made responsible, so long free-trade theories must be postponed to that Utopian era when the health, strength, and skill, capital, and labor of the whole human race shall be reduced or elevated to an entire equality, and when each individual shall dwell in an equal climate, upon an equal soil, freely pasture his herds and flocks where he pleases, and love his neighbor better than himself.

At present the Russians, the Germans, the French, the British, and also most of the less populous nations are pitted against each other for empire upon land and sea, and each and all are striving for the mastery in trade, arts, and manufactures, regardless as well of natural impediments as of

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the sentiments of their competitors. To this end they make war to extend or maintain territorial possession, subsidize steamships around the world, push railroads across continents, tunnel mountains, open inland seas, and at last establish technological schools for the better instruction of their own skilled artisans.

Never was keener foresight and overmastering earthly mindedness among all nations more alert and potential, directly and indirectly, in securing those material advantages likely to win the profits of industry and trade, than in the nineteenth century. Some pay bounties on exports, a greater number have levied or advanced protective duties on imports; and no nation has directly taxed her people more extravagantly, and solely for the benefits of her manufactures, than has Great Britain, by her costly and imperial maintenance of colonial and far-off markets.

Even China, powerless and docile, is persuaded with gunpowder, to trade in cotton-stuffs, hardware, and opium though it kills a half million of her opium eaters annually

and the British drum-beat of war is rarely hushed in India before it breaks forth in Africa, for all the benefits of the Manchester and Birmingham trade. The cost of their military and naval protection to commerce in the Mediterranean cannot be less than $20,000,000 annually, a sum far transcending all possible gains upon their entire export traffic to the Mediterranean. In other places it is even worse. The expense of the military and naval forces on the West India station, it is fair to say, must often exceed the total value taken there of British exports.

To be unmindful of the movements of those whose rivalry is unescapable and everywhere present, is to consent to be vanquished, and to stand in their rear as inferiors forever.

To lag behind, while all the world is on the move, is to accept the fate of the decrepit and dull-pated bison, who lingers on the prairie in the rear of the ongoing herd, only to be devoured by wolves.

We are no longer enduring the serfdom of colonies, but as a great republic, with a matchless destiny, we must prove American capacity, when intrusted with great affairs, able to cope with all rivals, and, if we have any, with all enemies, copying only their virtues and shunning their faults. Americans speak the English language, but it does not follow that our soldiers should wear red coats. We revere Old England's common law, but it does not follow that we may flog our wives with a stick not bigger than our thumbs. We borrowed their trial by jury, but did not import the English tread-mill; nor should we transplant any other legislative exotics to an uncongenial soil. We have to legislate for a continent, not for an island. Glad as we may be to somewhat abate taxation upon our own people, it will not be necessary to provoke the laughter of English statesmen at our imbecility by an abandonment of the policy of American protection.

Ireland, with its splendid harbors, once enjoyed a valuable export trade, and was the seat of prosperous manufactures; but these, after the union, losing protection and outrun under English competition, were completely extirpated by hostile, even vindictive legislation, and the Emerald Isle now only furnishes food for cattle, and potatoes for men. The question will not be impertinent to ask, when famines overtake their ill-starred people, "From whence comes earliest relief?" Protection answers, that "in America there is always something to spare."

Italy, in early ages the land of liberal arts, of heroes and