IE NATIONAL POLICY. TRACTS FOR THE TIMES. ]Vu.ixiber One. CONDUCTED BY JOHN WILLIAMS, EDITOR OF "THE IRON AGE." Subject WHO NEEDS PROTECTION! BY A WESTERN FARMER. NEW YORK: THE OFFICE OF "THE IRON AGE," 80 Beekman Street CHICAGO: JOHN A. NORTON, BOOKSELLER AND PUBLISHER, AND AGENT FOB THE WRITINGS OP HENRY C. CARET, 126J Dearborn Street 1865. f .'/. ..1>. IT'-.. iWf ft LIBRARY OFFICE OF THE IRON AGE, ) 80 Beekman St., New York, December, 1865. j This tract is the first of a series (compiled from articles appearing in THE IRON AGE) which I design issuing, with the object of presenting to the American public, in a simple and popular form, the leading arguments in support of the great principle of National Industrial Independence. I do not engage in this enterprise as the advocate of any class, or the organ of any special interest, but as the defender and exponent of that great NATIONAL POLICY which aims, by the development of the vast and varied resources of this country, to elevate and enrich all classes of its people. I hope in these short and simple papers to make plain that there is a perfect harmony between the interests of all American producers, and that laborers and capitalists, farmers, miners and manufacturers are all alike concerned in securing the variety and extent of our domestic pro- ductions. I expect, at the same time, to show that as the material interests of all classes of the people will thus be promoted, so will be their mental cul- ture and their social elevation. And I intend to exhibit the beneficial influence which the prosperity of this nation, thus secured, must have upon the condition and prospects of the ill-paid European laborer, who, seeing the boundless field of honorable and profitable industry thus thrown open to him, will either emigrate to this country or demand larger payment and higher social and civil rights in his own. I ask the support of all who desire the success of this policy to the present undertaking the necessity and advantage of which I think will not be denied. Efforts the most specious and persistent are being made by the advo- cates of what is called " universal free trade" to mislead the people on this subject, and the prejudices of farmers and workingmen are especially ap- pealed to ; to counteract these efforts will be my unceasing object, and to manifest the certain ruin, financial and industrial, which the prevalence of this system would bring upon the American nation, will be the great de- ign of these TRACTS FOR THE TIMES. The tracts will be supplied at a price very little beyond cost to individ- uals or to societies desiring them to circulate gratuitously. JOHN WILLIAMS, Editor of THE IRON AGE. THE IRON AGE, t \ c> Hardware, Iron and Industrial Reporter, JOHN WILLIAMS, Editor, IS PUBLISHED AT IVo. SO Beekman St., IVew York. EVERY THURSDAY MORNING. of In the United States $4 00 ' In Canada and British Provinces 5 00 In Great Britain and British "West Indies. . . 6 00 Payable in Advance. No Paper sent longer than paid for. of One square (one inch or less), one insertion $ 2 50 " " " one month 7 50 " " three months 12 50 " " " six months 20 00 " " " one year 35 00 Payable in advance. Address, JOHIV "VVILLIAMS,, 80 Beekman Street, New York. WHO NEEDS PROTECTION? BY A WESTERN FAIIMER. IN civilized as in barbarous countries, the farmer's trouble usually is how to raise any thing. In the West, our trouble is ho\v to get rid of what we easily raise and have at the year's end something to show for it besides hard hands and little or no money. To talk of the wonderful privileges of the Great West, as to soil and climate, has become the favorite theme of strangers and visitors and the underlying fact we gratefully acknow- ledge. But, in spite of the fruitful soil and climate in spite of hard labor and the best tools in the world farming in the West is not as profitable a business as it might be, as it ought to be. We don't complain of corn being worth ten cents a bushel but it looks a little hard not to be able to sell it at that. To be charged twenty- five cents for a dinner at the "West- ern Hotel," and five cents a,glass for lager-beer, looks reasonable ; but to swap two and a half bushels of corn for the one, and half a bushel for the other, keeps many a hard-working man hungry and thirsty when in town. Potatoes are everywhere bringing something. In the West you can some- times not give them away, unless you agree to deliver them free of charge at the man's door, who obliges you by taking them off your bands. This abundance, this cheapness of the good things of this world, has had this good result that among civflizecf nations the Westerners are the most hospitable, and are free with what they have as air. At the same time, they are the most wasteful of people. While their outposts are carrying on a continued skirmish with Indians, buffaloes, and other varmint, the main body of this grand army of civilization, with the keenest axes, with the brightest plows, is carrying on a war of destruction to which Phil. Sheridan's Shenandoah bonfires could not hold a candle leveling before them the proudest forests, cutting up the smooth face of the earth with deep gullies, causing inundations unknown before, and springs once never- failing to dry up ; fastening upon the ground itself, and sucking the very life out of it. This tireless and fast-increasing multitude leaves in its broad track a desolation worse than the army-worm, and carries a ruin with it which can never be mended. Where ordinary tools won't work fast enough, fire is called in to destroy woods magnificent as they are invaluable to scatter to the winds of heaven or carry to the ocean the fertility of the prairies, slowly stored up during countless centuries. While mother earth is thus being robbed, as long as she yields any thing it never enters the genuine Westerner's head to make any return to her ; land is dirt-cheap still better further on. Provisions, grain, and fodder, are likewise dirt- cheap therefore the western farmer wastes every year enough in the house to keep a German family six months. He gives grain and fodder to his stock without cooking, grinding or cutting them, when it is dry on the ground, when wet in the ground. While this great waste is going on all over the rich Western country while, at a short distance from railways and navigable rivers, the farmer gets scarcely any thing for his surplus products, the people of St. Louis and New Orleans, Chicago and New York, pay two pay ten prices for flour, beef, and butter, which differ from those of Iowa only in sometimes not being quite so fresh. To furnish these people with garden stuff, with milk, we are by the distance entirely prohibited. We are confined to a few of the most exhaustive crops; and where chinch-bugs and other "trials" kill the wheat, the fertility of the land is still more rapidly impaired by the severe rotation of crops to which we are compelled to submit it, namely corn corn corn until, instead of exporting corn from Illinois at ten cents a bushel, we shall, like New England, import guano at sixty dollars a ton, or let our richest bottom lands grow up to weeds and woods like WHO NEEDS PROTECTION? Virginia. We are on the high road for the one or the other ; for, not con- tent with having fed the operatives of the manufacturing, and the negroes of the planting States, we have long been taught to consider it as the height of human felicity to be attained to haul our surplus products to the "markets of the world" or, if you please England, a little to France and Belgium. And with what result ? Have we been paid for carrying the fat of the land across the ocean ? Have the poor of England been eating the cheap bread and meat of the West ? Certainly not. The elder Pitt, speaking in Parliament in the year 1766, made use of the following lan- guage : " I speak from accurate knowledge when I say, that the profits to Great Britain from the trade of the colonies, from all its branches, is two millions per annum. This is the fund which carried you triumphantly through the last war; this is the price America pays for her protection." Whether America still pays in order to be protected by England, may be doubted ; but that we pay is certain, for the balance of trade is almost always against us. That is to say, thirty millions of Americans, working on the sea, in mines, in shops and on farms, when they ccme to settle with England on each last of December, somehow or other find themselves nearly always in debt to her. This being so, don't it seem as if there were a screw loose somewhere ? The mistake of the Western farmer consists in his taking his surplus products to a distant market, and in there buying his commodities. The price of what he sells and of what he buys is fixed, not by him, but by the English trader. The farmer taking a load of po- tatoes to his " county seat," who gets a good price when his team is the ontyone in, gets little or nothing when there are twenty teams in town. A ship load of American flour in Liverpool is made to compete with nearly all the flour raised anywhere, and the cheapest regulates the price of the res-t. To depress that price, to overcome the competition of the rich and lou--p'riced American wheat and corn lands, the wheat-raising peasant on the shores of the Baltic, the Black Sea, throughout the whole of Europe nearly, is forced to live on rye, potatoes, and skim-milk; he eats no butter, hardly any meat, and dresses in the coarsest stuffs, often linen only, sum- mer and winter. He gets hardly any wages, and his children get hardly any education. The condition of the people of Europe, though greatly improved since Franklin's time, may still be characterized in his words : " Whoever has traveled through the various parts of Europe, has observed how small is the proportion of people in affluence or easy circumstances there, compared with those in poverty and misery the few rich and haughty landlords, the multitude of poor, abject, rack-rented, tithe-paying tenants. -and half-paid, half-starved laborers." With these men do we com- pete. Now, let us guess at the whole value of our yearly exportations to that European market, the closing of which some people would have us consider as a sentence to smother in our own fat. According to figures taken from the census by that great writer and patriot, Henry C. Carey, we exported during the three years which immediately preceded the rebellion, " Of pork, Indian corn, lumber, wheat, wheat-flour, wool, to Great Britain, France and Belgium, $32,367,000." The annual average, as here is shown, of the demand for these important commodities by the three great manu- facturing countries of Europe, was less than $11,000,000, or little more than sixteen cents per head of their total population. A single hundred thou- sand of their people, attracted here by large demand for labor and liberal wages, would furnish a demand for the various products of the land much greater in its amount. So it appears we are in ordinary times exporting little, and for that little we are getting a small price. But no matter bow dear the English workman has to pay for his daily bread a small portion of which is American we in the West never get the difference between Chicago and Liverpool prices. TTIIO NEEDS PROTECTION? On one side of the big pond we have, therefore, millions upon millions of poor, hard-working Englishmen, Belgians, Germans, Norwegians, who never had a decent dinner in their lives. On our side, stand we American farmers, blessed with plenty, in the midst of prairies untilled and yet un- pa?tured, but with granaries already full, and rivers of milk running over, and nearly all going to the hogs. To carry our vegetables, our delicious fruit, to the little factory children of Europe, and turn an honest penny in the operation, is of course out of the question. On those crops which we have been exporting we make little or no profit, and, what is infinitely worse, by their continued and exclusive production we turn our rich wood and prairie lands into one great frightful Sahara. Now, when a man has but little money, is hungry, and able to work, he generally goes where there is something to eat and offers his services. Why do the laborers of Europe not come here, pitch into work, which is as plentiful as provisions, and have good wages ? Millions have come ; but as long as a mechanic and father of a family can, for the same money, buy four times as much to eat in Missouri as in Lancashire, it looks ex- ceedingly strange that, for the sake of poor wages, he should continue to eat humble pie, and have his children do so after him. What prevents the miners of England, the iron and steel workers of Belgium, the always starving weavers of Silesia, to come over en masse, weave our wool and cotton, dig our coal and iron, make our rails and locomotives, and eat and drink our surplus products ? THE POLICY OP GREAT BRITAIN PREVENTS IT. This policy is the same to-day it was two hundred years ago. It is described by an Englishman about a hundred years ago as follows : "Manufactures in our American colonies should be discouraged, prohibited. We ought always to keep a watchful eye over our colonies to restrain them from setting up any of the manufactures which are carried on in Great Britain ; and any such attempts should be crushed in the beginning, as they will have the providing rough materials to themselves, so shall we have the manufacturing of them." Now, we love the English language and her poets ; we admire her phi- losophers and philanthropists ; mankind is indebted to that small band who, in the darkest times, have fought the hard-won battles of freedom ; but. at the same time, a regular Englishman of birth and property, hold- ing office in church or state, is apt to be the most intolerant and intolerable being on the face of the globe. This rich and official Briton looks upon the world as created and existing for the sole purpose of being governed and fleeced by himself and family, "honestly if you can." This British intolerance drove nonconformists over the ocean ; this British arrogance, this peculiarly British utter contempt for the rights, for the feelings, of anybody out of the favored parts of that insignificant island, drove colonists the most loyal into rebellion against their "mother country," against what they long fondly called " home." This is the view taken by enlightened Englishmen themselves at the time of our revolu- tionary war, and is forcibly expressed in Colonel Barre's reply to one of the ministry : " They planted by your care ! No, your oppressions planted them in America. They fled from your tyranny to a then uncultivated and inhospitable country, where they exposed themselves to almost all the hardships to which human nature is liable ; and amongst others, to the cruelties of a savage foe, the most subtle, and I will take upon me to say, the most formidable of any peo-ple upon the face of God's earth. And yet, actuated by principles of true English liberty, they met all hardships with pleasure compared with those- they suffered in their own country from the bands of those that should have been their friends. They nourished by your indulgence ! They grew by your neglect of them. As soon as you began to care about them, that care was exercised in sending persons to WHO NEEDS PKOTECTION? rule them, in one department and another, who were perhnps (lie deputies of deputies to some members of this house, sent to spy out their liberties, to misrepresent their actions, and to prey upon them men, \vhose be- haviour on many occasions has caused the blood of those sons of liberty to recoil within them. They protected by your arms ! They have nobly taken up arms in your defence ; have exerted a valor, amidst their con- stant laborious industry, for the defence of a country whose frontier was drenched with blood, while its interior parts yielded all its little savings o your emolument." In 1765, Washington, in speaking of the Stamp Act, says : "What may be the result of this and some other (I think I may add ill-judged) measures, I will not undertake to determine ; but this I may venture to affirm that the advantage accruing to the mother country will fall greatly short of the expectations of the ministry : for certain it is that our whole substance already in a manner flows to Great Britain, and that whatsoever contributes to lessen our importations must be hurtful to her manufactures." In 1824, Andrew Jackson said : " In short, sir, we have been too long subject to the policy of British merchants. It is time ive should become a little more Americanized." It is now long enough since those two great statesmen and warriors humbled the pride of England at Yorktown, and at New Orleans, to have made Americans forget, or at least forgive, that England had once been cursed with a King and a Ministry who had hired Indian chiefs and German potentates to invade their free and happy country. Before the outbreak of the slaveholders' rebellion, there was hardly a grudge, or prejudice, left against the British. But we all know how un- speakably base England has acted during the rebellion how contemptibly cowardly since. England has fought as openly as she dared against the government of the United States, against strong and united America. And this is the nation, or at least its rulers, who preach us "Free Trade," because it would be the making of America. If British impudence could blush, it might improve the opportunity by the light of burning American merchant vessels. But it can't. With an intensity of selfishness surpass- ing that of Tyre and Carthage, Great Britain tries to plunder the whole habitable and inhabitable globe. The Irishman, the Hindoo, and the China- man, are equally ruined by free trade but by it the American farmer and planter is to be made rich ! If honest, hard-working farmers (may they raise corn or cotton,) are in the least doubt how to vote whether for so- called free trade, or for protection to American mechanics and manufac- tures, and a home-market for themselves they will remember that Wash- ington, Jefferson, Clay and Jackson, were equally against free trade for protection, for a home market. But if, even after examining those great men's opinions, they should be inclined to think that times had changed that the new era of steam, of international communication and exchange, might make desirable a new line of industrial, of commercial polity then they ought to remember, and so as never to forget, nor have their children forget, that "free trade" is the watchword of those who charged the lawful, the constitutional government of the United States of America with waging war for " empire," against those who were fighting for their " indepen- dence" ; that " free trade" was the countersign of those who ran our block- ade in order to furnish a set of reckless and pitiless criminals with the means of destroying the republic ; that " free trade" is on the flag of those pirates, who inaugurated and illustrated it by burning a fleet of defenceless American merchantmen. Now, free trade, or protection, is not, like predestination or the baptism of infants, a speculative question in which case it could never be satisfac- torily decided. It is simply a question of dollars and cents, and as such to be decided by our interest as the latter appears to our good hard sense. WHO NEEDS PROTECTION? The English merchants and manufacturers may be supposed to understand their interest, and they are for free trade. Why ? Because under it the farmers of the globe ship their surplus to England and take their pay in English goods. Producers are therefore underbidding each other while selling their stuff, and bidding each other up when buying the manufac- tured English articles-paying, in addition, freight charges each way. That Americans should ever have doubted whether to make their own clothing, their every article of necessity and convenience, may soon seem strange, almost inconceivable, to those to whom we are in the course of nature to leave our rich western inheritance, improved if posssible, but certainly as good as we entered it. An aristocracy taught to rule or to- ruin, to despise northern mudsills and greasy mechanics, alarmed at the prosperity of free labor in regions vastly inferior in natural advantages, had too well succeeded in spreading the insidious poison of sectional prejudice against manufactures in the United States, because they first sprang up in Yankee land. Well, those Yankees ! in maintaining the Union, they poured out their blood as freely as the West and their money ! .The- vvorld wondered at, then admired, a public-spirited liberality never equaled. But the time of sectional prejudices has now passed forever. In a short- lime there will be less difference in manners, in dialect, in interest and feeling, between the men of the Palmetto State and those from the land of steady habits, than there is now between an Englishman and a Scotch- nan. Everybody begins to see that every day's work more done in Amer- ica, under a government mild but strong, will, as it ought, benefit every American. While the majority of our people will stick to that delightful,, nii^st primitive, and most scientific avocation, agriculture, others will give shipe and value to our raw material others will keep the widely sepa- rated parts of the great Republic together in a friendly exchange of the prulucts of different soils, climes, crafts. With pleasure rarely felt, the mind dwells on this great and certainly not very distant future of our great Union. The intelligence, the prompt action of the West and South, while it will hasten the advent of this new era, will benefit the farmers them- selves more than any other class. For it is the American farmer who needs protection the worst. For now, two hundred and fifty years, the planters and farmers of. A merica have been carrying on their business with a ruinous recklessness.. The rich and vast bank on which they have so largely been drawing., though honoring each reasonable draft, has in many localities been forced; to suspend payment on account of their long continued run. American- fanning may be defined as the art, with the least labor, at the least cost,. and ia the shortest time, to ruin the biggest farm, and make the least money in the operation. For the valleys and on the hill sides of Vermont, formerly producing wheat, there is now hardly strength enough left for white beans the smaller farms have been swallowed up and gone to grass. As far as Ohio, this depleting and depopulating disease has spread the- poorer farmers all the time being shoved further into the wilderness. But,, when Iowa has worn out fields, when Alabama has exhausted and aban- doned plantations, then it seems high time to stop and consider ! Again, when in New York State it has become an extensire and expensive science how to restore worn out lands at reasonable cost, when high authority tells- us it is doubtful whether the value of our improvements upon the ground equals the lasting injury done to it by the diminished fertility of the soil then each reflecting man must come to the inevitable conclusion, that American farming has been, and is, radically wrong. And in what? I'M growing without rest, without change, and without manure, summer after summer, the must, exhaustive crops, sending thorn off thousands- of miles, and ?u roljijji.i; tin- Around of that return which it muxt have, *: become? WHO NEEDS PROTECTION? barren. Those wonderful deposits of fertility, more valuable than gold mines, more indispensable than iron and even coal, will, with prudent management, bear moderate interest almost forever; but a spendthrift may ruin this rich patrimony in a short time, and impoverish his children forever and ever. We are now in the midst of a splendid career of ruin. The grain trade of Chicago, unrivaled on the globe, our annual hecatombs of oxen and hogs, what are they but the sad proofs that we are running through our fortune as fast as the seasons come round ? Let this reckless run on the " Farmer's Bank" continue fifty years, and we will, like tho Chinese, be compelled to save and carry to the compost heap every hair as it falls from our heads like the English, we will be found on every battle field digging up the bones of the slain, grinding them into 'alf and quarter inch bone dust, and spreading them on sickly turnip fields. Now we may export gold and petroleum and possibly grow rich, but. when we habitually export the products of the soil, we run to ruin, because we must then either abandon our worn out farms, or we must import, (not to put too fine a point upon it) manure ! If there was no other way of improving the plains of the West, smiling in childlike beauty and promise, than to stick up unsightly cabins and fences for the purpose of ruthlessly destroying their virgin fertility, how much better to have left them buffalo pastures until a generation came round more provident than we are. But wait we cannot ; what is more, we need not. As soon as we see that our farming has been doing over the left shoulder, as soon as we believe it preferable to have to go to the shoemaker's, to the woolen factory, five miles instead of fifty, or five hundred, or five thousand ; as soon as wj can believe that our own countrymen, engaged in manufacturing what we need, while consuming what we produce, will by-and-by sell us as cheap as foreigners, while we will certainly be more able to buy of and pay them so -soon the remedy for the only remaining evil of America will have be>>n found*. This evil consists in our unfortunate vassalage to Europe, in our long continued colonial dependence on Great Britain. To break that bond of servility, American industry needs protection until it has become stnng enough to overcome and forever subdue the machinations of foreign traders and capitalists. Does it appear unreasonable to the farmer that the rien who intend to work up his wool and cotton, while putting up their costly buildings, their expensive machinery, should ask him and the voters of America for protection until they get fairly going all over the continent ? If this demand seem unreasonable, let the farmer ask himself whether, in ; his opinion, Congress intended to oppress the consumers of wool, and > create a monopoly for him, when they laid import duties on foreign wool ? These duties are three cents per pound on the lowest priced foreign wool, six cents per pound for the next in rank, the next ten cents per pound, and ten per cent ad valorem-, the highest twelve cents per pound, and ten per cent, ad 'valorem. In spite of these duties, foreign wool, especially of the lower grades, is imported, because, in the Pampas, in the countn r of the : KaTirs- andtth-e Maories, sheep can be kept cheaper, by half wild nomades and convicts, tljaa by American fanners. If now the nation should be made