THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 NED ARDEN FLOOD, 
 MEADVILLE, PA.
 
 THOMrSON. Robert Ellis, oducator, b. in 
 Lurgaii. Jri'laiiii. in the spring of 1844. Coming to 
 this nmiitry in iiis tliirteenth yciir, lio settled with 
 his jiarents in Phihidoliiliia, and. entering the Uni- 
 versity of Pennsylvania, was graduated in 18(55, 
 and in 1808 received the degree of A. M. In 1867 
 he was licensed to preach by tlie Reformed presby- 
 tery of Philadelphia, and in 1868 was chosen pro- 
 fessor of Latin tiiid mathematics in the University 
 of Pennsylvania. He became {jrofessor of social 
 science in 1871, and in 1S81 jjrofessor of history 
 and English literature, wliich chair he still holds. 
 Since 1870 he has given instruction in political 
 economy, and he is well known as an advocate of 
 protection to home industry. In 1884-'5 he lec- 
 tured at Harvard on ))rotection and the tariff, and 
 in 1886-"7 he delivered a similar course at Yale. 
 In 1870 lie became editor of the " Penn Monthly," 
 then newly established, and continued such for ten 
 years. In 1880 a weekly supi)lement of notes on 
 current events was Ijegun, which in October of that 
 year was expanded into "The American," a weekly 
 journal of literature, science, the arts, and public 
 affairs, which is still puldished in Philadelphia un- 
 der his editorship. In 188;i-"i) he edited the first 
 two volumes of the "Encyclopaedia Aiuericana," a 
 supjilcment to the ninth edition of the " Encyclo- 
 pa-dia Britannica," but, his health failing, he was 
 obliged to resign the remaining two volumes to 
 other hands. In 1870 Hamilton college conferred 
 on him the degree of Ph. I)., and in 1887 he re- 
 ceived that of S. T. I), fromtiie University of Penn- 
 sylvania. Prof. Thom[)S(in is the aut lior of " Social 
 Science and Natioiuii Economy" (Philadeljihia, 
 1875 : revised ed., 1876 ; partly rewritten, under the 
 title of " Elements of Political Economy," 1882), 
 and " Protection to Home Industry," his Harvard 
 lectures (New York, 1886).
 
 PROTECTION 
 
 HOME INDUSTRY 
 
 FOUR LECTURES 
 
 DELIVERED IN HARVARD UNIVERSITV, JANUARY, 1885 
 
 REV. ROBERT ELLIS THOMPSON, A.M. 
 
 FKOFKSSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OK PENNSYLVANIA 
 
 NEW YORK 
 D. APPLETON & COMPANY 
 
 I, 3 AND 5 Bond Street 
 1886
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1 886, BY 
 
 RoRERT Ellis Thompson. 
 
 GRANT f; I'AIRES, 
 PllILAUliLI'lllA.
 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 These Lectures were delivered at Harvard at the instance 
 of the Corporation and Overseers of the University, who did 
 me the honor to appoint me Lecturer on Protective Tariffs for 
 the year 1S84-5, ^^''th the duty of dehvering four lectures on 
 that subject. I desire to acknowledge the courtesy with which 
 President Eliot and his colleagues in the Faculty permitted me 
 to make such an arrangement as would least interfere with my 
 duties at home, and the kindness which made my stay at Cam- 
 bridge one of the pleasantest experiences of my life. I also 
 have to thank my colleagues in the University of Pennsylvania 
 for their assumption of much of my work in my absence. 
 
 In preparing these lectures for the press, I have followed my 
 notes of preparation, rather than my recollection of what I 
 found time to say in the hour's space assigned for each lecture. 
 The second lecture in particular greatly exceeds what could be 
 delivered in that space of time. In the third lecture I have 
 changed the mode of presenting the main point, in accordance 
 with suggestions derived from a conference with a very intelli- 
 gent young gentleman who discussed the matter with me after- 
 wards in the rooms of my host, Prof. Palmer. But the lectures 
 are substantially what 1 delivered to the evening audiences in 
 Sevier Hall. 
 
 Philadelphi.a, JauiiLvy 4//1, 18S6.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 I. GENERAL PRINCIPLES— THE FARMER, i 
 
 II. THE EVIDENCE OF HISTORY 22 
 
 III. THE WORKINGMAN, 59 
 
 IV. ANSWERS TO OBJECTIONS 83
 
 I. 
 
 GENERAL PRINCIPLES— THE FARMER. 
 
 Gcntlcvien of the University : — 
 
 I KNOW of nothing more admirable in the public life 
 of the English people than the possession of a great 
 body of agreements in advance of all partizan dissen- 
 sion. However Tory and Radical may differ as to the 
 present policy of the Empire, they are agreed upon 
 general principles to an extent, that enables them to 
 discuss their difference without losing their heads, or 
 forgetting that they both are Englishmen. They 
 agree first of all that the honor and welfare of Pmg- 
 land is to be the primary object of all their delibera- 
 tions and efforts. They are agreed that all solutions 
 of present difficulties shall be within the lines of those 
 great political traditions, which make up the British 
 Constitution. And they are agreed that English 
 questions shall be settled by English \'otes and 
 voices, without foreign interference from any quarter. 
 So long as English parties conduct their controversies 
 within these bounds, and with this common ground of 
 mutual understanding under their feet, England will 
 be a great nation, capable of sustaining the shocks of 
 adverse fortune, and of passing without break of her 
 historic continuity through any change that n"!ay be 
 demanded by the new conditions of new times. 
 
 I
 
 2 UXIVEKSITY LECTURES. 
 
 It is my hope that as Americans we shall always 
 seek to appropriate this wisdom in the conduct of our 
 controversies. It is our duty to consider our agree- 
 ments before entering upon the discussion of our 
 differences. I shall seek to do so to-night, in making 
 a beginning of what I have to say on this controversy 
 between Free Trade and Protection, not more for the 
 sake of showing where our agreements come to an 
 end, than of cultivating that spirit which hel{)s to keep 
 all such discussions from degenerating into mere 
 scolding of either party by the other. 
 
 First of all, then, I shall assume that we are of one 
 mind in desiring without any reserves the welfare of 
 our common country. Whatever duties we owe to 
 mankind at large, we are Americans in the first place, 
 and are put in trust with each others' welfare and 
 growth in all noble directions, as with those of no 
 other people. And while we desire for our country 
 nothing that we do not wish for every other, and have 
 no wish that she should pro.spcr at the expense of any 
 other, we all believe that our first thought should be 
 given to this dear land of our birth or of our adoption, 
 with a love as passionate as that of the Hebrew exile, 
 who sang by the rivers of Babylon : " If I forget thee, 
 O Jeru.salem, let my right hand forget its cunning, and 
 let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth ! " 
 
 In the second place, we are agreed that the inter- 
 ference of government with the processes of industrial 
 development never can be anything more or better 
 than a necessary evil. We should seek to do without 
 that interference as far as may be, and should leave as 
 much as possible to the enterprise, the forethought and 
 the initiative of individuals. We should minimize the
 
 GENERAL PRIXCIPLES. 3 
 
 action of the state on the industrial hfe of the nation 
 to the utmost, and should avoid paternal meddle- 
 someness. For the great laws which govern the 
 industrial growth, are laws of nature, and therefore, as 
 Burke says, " laws of God." There is a " constitution 
 and course of nature " in economic matters, to use 
 Bishop Butler's expression. The business of the 
 economist is to discover its laws, and that of the statesman 
 to remove all hindrances to their free operation. It 
 never can be the business of either to set them aside, 
 or to devise a substitute for them. It is impossible to 
 improve upon them, and nothing but harm will come 
 of trying. When the statesman attempts more than 
 the removal of obstacles, he can only cramp industrial 
 growth, cause deterioration of national character, and 
 waste the human effort he thinks to make more efficient. 
 Now this may sound strange to you as coming from 
 a Protectionist. But my conviction of its truth is deeper 
 and higher than m\^ belief in the wisdom of any 
 measure of practical policy. I especially value the 
 writings of our American economist, Henry C. Carey, 
 because of the ability and earnestness with which he 
 vindicated this great truth. It underlies all he wrote 
 and taught in Political Economy. It is the basis of 
 both his earlier works, in which he still advocated the 
 Free Trade theory, and of those of his later years, in 
 which he advocated the Protectionist policy. He 
 believed that an economic science was possible, because 
 he believed in an established economic order, whose 
 laws express to us the beneficent will of God. He 
 held that wherever the laws of this order were allowed 
 free scope, there wealth would tend to diffuse itself 
 among all classes, instead of accumulating in the hands
 
 4 UXIVERSITY LECTURES. 
 
 of the few ; that there the laborer would obtain an 
 ever increasing share of the joint earnings of labor 
 and capital ; that there the tenant would pay a steadily- 
 diminishing share of his harvest for the use of the 
 land ; that there men would grow in the command of 
 the necessities and even the luxuries of life. Or, as he 
 sums up all in one sentence, " men would pass from 
 what is worse to what is better in land, in labor and 
 in food." And on the other hand he teaches that 
 wherever the poverty of the savage still perpetuates 
 itself in the bosom of civilization, and great masses of 
 wealth accumulate alongside deepening wretchedness, 
 there there has been some obstacle, some resistance to 
 the workings of the laws of this beneficent order. 
 
 Thirdly, I hope we are all agreed with Adam Smith, 
 that this natural order of economic growth realizes 
 itself in the balanced development of the three great 
 industries within the state, — the farmer and the artizan 
 in neighborhood with each other, and the trader serving 
 both by facilitating their exchanges, while he is the 
 master of neither. This I shall assume is the ideal we 
 cherish for our own country. We none of us wish to 
 see it reduced to the industrial level of an Ireland or a 
 New Zealand, or think the cowboy the industrial t}'pe 
 we should chiefly cultivate. However lovely the 
 pictures the poets have drawn of the pastoral or the 
 bucolic life, we are not content with that for ourseh-es. 
 \V'e love, as did M. Thiers, to ".see the tall chimneys 
 smoking," and to see gathered within the bounds of the 
 commonwealth that various industrial life which inter- 
 laces the lives of men in mutual need and mutual help. 
 
 In the phrase of the modern sociologist, we desire 
 for our people that large diversification of industrial
 
 GENERAL PRINCIPLES. 5 
 
 function, which will mark their industrial life as taking 
 a high rank. Wc do not desire that simplicity of type 
 and function which belongs to a low and rudimentary 
 stage of existence. And this we are agreed is to be 
 the outcome of the natural growth of society on the 
 lines marked out by the laws of the economic order. 
 Just as the upward sweep from lichen to oak, or from 
 bathybius to man, is through the operation of natural 
 law in the field of biology, so the movement that 
 carries society forward from the predatory to the 
 pastoral stage, from the pastoral to the agricultural, 
 and from the merely agricultural to the complex 
 industrial life of civilized society, is the outcome of 
 a " constitution and course of nature " in things eco- 
 nomical. 
 
 We are of one mind then as to (i) the loving regard 
 we owe to our own country ; (2) the existence of an 
 industrial order, whose laws we are to obey, and not 
 to improve or supersede ; and (3) the necessity of the 
 three great industries in something like a balanced 
 development to the prosperity of a well-ordered and 
 civilized community. But this brings us to the parting 
 of the ways. I do not know of another step we can 
 take together, or I should be glad to point it out. 
 
 The point at which the two schools come to a 
 distinct disagreement is just this : Wliat arc those 
 artificial liindranccs to the operation of natural laze, 
 zuhich it is the right and the dnty of the state to remove ? 
 
 There are some hindrances that present no sort of 
 difficulty and cause no disagreement. When the 
 Philistines forbid the Israelites to have the trade of the 
 smith among them, and require every man of them to 
 come down to Philistia if he is to have his tool
 
 6 LWIVEKSIjy LECTURES. 
 
 sharpened, we are agreed as to what that means and 
 what the rights of the IsraeUtes are. When England 
 forbids her American colonies to set up mills for the 
 slitting of steel, and crushes out the Irish woolen 
 industry by hostile legislation, we are again of the 
 same mind. We all see that these measures of the 
 sword or of the law-book are taken to prevent that 
 industrial growth to which the subject and dependent 
 countries otherwise would attain. And we hold that 
 such acts justify resistance by the sword. 
 
 Now Protectionists maintain that, without the use of 
 either political authority or military force, nations of 
 greater wealth and more developed industry can put 
 obstacles in the way of the natural growth of poorer 
 and more backward countries. And they contend that 
 this exercise of what Burke calls " the tyrannous 
 power of capital " is as much a hindrance to be removed 
 by the collective action of the weaker nation, as was 
 the prohibition laid by the Philistines on the children 
 of Israel, or those laid by England last century on 
 Ireland and her colonies. And they hold that laws 
 enacted to remove such a hindrance are not attempts 
 to interfere with the natural course and order of things, 
 but are a right and natural resistance to what is wrong 
 and unnatural. 
 
 At the same time Protectionists deny that there is 
 any need for collision between the weaker and the 
 stronger nation, or that a collision comes of necessity 
 from the growth of either in wealth or industrial 
 power. So long as a nation's growth is normal, — so 
 long as it embodies itself in the balanced development 
 of its own industries, its agriculture and manufactures 
 standing in due proportion to each other and both to
 
 GENERA L rRINCIPL ES. 
 
 7 
 
 commerce, — its advance will be helpful as a stimulus, 
 an inspiration and an example to other countries. It 
 is only when a false ambition has led it to destroy the 
 balance of the industries at home, and to give an 
 undue attention to those which it thinks the more 
 profitable to itself, that it comes to seek that others 
 may be held in a kind of industrial subjection and 
 dependence upon itself 
 
 The play of national ambitions makes up a great 
 part of the world's history. These ambitions give 
 direction to the development of national life more 
 powerfully than laws could do. In this " industrial 
 age " of the world's story, these ambitions very natu- 
 rally take an industrial shape. The conflict for 
 existence and for permanence is a conflict for markets. 
 The most important battles of our time are those in 
 which no shot is fired and no sword is drawn. They 
 are fought with the purse and the yard-stick. And 
 just as the old political ambitions led and still lead 
 nations to seek an imperial position by the annexation 
 of territories and the destruction of governments, so 
 the new ambitions cause wealthy and powerful countries 
 to add other lands by unfair means to their industrial 
 area. To this end capital and skill are regarded as 
 "weapons of industrial warfare" to crush out weaker 
 and less established capitalists, and to reduce whole 
 countries to the level of an insufficient and uniform 
 employment. These conquests of the purse and the 
 yard-stick are not less important or less cruel than 
 those of the sword, and indeed they are the most 
 constant provocation to wars of the better recognized 
 type. Sir William Napier, the great military historian, 
 says the history of modern warfare is that " political and
 
 8 I -x/ 1 'EKsm ■ L Ecri 'res. 
 
 commercial men they are who always have recourse 
 to the sword. They declare war, and generally for 
 commercial interests." ' 
 
 To prevent such conquests, — to secure to the country 
 that industrial independence which is the complement 
 of political independence, — we have Protective Tariffs. 
 
 Such Tariffs are based, first of all, on a view of what 
 the resources and climate of the country suggest can 
 be produced at home. It is not proposed to grow 
 pine-apples in Minnesota, or to commit any other of 
 the absurdities Free Traders kindly suggest as worth 
 our undertaking. We believe that the highest wisdom 
 has divided the area of the earth's surface into portions, 
 each of which is designated by its natural boundaries 
 as the home of a separate nation. And we believe that 
 He who has thus " fixed the bounds of the nations " has 
 given to each of them such natural resources as would 
 enable its people to become independent of all others 
 for the great staples of necessary use. 
 
 Protective Tariffs, in the next place, have regard to 
 the difference of popular capacity and industrial am- 
 bition in each country, and they aim at giving full 
 scope to that capacity. They do not measure it by 
 what the nation has done already, lest, — as Lord Bacon 
 says, — "by under\aluing their forces, they descend to 
 pusillanimous counsels." A hundred and fifty years 
 ago England had not produced an artist above the 
 level of a sign-painter. Since Hogarth made a be- 
 ginning, she has done better. Seventy years ago the 
 United States had given but little reason to believe 
 that its people possessed any special capacity for in- 
 
 ' Letter of Sir W. Nai^ier to Mr. Samuel Ciurney, Nov. 21, 1S51.
 
 GENERAL FRLNCIPLES. 9 
 
 vention or the management of the industrial arts. 
 Whitney and Evans filled up the short list of our in- 
 ventors ; and an Englishman defied us fight his country 
 on the ground that if left to ourselves we "could not 
 make so much as a mouse-trap" for ourselves ! The 
 collections at the Patent-Office tell a somewhat differ- 
 ent story now. Protection is the policy of a nation 
 that believes in its own undeveloped capacities, and 
 looks to the future. 
 
 Protective Tariffs seek to adjust popular production 
 to national demand. America is an exceptional coun- 
 try in this respect. In one sense it is a young country, 
 making its start in life. But if you look at the elements 
 which make up its population, you will see that each 
 of them is the product of a long development in civil- 
 ization, which has given them wants and desires as 
 well developed as in any other body of people. We 
 are made up of very old families, with and without 
 pedigrees ; and our notions of what we must have are 
 the notions of old families. We must have glass in 
 the windows, paper on the walls, china on the table, 
 carpets on the floors, presentable furniture in our 
 chambers, and all the paraphernalia of civilized life on 
 the v^ery outfront of civilization's onward march. We 
 are full fledged citizens, with all the results of Europe 
 in our heads from the start ; and we will have all that 
 Europe has used us to, whether we malce or buy it. 
 In fine we have the largest capacity as consumers at 
 the very outstart of our career as producers. 
 
 Lastly Protective Tariffs rest on experience as to the 
 need of collective action to naturalize those industries 
 which shall make the best useof our natural resources, 
 which shall give our people the best chance to show
 
 I Q rXJl E/^SJ TV L ECTL 'RES. 
 
 what is in them, and which shall enable a nation so 
 exacting in its wants to adjust its environment to itself. 
 The need of such collective action has been shown by 
 a long series of experiences and of experiments, in 
 which industries not sustained by it have been either 
 crushed by the competition of foreign accumulations 
 of capital, or have been just able to prolong existence 
 without hope of coming up to the national demand. 
 The beginner in such a country as ours finds very 
 quickly that he is competing under very unequal con- 
 ditions with his foreign rivals. He has no hold on the 
 confidence of even the home-market ; the channels of 
 trade are in the hands of his rivals ; he has to enlist 
 and train a body of workmen who have had no ex- 
 perience of industrial methods such as he is applying. 
 He will come to grief unless the nation say to him : 
 " Go ahead. Build your factory. Put in your 
 machinery. We will stand by you in making this 
 country all that its resources and the capacity of its 
 people fit it to be." 
 
 So a Protective Tariff is laid to equalize the con- 
 ditions to the home producer, so as to give him as 
 much advantage as is possessed by his foreign com- 
 petitor. It checks the import of foreign commodities 
 on the principle that a reasonable discouragement of 
 the consumption of such commodities by developing 
 home production will be for the general benefit of the 
 nation. 
 
 But be it noted that a Protecti\'e Tariff is not a 
 Prohibitory Tariff It does not aim at shutting out 
 completely the competition of the foreign producer, 
 nor does it handicap him in his competition. It aims 
 at equalization of conditions, not at creating insuper-
 
 GENERAL PRINCIPLES. j i 
 
 able bounds around home industry. How much duty- 
 is needed for this purpose in any given case, it is often 
 very hard to say. I observe that Col. Carroll D. Wright 
 of your Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics has been 
 seeking to devise a kind of mathematical formula, by 
 which might be determined what is needed in any given 
 case. I hope he may succeed in doing so, for nothing 
 would better serve the friends of the protective policy 
 than the establishing of some method which would 
 remove all arbitrary elements from the decision of that 
 question. 
 
 A Protective Tariff differs again, and just as widely, 
 from a Tariff for Revenue only. A Tariff for Revenue 
 only either levies duties exclusively on articles not 
 made at home, or it compensates duties on articles 
 made at home by equal excise duties on the home pro- 
 duction. A Protective Tariff selects for duty those 
 articles which come into competition with home-made 
 articles, and it taxes these on the principle that their 
 consumption should be discouraged and that of the 
 home-made articles encouraged. Its purpose is to 
 divert a portion of the capital of the country into a 
 channel in which it otherwise would not or could not 
 flow, or would flow less freely. The British Tariff is 
 one for revenue only, because, with the exception of the 
 duties on segars and on one form of alcohol, it lays no 
 duty on any article made at home, without compensat- 
 ing this by an equivalent excise duty. The Norwegian 
 Tariff is still more thoroughly of this type, for it lays 
 duties only on articles which cannot be produced in 
 Norway. Thus it has a two hundred per cent duty on 
 coffee and a similar duty on sugar and on tea. The 
 Norwegians are taxed by this just as heavily as though
 
 12 
 
 I ■.y/l'EKS/TY LECTfRES. 
 
 some of the duties had been laid on articles which 
 could be made at home but are not, — such as cottons. 
 'rhej)ul)lic burdens under their Tariff are just as great, 
 and are felt very hea\i!y by the poorer classes, while 
 the people as producers derive no benefit from their 
 Tariff. 
 
 It will be seen that a Protective Tariff is but a rough 
 and ready way of solving" an industrial difficulty. It 
 is open to a plausible objection from some who would 
 like to see the thing done more neatly. They say : 
 "Your policy is a very clumsy one. It leaves too 
 much to depend upon individual initiative. It gives 
 no assurance that the industries it fosters will be dis- 
 tributed with anything like equality over the whole 
 country. It takes the risk of leaving some parts of 
 the country nearly as destitute of manufactures as are 
 Ireland or New Zealand, or of exposing their begin- 
 nings in manufacture to an overwhelming competition 
 from older and more developed districts at home. 
 Would it not be better to have government take the 
 whole matter in hand, and locate the factories as it 
 now locates its forts and arsenals, with exact reference 
 to the needs of each and every part of th'e national 
 territory?" 
 
 It is no doubt true that Socialism could furnish us 
 with a more exact solution of this as of many another 
 difficulty, but always at the sacrifice of higher advan- 
 tages than it secures. The enterprise, the independence, 
 the initiative of the indix-idual, the manly self-reliance 
 of men, the right to make of your own life what you 
 wish to make of it, — these are what it asks us to sacri- 
 fice by a return to an undeveloped social order, out of 
 which our fathers escaped b\' blood and by tears.
 
 GENERA L PRINCIPLES. 
 
 13 
 
 Protection differs from Socialism just in minimizing- 
 what Socialism maximizes, — the interference of the 
 state with the direction of industry. It maximizes 
 what Socialism minimizes, — the initiative of the indi- 
 vidual. It moves between two extremes which con- 
 stantly meet, and mutually beget each other. The one 
 is the theory that the state has no responsibility for 
 the general welfare, that its duties are those of the 
 policeman only, and that it cannot help if people 
 starve. The other is the theory that the state must be 
 everything and do everything, and leave as little as 
 possible to the individual. 
 
 The Tariff is not an ideal solution of the difficulty 
 to which it is directed. There are no ideal solutions 
 in legislation. Every law is a compromise, by which 
 some advantages are sacrificed in order to secure what 
 its authors thought were greater advantages. 
 
 A Tariff does not at once effect an equal distribu- 
 tion of industries over a country like ours. The dis- 
 tribution might have been done more effectively by 
 the collective action of the nation through its govern- 
 ment. But it effects that distribution in the long run, as 
 is shown by our own recent redistribution of industries. 
 It puts a whole skin on the industrial state, within 
 which the circulations of industrial life move freely 
 and complete themselves. It proceeds on the po'^tu- 
 late that a nation is an organic whole, within which 
 things tend to an equalization more promptly than in 
 the world at large. Capital, for instance, flows freely 
 and almost without restriction within national bound- 
 aries, but it is exceptional to find it flowing across them. 
 It seeks in our South and West for more favorable 
 conditions to carry on great industries like the smelting
 
 H 
 
 C •.\7i-ERSITV LECTURES. 
 
 of iron and the spinning and weaving of cotton. It is 
 said that Penn.syl\-ania and Massachusetts arc pinched 
 by this new competition. They can stand it, for other 
 channels he o]ilii for the direction of tlieir capital, 
 and especially in the carrying those manufactures to 
 a higher point of elaboration than we have attempted 
 heretofore. 
 
 A Protective Tariff does not attempt to protect 
 everything. It is not necessary that it should. There 
 are some industries which enjoy a natural protection 
 against foreign competition amounting to an absolute 
 prohibition. So long, for instance, as we cannot 
 import houses, the trades connected with that great 
 business need not be mentioned in the Tariff And 
 it is just this "natural protection," which Prof Tho- 
 rold Rodgers says ought to be enough for us, that 
 suggested the enactment of protective Tariffs in the 
 first instance. In colonial times it was found that iron 
 "hollow wares" were too bulky to permit of their 
 import except at a great charge for transportation. 
 Not only are they weighty,' but they do not pack to 
 any advantage on account of their shape. So the 
 manufacture of pots, kettles, stoves and the like was 
 begun in the Shenandoah Valley, at a time when the 
 countr}' was dependent on I^ngland for every other 
 kind of iron ware. The American farmer was shrewd 
 enough to observe that he was much the better off for 
 having this iron business in his neighborhood, as it 
 gave him a class of customers, for breadstuffs and the 
 like, close at hand. He might be paying a little more 
 for his hollow wares than if he could have got them 
 carried cheaply from England. But when he compared 
 the price he got for what lie had to sell, with that he
 
 THE FARMER. 
 
 15 
 
 paid for pots and kettles, he seemed to be not the 
 worse but the better for the difficulty in bringing such 
 things from Europe. So it occurred to him to ask if 
 he would not be the bttter for other things being too 
 dear or too bulky to bring across the ocean, and if it 
 might not be his best policy to buy such things at home 
 even if the cost were a little greater on that account. 
 And when he got an effective government of his own 
 over the country, and it had to raise a revenue, he 
 thought it wise to collect that revenue in such a way 
 as to gi\'e the countr}' a little more of that " natural 
 protection" which had done so well for a few indus- 
 tries. In .so doing he was acting on just the lines 
 suggested by his experience. 
 
 Be pleased to note, gentlemen, that Protective 
 Tariffs are laid in the first instance by agricultural 
 communities. It is the votes of the farmers that 
 establish them, and for the benefit of their own busi- 
 ness, because they have come to see how wasteful and 
 unprofitable it is to carry on their farming at a distance 
 from the artizans they feed, and whose services they 
 must employ. We sometimes hear Protective Tariffs 
 criticised as though we ha\'e such tariffs for the .'^ake 
 of the manufacturers and because we have manufac- 
 turers. It would be much nearer the truth to say that 
 we have manufacturers because we have had Protective 
 Tariffs through more than two-thirds of our history 
 under the national constitution. This is especially 
 true of New England, which clung to her shipping 
 and her commerce and opposed the protective policy in 
 the earlier years of the Republic, until she was forced 
 to become a manufacturing country by the vote of the 
 South and West, no less than of tlv^ Middle States.
 
 l5 UNIVKRSrj-Y LECTURES. 
 
 I insist on this because the relation of the tariff \.o 
 agriculture is a point on which the critics of our 
 national policy love to dwell, and because it was the 
 consideration that weighed most with myself in delay- 
 ing my conversion from Free Trade beliefs. In my 
 case the finishing touch was administered by one of 
 those Western Farmers, to whom the Cobden Club 
 appeals with such confidence for the overthrow of our 
 protective policy. It was in a town in the Mississippi 
 Valley nearly eighteen years ago that I attended a 
 meeting of farmers called to establish a cotton factory 
 by the combination of their savings. The place had 
 neither water-power nor railroad communication ; and 
 the beautiful prairie fields around the town .seemed to 
 admonish its people to stick to the one indu.stry for 
 which had been given them an abundance of resources, 
 and to leave cotton-spinning to other localities. 
 Besides, as I urged on one of them, they would be 
 crushed out by the competition of the Eastern manu- 
 facturer. He answered me that farming, when it 
 stands alone in any community, is a poor business ; 
 tliat the growth of wheat and similar crops for one 
 year after another did not enable them to find employ- 
 ment for the poorer and less robust members of their 
 community, who were made dependent on the earnings 
 of the rest. A factory would bring into wholesome 
 action a large amount of human capacity which was 
 running to waste, besides giving to the farmer a local 
 market for many profitable crops and products, for 
 which there is no sale in a merely farming neighbor- 
 hood. Nor did he fear the Ea.stern manufacturer so 
 long as the Tariff gave him a reasonable amount of 
 security against English competition. So long as the
 
 THE FARMER. 
 
 17 
 
 home production in this or any other article fell below 
 the national demand, there was room for every fresh 
 beginner without any interference with those who had 
 made their start earlier. And this, he said, in a country 
 growing as fast as ours, must be the ordinary condition 
 of every kind of manufacture. 
 
 So the American farmer has reasoned, and he is 
 justified by hard facts in thus assuming that he is 
 going to gain by the neighborhood of the artizan, 
 rather than by leaving him at a distance. The West 
 knows why land in Pennsylvania is worth $49.00 an 
 acre, and but $10.89 in Virginia; or $42.00 in Massa- 
 chusetts and $5.56 in Mississippi ; or $65.00 in New 
 Jersey and but $4.30 in Georgia. There are three 
 great counties that stand at the head in point of agri- 
 cultural wealth in this country. They are Champlain 
 in Illinois, Worcester in Massachusetts, and Lancaster 
 in Pennsylvania. As I came home from the moun- 
 tains this summer, the train carried me through the 
 last of the three, just at the time when the harvest 
 activities were coming to their close. As I looked 
 from the windows of the carriage upon mile after mile 
 of comfort and prosperity, I was constrained to ask 
 myself: " Is there anywhere on the earth's surface an 
 equal body of people whose lot is in every sense as 
 advantageous as that of these American farmers of 
 ours ? " I believe there is not, and I also believe that 
 at no time in the histor}' of the country was that lot 
 so enviable as in these last twenty-four years that they 
 have spent under " the oppression of a Protective 
 Tariff- 
 Suppose that that policy were reversed, and that 
 we managed to retain all the manufacturins: indus-
 
 i8 rxu'ERs/yy lectures. 
 
 tries we have acquired under it. I cannot imagine 
 any one whose acquaintance with the conditions of our 
 industries makes his opinion worth considering, claim- 
 ing more than this, if so much. But even on this 
 supposition the growth of the country for many years 
 to come must turn chiefly to farming. The tide of 
 immigration would set toward the farm much more 
 than it does at present. At the utmost, the farmer's 
 customers would remain the same in number as at 
 present, while his competitors would multiply. It is 
 much more than probable that many of his present 
 customers would be obliged to change their occupa- 
 tion and betake thcmseh'es to agriculture because 
 the workshops in which they toil had been closed 
 by the change of our policy, as in 1837 and 1857. 
 Does any one suppose that the farmer is going to 
 gain by a policy which will convert his customers 
 into his competitors ? 
 
 It is possible that the farmer pays for some articles 
 more than he would pay under a Free Trade policy. 
 Those who think that final, are welcome to the con- 
 cession. But the farmer is not interested simply in 
 the price he pays for manufoctured goods. He is 
 interested in the relation of the prices of those raw 
 materials (including food) which he produces, to the 
 prices of the commodities into which they are con- 
 verted, and of which he is a consumer. The prices 
 of these two classes come nearest to each other in 
 those localities in which the one is converted into the 
 other. Mr. Carey, who was a paper-maker, uses this 
 illustration : Suppose that all the paper-mills of the 
 country were located on the Schuylkill. At that 
 point the price of a pound of rags would be compara-
 
 THE FARMER. 
 
 19 
 
 "tiv'ely high, and that of a pound of paper compara- 
 tively low. With every hundred miles you went 
 Westward, the price of rags would fall and that of 
 paper would rise. At the foot of the R.ocky Moun- 
 tains the divergence in the two prices would be as 
 remarkable as was their convergence on the banks of 
 the Schuylkill. The tendency of Free Trade would 
 be to remove the area of convergence to the other 
 side of the Atlantic, and to bring the \\hole country 
 within the area of wide divergence. Will the farmer, 
 "whose crops are all, or nearly all, the raw materials 
 of manufacture, profit by a change which enables 
 him to buy less clothing or hardware with his 
 bushel of wheat or his fleece of wool ? And will 
 he find any compensation for this change in the 
 fact that his purchases are effected with smaller 
 amounts of coin than before ? That, I take it, is 
 all that is really promised him, when it is said that 
 he would buy more cheaply if there were no Protec- 
 tive Tariff 
 
 It is objected that after twenty-four years of this 
 Protective policy the American farmer is still depend- 
 ent upon the foreign market. This is true to some 
 extent, though by no means to so great an extent as 
 is assumed. Those bulks which gather at a single 
 point in commerce, are always thought greater in pro- 
 portion than they really are. The wheat which passes 
 through New York to the European consumer bulks 
 larger to the public eye, than the far greater amount 
 Avhich goes to furnish food to the manufacturing dis- 
 tricts of our own country. Of the entire food product 
 of the Northern states, ninety-four per cent is con- 
 sumed at home and but six per cent is exported.
 
 20 
 
 UX/rEKS/TY LECTURES. 
 
 That wc should be obliged to seek a foreign market 
 for even six per cent is due to a cause for which the 
 Tariff policy is not responsible. It is that our Home- 
 stead laws have put such a premium upon agriculture 
 in the \Vest, as has made it impossible for any Tariff 
 to secure an equal growth of manufacturing with 
 agricultural industry. To secure the rapid occupation 
 of our public domain we have given every new farmer 
 there the site on which he is to pursue liis industry, 
 and the chief raw material he is to use in it, for a sum 
 very little greater than the costs of the survey. We 
 have made no restrictions as to nationality, if the new 
 settler will but declare his intentions to become an 
 American citizen. And some of the Western states 
 have enlarged the offer by conferring upon such 
 settlers all the prerogatives of voters in state and 
 national elections, and have thrown state offices open 
 to them, after a three months' residence. 
 
 This policy has drawn to the West between four 
 and five millions of farmers, whose condition would 
 be nearly as bad as could be, if it were not for the 
 inducements the Tariff has offered to foreign as well as 
 native capitalists and artizans to undertake that devel- 
 opment of manufactures on American soil, which fur- 
 nishes the American farmer with the only good and 
 steady market he has for breadstuffs. Just in so far 
 as his production of food exceeds the demand of this 
 market, he makes his prosperity depend upon the 
 chances of the weather in Europe, the possibility of 
 competition from India, and other contingencies over 
 which neither he nor the nation has any control. Our 
 Protectionist plan is to extend our manufactures until 
 we make at home the $258,000,000 worth of goods w^e
 
 THE FARMER. 21 
 
 now import, and feed the workmen we employ in 
 making them with the surplus of our agriculture we 
 now have to export. To effect that there must be 
 persistence in our tariff policy.
 
 II. 
 
 THE EVIDENCE OE HISTORY. 
 
 Gentlemen of the University : — 
 
 jMy first Lecture was occupied mostly with some 
 general considerations, which have led Protectionists 
 to believe in the wisdom of a Tariff, which tends to 
 restrict trade with foreign countries for the sake of a 
 freer industrial movement at home. I now propose to 
 reinforce those considerations by directing your atten- 
 tion to some parts of the history of national indu;^tr\', 
 which bear upon the controversy. I am aware of the 
 necessity of employing this argument from history with 
 care and discrimination, if we are not to be misled b\' 
 parallels which lie on the mere surface of things. But 
 I know of no test and corrective of economic theories 
 except that experience of which history is the record. 
 I know it is claimed by some economists that such 
 controversies can be settled without any appeal to 
 history. By the aid of such phrases as "of course," 
 "everybody must admit," and "let us assume," they 
 will prove to you that no country can really be held 
 back by any other in its normal course of develop- 
 ment, unless by force of arms or political predomi- 
 nance; and that no industries really worth the having 
 can be built up by Protection or broken down by Free 
 Trade. Protectionists do not find much that is con-
 
 THE EVIDENCE OF HISTORY. 23- 
 
 vincing in that kind of argumentation ; and the world 
 is beginning to believe that a science based on mere 
 assumptions is not one to whose direction great prac- 
 tical interests can be entrusted. Hence the not un- 
 justified distrust of the claims of Political Economy to 
 rank as a science at all; and hence also the rise of what 
 calls itself the " Historical School " of economists, which 
 professes to follow the opposite method, and to take its 
 stand on facts rather than assumptions. There is an 
 easy road into the land of unreality by the gate called 
 " It Must Be So," and we shall endeavor to avoid both 
 the gate and the land it leads to. 
 
 We shall commence with the country which stands 
 forward as the especial champion of Free Trade. The 
 economic history of England did not begin in the 
 month of June in the year 1846, as some Free Traders 
 seem to think. There is a long and instructive story 
 before we come to Mr. Cobden and his Anti-Corn-Law 
 League. At the beginning of that story we find Eng- 
 land a poor, backward and unprogressive nation, prac- 
 ticing Free Trade wnth the continent, and getting little 
 benefit from the practice. Although the Romans had 
 worked the iron deposits in the Forest of Dean, the 
 England of the Middle Ages was dependent- upon 
 Normandy for its supply of that metal, and the cost 
 was so great, — Prof Thorold Rogers tells us, — that 
 the wear of plow and spade was an important part of 
 the expense of managing a farm. She raised excellent 
 wool, and sold it to the Flemings, who in return sup- 
 plied the English people with all but the coarsest fab- 
 rics. She had substantially no manufactures, an im- 
 poverished agriculture and a half-starved people. While 
 the whole population was employed in raising food,.
 
 24 
 
 C X/IERS/TY LKCTC'RES. 
 
 there was what we would think but three-fifths of a 
 sufficient supply for their wants. 
 
 A beginning of the policy that brings the farmer and 
 the artizan into neighborhood was made by Edward 
 III., who laid such restrictions on the export of wool 
 in 1337, as forced the Flemings to bring their wool 
 manufacture over into England. " Nor can we doubt," 
 says Mr. Cunningham in his Growth of English Indus- 
 try and CouDticrce (Cambridge, 1 882), " that his policy 
 was successful, and that the great woolen manufactures 
 of England were in their earlier stages much indebted 
 to his fostering care. This was protection, but protec- 
 tion of a type that Mr. Pvlill regarded as justifiable even 
 in the present day." His method was to put up the 
 export duty to forty shillings the sack, and to limit the 
 amount that might be exported. Twelve centres of the 
 new industry are enumerated as having been estab- 
 lished by Flemish immigrants in his reign, and some 
 of their settlements were so extensive that the commu- 
 nities they formed retain to this day linguistic pecu- 
 liarities they derived from Flanders. In the last year 
 of his long reign he took the farther step of requiring 
 that eveiy English subject should wear cloth of Eng- 
 lish weaving. He was the first English king who re- 
 garded the trade and industry of his people as anything 
 but a source of revenue and an object of taxation. 
 
 This was more than five hundred years before the 
 repeal of the Corn Laws, and this long interval shows 
 us a series nearly as long of laws for the protection of 
 English industry, increasing in number and importance 
 with the approach to our own time, and with the growth 
 of England in wealth and in industrial power. This 
 wise policy was favored by the c\ents which at \'arious
 
 THE FA'IDENCE OF HISTORY. 2" 
 
 times drove large bodies of hard-working people into 
 England to escape the religious persecutions which 
 raged on the continent. This enabled Queen Elizabeth 
 to naturalize the lace and cutlery manufactures, while 
 the immigrant Huguenots a century later brought the 
 manufacture of silk, felts, gloves and fine iron wares. 
 These opportunities were seconded by fresh laws for 
 the protection of those new industries. But the most 
 notable piece of legislation in this direction was the 
 Navigation Laws, which were enacted in Cromwell's 
 time to destroy the Dutch monopoly of the carrying 
 trade, and which remained unrepealed until 1849. By 
 this law foreign ships were confined to the products 
 of their own countries and their colonies, when they 
 brought cargoes into the ports of England and its colo- 
 nies; while English ships were free to bring the pro- 
 ducts of eveiy land. It is admitted that this great Act 
 laid the foundation of England's greatness as a com- 
 mercial and ship-owning country, and it has had the 
 approval of both Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. 
 
 The most remarkable instance of the development 
 of an English manufacture by Protection is precisely 
 that one whose friends are the most pronounced ene- 
 mies of the policy to which it owes its very existence. 
 Originally the manufacture of cottons in England was 
 forbidden in the interest of the wool-growers, and so 
 unpopular was this fabric that a lady who appeared on 
 the streets of London in a cotton gown ran great risk 
 of having it torn from her back by the wives of the 
 woolen- weavers. It was not until well on in the last 
 century that the business was even legalized in Eng- 
 land, and at the same time protected from foreign com- 
 petition by heavy duties. At that time India stood
 
 26 r. \ V / 1: Rsj 7 y J. E C7'i a: US. 
 
 ready to supply England with cotton fabrics, fine or 
 coarse, at a price with which no English manufacturer 
 could compete. But East Indian cottons were shut 
 out of the English market by prohibitions until 1832, 
 and those of the continent of Europe were laid under 
 a duty amounting to two-thirds of their value. Behind 
 barriers of this kind Manchester made its beginnings 
 in weaving and spinning this fabric. At that time the 
 t )wn was too insignificant to have a representative in 
 Parliament, and the Northern shires of England were 
 backward districts, notable chiefly for their devotion to 
 the Pope and the Pretender. • The long list of manu- 
 facturing centres, which now dot Lancashire and York- 
 shire, had no existence. Nor had the country any 
 iiatiiral advantage for this manufacture, except that of 
 a damper climate. Nothing but Protection, in a form 
 more extreme than any American Protectionist would 
 like to justify, could have forced this industry into ex- 
 istence or enabled England to make a fair start in it. 
 
 But mark the result. In this case, as in nearly every 
 other in which a manufacture is thus naturalized, new 
 inventions and improvements in method followed rap- 
 idly. Ten great inventions and a great multitude of 
 lesser contri\ances to sa\e labor and material were pat- 
 ented between 1738 and the close of the century, the 
 chief being the power-loom, the spinning-jenny and the 
 spinning-mule. And behind all these was James Watt's 
 steam-engine, which had just begun its work of revo- 
 lutionizing the industry of the world. The outcome 
 of all was the factory system, devised by Richard Ark- 
 wright to give the precision of military drill to all the 
 operation of manufacture. And that England's rivals 
 might not prof t by these great improvements, it M'as
 
 THE E J 7DEjVCE OF HIS TOR Y. 2 J 
 
 forbidden by law to send any part ©f this machinery 
 out of England, even to India or any colony or de- 
 pendency of Great Britain ! 
 
 This last piece of legislation is the best exponent of 
 the spirit in which English policy was directed during 
 this most critical period in the world's industrial de- 
 velopment. In the heyday of these great inventions 
 England had formed the purpose to make herself the 
 world's w^orkshop, and to bring the rest of mankind 
 into an industrial dependence upon herself Hence 
 her efforts to secure an entire monopoly of the new 
 machinery. She made it a penal offence to export it 
 out of the kingdom, even to her own colonies, and she 
 punished with equal severity any attempt to induce 
 skilled artizans to emigrate. This later law was re- 
 pealed through the efforts of Mr. Huskisson in 1824, 
 but the former remained in force even after the repeal 
 of the Corn Laws, and with the approval of that eminent 
 Free Trader, Mr. J. R. M'Culloch. She thus seconded 
 by legislation the ambition of her merchants and manu- 
 facturers to make the whole world tributary to her 
 wealth and capital, through those memorable and criti- 
 cal seventy years which preceded 1846. She extended 
 protection to every industi'}^ with which she now is 
 fighting for the control of the markets of the Avorld. 
 She accompanied this with every kind of restriction 
 upon her colonies and dependencies, which might con- 
 tribute to obtain for her more customers or larger 
 markets. She supported this policy by every diplo- 
 matic resource at the command of the most powerful 
 of military and na\al empires. She cajoled for trade, 
 bullied for trade and fought for trade. And then when 
 Protection seemed to have done its perfect work, she
 
 2S uNiiKRsi rv ]j-:cruREs. 
 
 abandoned it, nob through any growth in moral insight 
 or in love for her neighbors, but because Free Trade 
 seemed now to serve better the great aim of putting 
 England before all other countries and keeping her 
 there. 
 
 To understand the meaning of what Free Traders 
 have called "the peaceful revolution of 1846," it is 
 necessary to look at anotlier side of her history. 
 Parallel with this gigantic growth in manufactures, 
 was proceeding the revolution which deprived the 
 English common people of the hereditary possession 
 of land. At the Restoration of the Stuarts the greater 
 part of the soil of England was held in small farms 
 by tenures which were regarded as perpetual. The 
 ownership was vested in the landlord, but the tenant 
 was liable only for a fixed rent, which could not be in- 
 creased through an)' act of the owner. The " unearned 
 increment," of which we hear so much in these days, 
 fell to the tenant, and it amounted to so much through 
 the growth of society, that the rent was generally much 
 below the annual value of the land. This lasted until the 
 legislators of the Restoration period transferred the ju- 
 risdiction of these tenures to the King's courts, where 
 no respect was shown to those maxims from which these 
 customary tenures derived their permanence. On the 
 contrary they treated all these " imperfect rights " as 
 innovations on the rights of the land-owner, and pro- 
 ceeded upon the contrary principle that the landlord 
 could " do what he willed with his own." This led 
 to the application of trade principles to the land, and 
 the small farmer was swept awa)' to make room for 
 the large farmer, for much the same reason that a 
 trader prefers a large .sale to mar.y small ones. Par-
 
 THE EVIDENCE OF HISTORY. 
 
 29 
 
 liament followed up this blow by grants of authority 
 and loans of public monL-y to enclose the common 
 lands, which for time out of mind had been open to 
 the use of the common people, and which furnislied 
 them with grazing and fuel. Within a century and 
 a half one third of the soil of England was thus 
 enclosed. The very greens of the villages, as Arch- 
 deacon Hare complains, were thus taken into the 
 fields of the estate, leaving no room for out-door 
 sports, and no common resort for the villagers except 
 the ale-house. Hence the rural England of to-day, 
 with a limited number of great land-owners, a small 
 army of capitalist tenants holding by nineteen years' 
 leases, and an agricultural peasantry living on wages, 
 with no estate in the land, — " the thinnest and abso- 
 lutely most joyless peasantry in Europe," Prof Cliffe 
 Leslie says. 
 
 At the time of the Reformation, Mr. Seebohm tells 
 us, of those who earned their living by toil, one person 
 in three lived by some other employment than agri- 
 culture. Now but one in four is employed in farming, 
 and the other three are at manufactures or some other 
 work that is not tillage of the soil. There has been a 
 sixfold change in three hundred years. Nor has so 
 great a change been brought about by any necessity. 
 As the example of Belgium shows, a far larger body 
 of both capital and labor could be expended in farm- 
 ing England, and with the result that England could 
 more than supply her people with food without ex- 
 tending the area of her agriculture by a single acre. 
 Belgium feeds four hundred and fifty people to the 
 square mile, and one Flanders province has eighteen 
 hundred and finds food for them all. A Belgian
 
 ^Q L\\717:A'S/Ty LEC'lURES. 
 
 farmer la\s out twice as much on an acre as does an 
 iMi^lish farmer, and does not find " the law of dimin- 
 ishing returns from agriculture " at all in the way of 
 his sa\'ing a large slice of his income. And in Great 
 l^ritain there arc tvvent}'-three million acres of the soil 
 which are lying absolutely idle, not even in use as 
 game ])reserves. Of this, seven million five hundred 
 thousand acres are in England, and much of it in 
 the most fertile parts of the kingdom. It is not 
 necessit)-, but the belief that manufacturing pays 
 better than farming, and that it is not limited in 
 profits by any " law of diminishing returns," which 
 has driven the English people from the farms into the 
 back streets of the great cities, where they furnish an 
 inexhaustible supply of cheap labor for the manuflic- 
 turing capitalist. It is this that has made England a 
 top-heavy country, with an o\x'r-dcveloped manufac- 
 turing system, and an under-developed agriculture, 
 dependent upon the rest of the world for food and 
 customers, and obliged to regard the growth of any 
 other country in manufactures as a calamity to herself 
 
 So 1846 found England with an agricultural system 
 that was no longer able to feed the people, and that 
 was falling behind the national demand steadily, in 
 spite of laws for its protecticMi from foreign competition. 
 In the interests of her manu'actures she could no 
 longer maintain those laws. Lancashire and Stafford- 
 shire wanted cheap bread in order to keep wages down; 
 and after a great agitation the Corn Laws were swept 
 awa\' as monstrous. 
 
 So England entered upon her new career as the 
 apostolic nation, with the gospel of Eree Trade to give 
 to the world. As The Saturday Rt'vtcw says, she
 
 THE EVIDENCE OF HISTORY. ^^ j 
 
 adopted " a new religion, made up of Free Trade and 
 the pleasanter parts of Christianity," about the year 
 185 I and with the Prince Consort as the chief-priest. 
 This new doctrine is so much more sacred than 
 Christianity, that it is hardly to be discussed, but 
 rather to Idc accepted as a thing so nearly axiomatic 
 that to doubt implies a certain unsoundness of mind. 
 It stands on nearly the same footing as the multiplica- 
 tion table in point of certainty. 
 
 But to turn from sentiment and theory to the facts 
 of the situation, we find the reason for so much posi- 
 ti\eness in the necessities of England's position. She 
 is a country which has destroyed the balance of her 
 own industries, and therefore nmst seek to prevent 
 others from effecting that balance for themselves. Her 
 own economists compare her to a great manufacturer 
 who has secured a foremost position in the world's 
 trade and must face jealous rivals and make every 
 exertion in maintaining it. They speak of our rise 
 into a high rank, as a commercial and manufacturing 
 country, as the most likely event to put a stop to her 
 advance in prosperity and wealth. She does not manage 
 to conceal the means by which she has sought and 
 still seeks to maintain her industrial pre-eminence. 
 Mr. Brougham in 1816 consoled her for the losses she 
 had incurred by reckless exportations to America, on 
 the ground that these would serve to " stifle in the 
 cradle those rising manufactures in the United States, 
 which the war had forced into existence contrary to 
 the natural course of things." Mr. Tremenhere in 1864 
 in an official report to Parliament deprecated strikes 
 on the part of English workingmen, on the ground 
 that English capitalists had to make great sacrifices,
 
 ^2 ^ '-V/ 1 '£MS/ TV L ECTURES. 
 
 amounting in some cases to ^^"300,000 or ;{^400,000 a 
 }'car to overwhelm foreign competition in times of 
 depression, and thus to clear the way for the \\ hole 
 trade to step in when prices revive again. These great 
 capitals he describes as " the only great instruments of 
 industrial warfare" still left to England, since her rivals 
 had come up to lier in other respects, and he thought 
 the English workman ought to feel under obligations 
 to the capitalists who used their money in this public- 
 spirited way. These Englishmen may talk to foreign- 
 ers of Free Trade and international peace, but when 
 they talk to each other they do not conceal the fact 
 that their trade is industrial warfare on the part of a 
 nation, which as long ago as 1864 had machinery 
 capable of doing the work of four hundred and fifty 
 million human beings. It must now be not less than 
 seven hundred million. 
 
 One of the w'eapons by which they seek to make 
 good their contention in favor of Free Trade is an 
 assumption of superior wisdom and experience, which 
 entitles them to pose as the economic instructors of 
 the rest of mankind. It is this that makes them foreign 
 missionaries to advise the Western farmer how he is to 
 vote for members of Congress and other officers of the 
 American government. Now let us see how^ far this 
 superior wisdom has enabled them to manage w ith 
 success the affairs of the countries which have become 
 dependent upon their Empire. As we look, we shall 
 be impressed, I think, with the fact that there is at 
 times an irony in the workings of Providence, which 
 allows people of themselves to make a jest of their 
 most confident pretensions to exceptional wisdom. 
 
 The first we shall consider is India. When the
 
 THE E VIDENCE OF HI ST OR Y. 
 
 33 
 
 English first went there they found it a busy manu- 
 facturing country. Indeed it was to buy Indian manu- 
 factures that the)' began to go thither. Cotton goods 
 were the great staple of Indian manufacture, and in 
 some parts of the country every man, woman and 
 child was engaged in spinning or weaving cotton. 
 They produced every grade of the fabric, from the 
 coarsest to some so fine that a lady's dress could be 
 drawn through her finger-ring. Their machinery was 
 of the simplest sort, a loom looking like an accidental 
 concatenation of sticks and strings. The industry 
 continued to flourish after the English had become 
 masters of the greater part of peninsula, and even after 
 the North of England had become a great centre of 
 the manufacture. But in 1813, when Napoleon had 
 shut out English manufactures from the continent, and 
 the war with America had lost England our market 
 for her wares, the cotton-spinners persuaded the home- 
 government to put an end to the protective duties which 
 had kept their goods out of India. At the same time 
 there was no removal of the absolute prohibition of the 
 importation of East Indian cottons into England. So- 
 Bengal was flooded with the cottons made by that 
 English machinery, whose export to India was forbid- 
 den under severe penalties. The effect was ruin and 
 distress, for which, says Sir William Bentinck,"no par- 
 allel can be found in the annals of commerce." Great 
 cities relapsed into jungle. The people were reduced 
 to the level of a single industry. The bonds of asso- 
 ciation among them were broken. They sank ever 
 deeper into poverty under the otherwise just and 
 peaceful government of England, until the problem of 
 raising a revenue sufficient for the management of 
 3
 
 34 
 
 c\\vr£A's/vy lectl 'res. 
 
 public affairs became the most difficult problem in 
 British finance. 
 
 India is now a palmary instance of the misery that 
 can be inflicted on a country by the destruction of 
 \-aried industry among its people. Tlie country has 
 nothing" but an impoverished agriculture, and a few 
 petty trades, such as the making of filagree ornaments. 
 Nothing else flourishes than the business of the usurer, 
 who in the Southern parts of the peninsula had reduced 
 the ryots to a condition of virtual slavery, until the gov- 
 ■ ernment stepped in with a general obliteration of debt. 
 The dangers of such a position are extreme. The 
 country has all its eggs in one basket, and woe to it if 
 that basket fall. Whenever the periodical rains fail, 
 the district thus affected suffers from famines more 
 destructive than any in its earlier history that resulted 
 from the calamities and desolations of war. In the 
 famine of 1876-78 alone, Miss Florence Nightingale 
 estimates, thj deaths by starvation reached six millions. 
 And so certain is the recurrence of this calamity, that 
 the Indian government has raised by a special income- 
 tax levied on rich natives a famine Guarantee Fund. 
 
 The poverty of the people is so great, that the 
 average income of the ryot or peasant is put by good 
 authorities at thirty shillings a year, and of this, the^ 
 government takes twenty per cent as a land tax. Even 
 this is not enough to pay the large salaries the English 
 officers and officials require for doing duty in a country 
 so unhealthy, and so dangerous through the possibili- 
 ties of native insurrection. So it is supplemented by 
 monopolies of the most objectionable kind. Of the 
 opium monopoly you have heard, and of the manner 
 in which the government's trade in opium is promoted
 
 THE EVIDENCE OF HISTORY. 
 
 35 
 
 by keeping China open for the importation of this 
 poisonous drug. Not a whit better is the monopoly 
 of the hquor trade, by whose promotion the Hindoo 
 is rapidly losing his chai'acter as one of the most 
 temperate of beings. And worst of all is the salt 
 monopol)'. The Hindoo lives on rice, a grain singu- 
 larly deficient in saline elements. He consumes large 
 quantities of fish, and much of it in a half-rancid con- 
 dition, because salt is too expensive to have it prop- 
 erl\' cured. He lives under a burning sun, and has a 
 long sea-coast around his country ; but if he be found 
 trying to make any use of this advantage to supply 
 himself with salt, the government sends him to prison 
 for interfering with its monopoly. It used to be argued 
 that the natives got plenty of salt in spite of all this. 
 The amount supplied to soldiers detained in the mili- 
 tary prisons was taken as the basis of the estimate, and 
 it was said that the total annual consumption, if divided 
 by the population of India, would give about the same 
 amount for each inhabitant. But how was the popula- 
 tion ascertained ? By estimates made in each province 
 by the civil authorities. In 1876 they left off guessing 
 at the population and actually counted it. And they 
 found it was greater by a hundred millions than they 
 had supposed. So India must be short in its supply 
 of salt by the amount needed by one hundred million 
 people, to say nothing of what must be fed to the cattle, 
 who were overlooked in the estimates I have men- 
 tioned ! 
 
 In 1858, for the sake of revenue, the Indian author- 
 ities put a dut}' on imported cotton goods, the only 
 article of import that was available for the purpose. 
 From that time until its repeal in 1881, the English
 
 36 
 
 a\7/ 'ERSITY LECTURES. 
 
 cotton spinners kept a constant outcry ac^ainst this 
 duty. As Indian cotton is too short in the staple to 
 be spun by machinery without a mixture of our 
 Ioniser staple, a duty of five per cent was put on the 
 import of American cotton as a means of discourat^ing 
 the manufacture, while the Eui^lish cotton-spinners got 
 their American cotton free of duty. But, slight as 
 was the duty, it sufficed, with the disadxantage to 
 importation caused by the decline of exchange on 
 Calcutta, to enable the Bengalese to make their 
 start. As the prohibition on the export of machinery 
 had been removed, they built and furnished factories 
 after the modern fashion. As half the human 
 energy of India is running to waste for want of em- 
 ployment, they had an abundant supply of cheap 
 labor, and could run their factories seven days in the 
 week. To meet the English demand for the removal 
 of the duties, the Indian government tried ever\' way 
 of making it as little protective as possible. At last, 
 in the face of protests from officials of all kinds, that 
 the revenue could not be spared, the home-govern- 
 ment ordered its repeal. But it had done its work. 
 The habit of manufacture on a great scale had been 
 formed ; the industrial forces had been drilled ; and 
 the market in India and even in China and Japan had 
 been accustomed to the notion of looking to India for 
 cottons. There is no chapter in recent history that so 
 amply exemplifies the international benevolence w hich 
 underlies English Free Trade. 
 
 From India we turn to Ireland, where Providence 
 seems to bring the irony still closer home to the 
 English people and their economists. Ireland is at 
 her own doors. It is not a pagan nation at the other
 
 THE EVIDENCE OF IHSrOKY. 
 
 \7 
 
 side of the world, with unknown difficuhies in the 
 way of its peaceful development. Here is a people 
 who have proved themselves capable of success in 
 eveiy country but their own, and who seemed to be 
 doomed to perennial poverty and discontent so long 
 as England retains the direction of their affairs. 
 
 I can imagine that I hear you saying, " We are 
 tired of this endless talk about Ireland and Irish 
 grievances ! " Well, as the Irish themselves say in 
 such cases, " You may be tired and begin again." 
 You are pretty certain to hear a great deal more about 
 the country and its grievances, in spite of Mr. Glad- 
 stone's laws for the reconstruction of its land system. 
 And let nie say that I )'ield to no one in admiration 
 of the magnificent courage and conscientiousness with 
 which Mr. Gladstone has attacked the Irish problem, 
 and that I regret the unwillingness of the Irish people 
 to do justice to these qualities in the man. At the 
 same time I must regard his legislation for the redress 
 of Irish grievances as predestined to failure, because 
 it attacks not the disease but only its symptoms. 
 What Ireland is suffering from, is not, as both Mr. 
 Gladstone and Mr. Parnell assume, a bad system of 
 land laws, but the want of varied industry, in whose 
 absence any land system must work badly. 
 
 Ireland at one time had its full share of manufacturing 
 industry. We find Fazio Degli Uberti,an Italian poet 
 of the fourteenth century, mentioning her beautiful 
 *' white serges" as the finest woolen goods then known. 
 Edward III. who laid the foundation of the woolen in- 
 dustry in England, fostered it equally in Ireland. The 
 hand of English repression was laid on it first -by 
 Strafford in the reign of Charles I., that English
 
 38 
 
 ( X/lE/^S/TV LECTURES. 
 
 woolens might not suffer by its competition ; while he- 
 also promoted the linen manufacture, \\ hich competed 
 only with the Dutch. Ormond in the reign of Charles 
 II. fostered both ; and after the troubles of the Revolu- 
 tion of 1688 the Irish woolen business was rising rapidly 
 into prosperit}'- and importance, thanks to the abundant 
 supply of the best wool produced in Europe. k 
 compliance with the petitions of its English rival, 
 the business was deliberately strangled by laws passed 
 by the English and the Irish parliaments in this reign. 
 The latter forbade the export of wool and of woolens 
 to any country but England, and the former forbade 
 their import into England. Having lost one industr}', 
 the Irish people turned to others. " The easiness of the 
 Irish labor market," says Earl Dufferin,"and the cheap- 
 ness of provisions still giving us the advantage, even 
 though we had to import our materials, we ne.xt made 
 a dash at the silk business, but the silk manufacturer 
 was as pitiless as the wool-stapler. The cotton manu- 
 facturer, the sugar-refiner, the soap and candle maker 
 (who especially dreaded the abundance of our kelp), 
 and any other trade or interest that thought it worth 
 while to petition, was received with the same cordiality, 
 until the most searching scrutiny failed to find a single 
 vent for the hated industry of Ireland to respire." 
 The consequence was that the people were driven to 
 the land, as the only means of getting a livelihood. 
 The rack-rent system began, and in one generation the 
 rentals of Irish estates were more than doubled. 
 Swift, who was Irish in his hates at least, denounced 
 the iniquity of forbidding the country to make the best 
 of its own resources, and advised the Irish to retaliate 
 by burning everything England sent them except her
 
 THE EVIDENCE OF HISTORY. 
 
 39 
 
 coals. He defended the people from the charge of 
 idleness, by reminding their critics that English policy 
 had left them nothing to do. 
 
 This state of things continued until the uprising of 
 the Volunteers secured the independence of the Irish 
 Parliament in 1782. That uprising, like the American 
 war of Independence with which it coincided, was 
 mainly a revolt against the policy that was holding 
 Ireland and the Colonies in a state of industrial depend- 
 ence upon the English nation and its manufacturers. 
 Its manifesto was Mr. Hely-Hutcheson's book "The 
 Commercial Restraints of Ireland Considered," which 
 a subservient Parliament had burned as a work of 
 seditious character. Its watchword was the motto 
 Napper Tandy hung upon his cannon : " Free Trade 
 or this." Both Ireland and America demanded Free 
 Trade, but by that they meant simply an end to the 
 aggrandizement of P2ngland at the expense of their 
 native industries. They meant that she must take her 
 hands off and give other countries a chance to make 
 the best of themselves. And when, after securing 
 their political independence, they found her capital 
 gave her the power to maintain the monopoly that her 
 political dominance had established, they both defended 
 themselves against this by adopting Protective Tariffs. 
 The Irish Tariff was adopted in 1783, and laid heavy 
 duties on imports from England as well as other 
 countries. It continued in force until 1801. It found 
 the habit of manufacture all but extinct in Ireland, 
 except in the North-East counties, where the linen- 
 manufacture had been always fostered by bounties and 
 protective duties. It was opposed with great deter- 
 mination by statesmen who scoffed at the notion oC
 
 40 
 
 UNIVERSITY LECTURES. 
 
 taxing the country into growing rich. But under its 
 influence the woolen industry of the South and West 
 revived, and the Irisli people began to emerge out of 
 their poverty and uniformity of occupation. " Black 
 Jack Fitzgibbon," the Karl of Clare, had resisted the 
 passage of the law with all the energy of his powerful 
 but ill-regulated mind. But in 1798 he said, " There 
 is not a nation on the face of the habitable globe which 
 has advanced in cultivation, in agriculture, in manu- 
 factures with the same rapidity in the same period as 
 Ireland." The Whig statesman Lord Plunket describes 
 Ireland at this time as seeing " her trade, her manufac- 
 tures thriving beyond the hope or example of any 
 other country of her extent." Mr. (afterwards Judge) 
 Webb, in a pamphlet of 1798, said that in fifteen years 
 the agriculture, the commerce and the manufactures of 
 Ireland had swelled to an amount that the mo.st 
 sanguine friends of Ireland would not have dared to prog- 
 nosticate. The revenue had increased to three or even 
 four times its former volume, without any increase in 
 the burdens of taxation. And when the first proposal 
 for a legislative union with England was made in 1 799, 
 it was rejected in an address from the Irish House of 
 Commons to the King, in which they say, " In manu- 
 factures any attempt it makes to offer any benefit which 
 we do not now enjoy, is vain and delusive ; and 
 whatever effect it is to have, that effect will be to our 
 injury. Most of the duties on imports, which operate 
 as a protection to our manufactures, are, under its pro- 
 visions, to be either removed or reduced immediately ; 
 and those which will be reduced, are to cease entirely 
 at a limited time. . . . Many of our manufactures 
 owe their existence to the protection of these duties,
 
 THE E VIDEXCE OF HISTOR Y. 
 
 41 
 
 and it is not in the power of human wisdom to foresee 
 any precise time when they may be able to thrive 
 without them." The Treaty of Union was carried by 
 wholesale bribery, one year later, and all the ill effects 
 that were foreseen followed with it. 
 
 The Continental System of the first Napoleon had 
 shut the markets of Europe a ^"ainst English manufac- 
 tures at the date of the Union, and that of Ireland was 
 the only one that was obtained to replace them. The 
 repression of Irish manufactures, begun in the previous 
 century by legislation, was again completed by " the 
 tyrannous power of capital." The export of woolens, 
 which in 1792 had amounted to three hundred and 
 sixty thousand yards, fell off after the Union to twenty 
 thousand yards. As late as 1822 there were still nine 
 thousand five hundred persons engaged in the manufact- 
 ure; by 1839 there were but one thousand three hundred 
 and twenty-one. The cotton manufacture had furnished 
 employment to thirteen thousand five hundred people; 
 by 1879 the number was reduced to one thousand six 
 hundred and twenty. In the silk business six thou- 
 sand persons were employed at the Union; by 1879 
 the number was one hundred and fifty-two. A similar 
 fate befel glove-making, stocking-weaving, calico-print- 
 ing, and every other manufacture that had sprung up 
 under the protection of the Tariff of 1783. 
 
 Destitution became general in the Irish towns; and 
 throughout the country, — except in the North- Eastern 
 counties, which were comparatively prosperous, — the 
 people were driven back upon the land, and forced to 
 compete with each other for the possession of the 
 poorest bit of soil. The periodic famines which deso- 
 late countries engaged only in the production of food
 
 42 
 
 ( Xn-EKSJTV LECTURES. 
 
 warned I^iiglish statesmen of the growing povcrt)' of 
 the kingdom, but the warning was unheeded. At last 
 in 1846 the staff of bread was broken in a single night, 
 the fatal 5th of August, and hundreds of thousands 
 lay down to die. Yet in those three years of horror 
 that followed, Ireland exported each year food to the 
 value of iJ" 1 5 ,000,000. And this has gone on every 
 year since. In 1879 the aid of the civilized world was 
 invoked to keep the people from starving along the 
 West coast. In our Philadelphia committee, the ques- 
 tion was asked by the American members "What kind 
 of food shall we send to Ireland?" Those of us who 
 were of Irish birth answered, " Send none at all. There 
 is a superabundance of food in Ireland. Remit money, 
 and the food that else must be sent out of the country 
 to pay rents and buy articles of manufacture, will be 
 retained and given to the hungry." Because of the 
 ruin of her manufactures by Free Trade with England, 
 Ireland has to export food enough to pay for nearly 
 every article of necessity, convenience or luxury, food 
 excepted, which is used b}- rich or poor, and also 
 enough to pay the rents consumed by her non-resident 
 landlords in London or Paris. Every sloop, steamer 
 and boat that leaves the East coast is loaded to the 
 gunwale with food. In 1882, which was almost a 
 famine year, five of the principal crops of Ireland pro- 
 duced nearly eight pounds of food a day for every 
 man, woman and child in Ireland ; and this did not 
 include beef, dairy products, fish or garden crops of 
 any sort. Yet we are told that Ireland is overpopulated, 
 and that the wholesale deportation of her people is 
 the only remedy for the evils from which she is suf- 
 fering !
 
 THE EVIDENCE OE HISTORY. a,-> 
 
 These facts should make intelligible my criticism 
 upon Mr. Gladstone's Irish legislation, that he is 
 dealing with the symptoms and not with the disease. 
 His cure for Irish evils is laws for the alteration of 
 land system. Now it is true that the Irish situation 
 is on J which gives the land-owner an immense power 
 over those who have to rent land, that is to say over 
 the great part of the Irish people. And whate\cr 
 gives men an excessive power over their fellows, is 
 certain to tempt to abuse of that power, and to bring out 
 whatever meanness and baseness there is in our human 
 nature. It might, however, have been presumed that 
 the resources of civilized legislation would have fur- 
 nished some means of destroying this excess of power, 
 without interfering with the rights of property in 
 land, and forbidding the landlord to take such price 
 as he can get in the land-market for his farms. But 
 this is what Mr. Gladstone has done by the Irish 
 Land Law, which sets up a court to determine what 
 is a fair rent for a piece of land, and lays a heavy fine 
 upon the landlord who evicts the tenant who is paying^ 
 this fair rent. You would not endure such a law in 
 Massachusetts, and we would not in Pennsylvania. 
 We believe in free contract between landlord and 
 tenant. But say the English, the cases are widi,^ly 
 different. " Free contract," says The Spectator, " im- 
 plies free contractors ; howex'er, partly from histor- 
 ical circumstances, but chiefly from the ab.sence of 
 alternative employments, the poorer tenants of Ireland 
 are not free ; at least one half the adult population 
 are compelled by the coercion of hunger to agree to 
 any terms which will secure them the use of the soil." 
 In other words, the Irish tenant would be emancipated
 
 44 
 
 UXrVRRSITY L ECTURES. 
 
 and made a freeman by the policy which would create 
 on Irish soil those " alternative occupations," whose 
 presence would relieve the pressure upon the land- 
 market, without any socialistic meddling with the 
 rights of property. Are there no means of creating 
 such " alternative occupations " where they do not 
 exist? Edward III. thought there were; Cromwell 
 thought so ; the Stuart kings and the first three kings 
 of the present house thought so. But they have 
 vanished out of " the resources of civilization " for 
 English statesmen. 
 
 Even as regards the land, this new legislation must 
 be a failure, unless there is a restoration of Irish 
 manufactures. It is assumed on both sides that the 
 conversion of the Irish tenant into a land-owner, or 
 something nearly the same as that, must result in his 
 permanent prosperity. The truth is that the Irish 
 land-owner has fared nearly as badly under the ruin 
 of the manufactures of the country, as has the tenant. 
 I can give you the names of at least a dozen of Irish 
 free-holders within the range of my own knowledge, 
 who found Irish farming an intolerable business, 
 although they paid no rent but a peppercorn or a 
 farthing an acre to the Crown, and who ha\'e left the 
 country to find a home in America. My own father 
 was one of these. And the prosperity these persons 
 have had in whatever walk of life they have chosen in 
 this land of their adoption, has been such as to prove 
 that they did not fail to get on in Ireland through any 
 want of industry or perseverance. Have even the 
 much-abused landlords prospered under this system, 
 for whose evils they are held responsible? Great 
 numbers of them have been absolutely beggared. The
 
 THE EVIDENCE OF HISTORY. 
 
 45 
 
 famine of 1846 found in the poor-houses of the South- 
 West men who had been the lords-heutenant of their 
 counties. In the decade 1 848-1 859 one third of the 
 soil of Ireland was sold in the Encumbered Estatjs 
 Court, and mostly at a fraction of its market valu •. 
 It was bought up by people like Mr. Bence-Joncs, 
 whose utter want of sympathy with the Irish people 
 stands in strong contrast to the character of many of 
 the people they succeeded, and constitutes one of 
 the most serious difficulties of the present situation. 
 
 The worst failure of Mr. Gladstone's policy is its 
 failure to do anything for the great multitude who 
 have no land, no employment and no prospect of 
 getting either. The Irish correspondent of TJic (Lon- 
 don) Guardian in 1882 reported that there were nine 
 hundred thousand young people in the " proclaimed 
 districts " of Ireland, who were in this sad condition. 
 I wonder what our American Free Traders would 
 do with Ireland, if they had the responsibility of 
 governing it. I have no doubt they are glad enough 
 to have no such responsibility ! But we Protectionists 
 of America would not hesitate to undertake to make 
 the Irish people prosperous and contented, if we had 
 the chance. We would apply to her case the remedies 
 which have cured similar evils in this country, with 
 the confidence that the result would be the same. 
 
 It may be said that America and Ireland are very 
 different countries, and that analogies between them 
 are misleading. It is true that they now are very dif- 
 ferent, but it is not true that they were so different a 
 century ago. At that time they were suffering from 
 the same repressive and selfish policy of England's 
 part; and what difference there was, was probably in
 
 ^^6 LW/rEKs/jy lecil 'res. 
 
 faxor of Ireland. America was permitted to carry on 
 only such industries as suited the Mother Country to 
 have established in her colonies. Thus the making 
 of pig iron "was encouraged, because the colonies had 
 plenty of the charcoal, which in those days was used 
 exclusively in smelting iron; but the manufacture of 
 steel was strictly forbidden. In the pineries of New 
 Jersey there still are found remains of the works, in 
 which the steel manufacture was carried on secretly 
 and far away from the observation of English ofificials. 
 A hat factory in one of the colonies was declared a 
 nuisance by the British Parliament, and the export of 
 hats from one colony to another, at a later time was 
 forbidden. In 1765 the emigration of skilled artizans 
 to the colonies was forbidden by law. As a conse- 
 quence of this policy the colonists were deeply in debt 
 to the traders in England. One English authority 
 calculated that they got not above a fourth of the 
 advantage of their own products, and said it was Eng- 
 land's best policy not to put too many difficulties in 
 their way, but to encourage them to go on cheerfully ! 
 By 1774 the cheerfulness had come to an end, and 
 the struggle for independence began. It found its 
 motive as much in the necessity for the diversification 
 of American industry, as in the maintenance of the 
 political rights of the people. One of the measures 
 of resistance was the agreement not to import any 
 more goods from England, and in 1774 the Conti- 
 nental Congress signed such an agreement for the 
 whole country. Four months before the Declaration of 
 Independence was voted, Congress recommended the 
 colonial legislatures to exert their utmost endeax'ors to 
 promote the culture of flax, hemp and cotton and the
 
 THE EVIDENCE OE HISTORY. ^y 
 
 growth of wool in tlic United Colonies ; and to take 
 the earliest measures for establishing in each colony 
 a Society for the improvement of agriculture, arts, 
 manufactures and commerce ; and forthwith to con- 
 sider of the ways and means of introducing and im- 
 proving the manufacture of duck, sail-cloth and steel. 
 
 Much of the sufferings of the American armies 
 during the war for independence grew out of the un- 
 provided condition of the country, which had not a 
 single one of the manufactures needed for the equip- 
 ment of an army. As the war proceeded these were 
 established on such a scale as made the country much 
 less defenceless. With the return of peace, and the 
 resumption of trade with the Mother Countr)-, all these 
 new industries were ruined. The general government 
 had no power to restrain imports by imposing duties ; 
 the several states did it in such a way as to make the 
 state boundaries into custom house lines, and to take 
 as much advantage of each other as of the sti-anger. 
 The American manufacturer was confined to the little 
 compass of his own state, and had not the market 
 necessary for the development of his business. As a 
 consequence the country began to sink to even a lower 
 level than it had held before the war, and the spread 
 of discontent and of distress was such as to threaten 
 the overthrow of the social system. While quarrels 
 over trade were drawing the colonies farther apart, the 
 presence of insurrection seemed to indicate the speedy 
 ruin of the new nation, and the possible return of 
 its elements to the British Empire. It was to save 
 the country from this fate that the new Constitution 
 was adopted, after a futile attempt to so modify the 
 Articles of Confederation as to transfer the power to
 
 48 
 
 UNIVERSITY LECTURES. 
 
 levy duties on imports from the states to the nation. 
 The Constitution gave the national Congress power to 
 " lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises," 
 and specified as the purpose for which these were to 
 be laid not only the payment of the nation's debts and 
 the provision for the public defence, but also "to pro- 
 vide for the general welfare of the United States." I low 
 this clause w^as understood by its authors was shown 
 by the first Congress which met under the Constitu- 
 tion. It passed a Tariff law reported by James Madi- 
 son, and in the preamble it was said that one of the 
 objects was "the encouragement and protection of 
 manufactures." 
 
 The new Tariff was drawn on very modest lines, and 
 showed how limited were the industrial ambitions of 
 the fathers of the Republic. Neither wooleu, nor iron, 
 nor cotton manufactures are specified in its lists of 
 protected articles. As a consequence, the Haitford 
 woolen mill, which supplied Gen. Washington with the 
 suit in which he was inaugurated, was sold out by the 
 sheriff in his second administration. Nor were the 
 duties high, but the cost of transportation and the 
 interruption of commerce by the great wars of that 
 time supplemented them heavily. Among the articles 
 laid under a duty was cotton. This was not yet an 
 important staple in America ; it had been grown chiefly 
 to make clothing for the slave population. But the 
 American indigo business had been transferred to 
 Bengal during the war for independence, and the 
 Southern states were casting about for some article to 
 take its place. So for a goodly number of years the 
 women of New England paid a higher price for the 
 West India cotton they twisted into lamp-wicks or
 
 THE EVIDENCE OF HISTORY. 
 
 49 
 
 spun and wove into sheetings, in order that the South 
 might have a chance to retrieve its fortunes. When 
 at last the cotton-gin invented by a Yankee school- 
 master had put American cotton-growing on its feet 
 the world was to see the cotton-planter of America 
 joining hands with the English cotton-spinner to put 
 down the policy to which each industry owed its very 
 existence ! 
 
 What was defective in the first Tariff was corrected 
 to some extent by amendment while Alexander 
 Hamilton remained the Secretary of the Treasury. 
 But the general tendency of American legislation took 
 a new direction with the accession to power in i8oi of 
 a party which believed in minimizing the powers and 
 the revenues of the national government. No farther 
 advance was made towards making the country self- 
 sufficient or creating those resources which fit a nation 
 for war. As a consequence the second war with Great 
 Britain again found America altogether unprepared to 
 equip or furnish an army ; and the disastrous conduct 
 of that war by land was very largely due to this defect. 
 Even salt was not to be had, and the blankets and 
 tents for the regiments could not be furnished by any 
 American producer. During the war and for a year 
 after the return of peace all duties were doubled, and 
 as a consequence there was a rapid growth of manu- 
 factures, especially in the Middle States. But with the 
 return of peace, English exports to America rose to 
 four times the amount sent here in any previous year. 
 It was on this occasion that Mr. Brougham congratu- 
 lated his country on the fact that their losses in 
 America through excessive exports would " stifle in 
 the cradle those rising manufactures in the United 
 4
 
 ■50 US'IVERSUY LECTURES. 
 
 States w Inch the war had forced into existence con- 
 trary to the natural course of things." (Hansard, 
 xxxiii. 1099.) 
 
 There was no disposition on the part of Congress 
 to acquiesce in this " stifling" process. Especially the 
 South was agreed to resist it. The British Tariff still 
 discriminated in favor of cotton grown in India and 
 the British colonies, to the exclusion of American. 
 During the war there had been such a growth of 
 cotton manufacture as furnished employment to one 
 hundred thousand people, and furnished a steady 
 market for Southern cotton. So Mr. John C. Calhoun 
 and the other representatives of that section gave their 
 support generally to the proposition that American 
 industry should be protected, and they helped to pass 
 the Tariff-law of 18 16. The duties it imposed averaged 
 about sixteen per cent ad valorem, which was thought 
 to be sufficient, because the authors of the measure 
 had no conception of the altered conditions of produc- 
 tion and exchange. I shall tell the result in a quota- 
 tion from a Free Trade writer : 
 
 "The Tariff of 18 16 raised the price at first, and 
 was all the encouragement that was desired. But in 
 a little while another effect followed. The foreign 
 manufacturers contrived to reduce the cost of producing 
 their goods, by improved machinery and other means, 
 and submitted to a reduction of their profits in order 
 to keep as much as they could of the American trade 
 by counteracting the Tariff; while the American 
 manufacturers, who could only supply a part of the 
 demand for broad-cloths, found their profits diminished 
 by the rise in the costs of labor and subsistence, which 
 was caused h\ the diversion of labor from its natural
 
 THE EVIDENCE OE HISTORY. 51 
 
 channels. To this was added the more abundant 
 capital of the foreign manufacturers, enabling them to 
 give longer credits ; their wider access to established 
 markets enabling them to accept a lower rate of profits; 
 and the great advantage of being already established, 
 with machinery all built, trade all regulated, and in the 
 midst of a superabundant supply of labor, which had 
 no competing opening, and which therefore could be 
 had for the asking, at the lowest wages on which 
 pi^ople could live." [The League, May, 1868.) 
 
 So the sheriff had a busy time for some years under 
 that well-meaning but futile Tariff of 1816 ; and where 
 the factories did not stop work, they went on only 
 because the new owners had bought them for a fraction 
 of what they had cost, and therefore could afford to 
 keep them going. Some kinds of enterprise stopped. 
 The improvement of American sheep had received a 
 great impulse during the war, and as much as a 
 thousand dollars had been paid for a ram lamb. But 
 now blooded sheep were sold off at a dollar, and great 
 multitudes were slaughtered for their pelts. 
 
 Every president went on urging the effective pro- 
 tection of American manufactures as a measure of 
 national defence, no less than as a means to national 
 prosperity; but it was not until 1824 that a really 
 protective Tariff was enacted, with duties averaging 
 thirty-eight per cent ad valorem. It was amended in 
 1828 chiefly by increasing the duties on wool and 
 woolens, and was reduced in 1832 without detracting 
 from its protectionist character. By the admission of 
 even its enemies it enabled a great advance in the 
 diversification of American industry and in the elevation 
 of the nation out of the poverty of the years which
 
 52 
 
 UNIVERSITY LECTURES. 
 
 followed the war. Henry Clay pointed to the seven 
 years before 1824 as the most distressing, and the 
 seven after that year as the most prosperous, in the 
 n^ition's history. 
 
 But the prosperity was not equally diffused. Those 
 states which still retained negro slavery had expected 
 that their closeness to the source of the cotton supply, 
 and their abundance of cheap labor, would serve to 
 give them if not a pre-eminence, at least an equality 
 with the rest of the country as manufacturing common- 
 wealths. For this reason they had supported the 
 Tariff of 1 8 16, when New England had opposed it in 
 the supposed interests of her commerce. But their 
 hopes had been disappointed. They found that slave 
 labor was not equal to the nice work required in 
 manufactures, and that the poor whites of the South 
 would not work, so long as the existence of slavery 
 made work a badge of social inferiority. So the Tariff 
 did its work chiefly in the Middle and Eastern States, 
 while the abundant water-power of the South fell idly 
 over the rocks. On the other hand the great improve- 
 ment in the quality of American cotton had obliged 
 the English government to cease discriminating against 
 its importation, sincj that di-scrimination placed Lan- 
 cashire at a disadvantage in competing for the markets 
 of the world. So the South was no longer depemKnt 
 upon the Northern market, and began to see the ques- 
 tion of Free Trade in a new light. There arose that 
 strange alliance between the American slave interest 
 and the English cotton interest, which came to an end 
 only with the Civil War. It was now that the cotton 
 states made the discovery that Protection was a breach 
 of the Constitution, and oppressive to their interests.
 
 THE EVIDENCE OF HISTORY. 
 
 53 
 
 The attempt of South Carolina, with the support of 
 three other states, to nullify the Tariff of 1832 was 
 suppressed by the courageous action of the President. 
 But it led to the Compromise Tariff of 1S33, which 
 provided for the gradual reduction of all the duties on 
 imports, until by 1842 they should stand at a level of 
 twenty per cent. This agreement was accepted by the 
 manufacturers at the persuasion of Mr. Clay, and 
 because they were confident that the improvements they 
 had made in machinery would enable them to hold 
 their own without much protection. The result showed 
 that they had overestimated their strength. A time 
 of great depression and business disaster followed, of 
 which the Tariff reductions were not the sole but a 
 chief cause. When 1842 came, there had been a 
 political revolution. Mr. Harrison had been elected 
 by the Whig Protectionists to the presidency, and his 
 untimely death did not prevent the passage of a 
 thoroughly protectionist Tariff in 1842. 
 
 Before this Tariff was passed, the situation of both 
 capital and labor had been wretched in the extreme. 
 The monuments of the era may be found in the soup- 
 houses of our great cities, which were devised to keep 
 the working population from starving. The govern- 
 ment's revenue had fallen so low, that it was obliged 
 to seek a loan in Europe, and sought in vain, although 
 a few years before it had distributed a much larger 
 sum of surplus revenue among the states. There 
 were some who ridiculed the idea that this distress 
 could be even alleviated by increasing the duties on 
 imports, and among these was Mr. Henry C. Carey, 
 whose failure as a paper-maker under the pressure of 
 the times had not converted him from Free Trade
 
 54 
 
 ( XJlERSJ-rV LECTURES. 
 
 opinions. But what they declared to be impossible 
 was done. Mr. Nathan Appleton says that the Tariff 
 of 1842 "adopted with the greatest difficulty, carried 
 almost by miracle, changed, as if by enchantment, the 
 whole scene. In the short space of a year, the whole 
 country passed from the depths of suffering, idleness 
 and depression, to a state of the most active prosperitv- 
 and the fullest confidence. No one capable of tracing 
 cause and effect can doubt that the change was the 
 direct and immediate result of the Tariff." 
 
 I think its greatest achievement was the conversion 
 of Mr. Carey by the undeniable evidence its results 
 furnished for the vindication of the protective policy. 
 
 But Free Trade was "in the air" in those days. 
 The victory of the Anti-Corn-Law League in England 
 in 1846 produced a profound impression in America. 
 The notion became common that the path to prosperity 
 had been thrown open to us in the repeal of the Eng- 
 lish import duties on our grain. Mr. Walker, the new 
 Secretary of the Treasury, lectured Congress on the 
 wisdom of the Laisscz Faire policy. Western votes 
 were added to those of the South in support of Free 
 Trade. The result was the Horizontal Tariff of 1846, 
 which was passed by a party vote and in defiance of 
 pledges given at the election of 1844. It was "neither 
 fish, flesh, fowl, nor good salt herring." It put almo.st 
 all duties at one of three ad valorem rates, without 
 any intelligent reference to either revenue or protection. 
 Some industries got a fair degree of protection ; a few 
 got too much ; the majority got too little or none at 
 all. Of the latter class was the iron business. The 
 ri.se of the railroad system had made this metal -of 
 prime importance. American producers were furnish-
 
 THE EVIDENCE OF HISTORY. 
 
 55- 
 
 ing iron rails at ;$6o a ton, while the English maker 
 offered them at $40 a ton. The reduction to thirty 
 per cent ad valorem enabled the foreigner to secure 
 an entrance to the American market, and to undersell 
 the home producer, especially as the great crash of 
 railroad speculation in England had diminished the 
 English demand. Our furnaces began to stop work- 
 ing, and the Iron-men met in Convention in 1850 to 
 lay their grievances before Congress. In their Memo- 
 rial, prepared by Mr. Stephen Colwell, they warned the 
 country that the price England asked for any article 
 would depend a good deal upon the amount of our 
 dependence upon her for our suppl}^ and that if we 
 made ourselves dependent upon her for iron, she would 
 advance the price as soon as she had got our home 
 competition out of the way. The prediction was ful- 
 filled to the letter. In a short time we were paying 
 her $80 a ton for iron rails, the duty on which was 
 more at the new ad valoreju rates than had been levied 
 by the Tariff of 1842 by a specific duty. But it gave 
 no protection in the sense of assuring the capitalists' 
 investment in this industr}^ 
 
 As if the Tariff of 1846 were not bad enough, Con- 
 gress in 1857 made a horizontal reduction of twenty- 
 five per cent in all its duties. The opponents of the 
 reduction predicted that it would cause a financial 
 crash, and, as many of us still remember, their predic- 
 tion was fulfilled. But they got no hearing, for, as 
 Mr. Greeley sorrowfully said, the world seemed to have 
 gone ov^er to Free Trade. An enthusiastic member 
 of Congress from New England proclaimed his hope 
 of seeing every custom-house abolished from the face 
 of the earth. But one man held out; against the flood
 
 56 
 
 UNIVERSITY LECTURES. 
 
 of tendency. Mr. Carey said to Mr. Greeley, "If you 
 will wait a little, you will see the world coming back." 
 They both lived to see that, — to see, as The London 
 Times expressed it, "a flood of protectionist sentiment 
 sweep round the world." 
 
 The experiences of 1857 helped this part of the 
 world to come back from its rush into Free Trade. The 
 country was plunged into a depression nearly as great 
 as that of 1837. Although already heavily in debt to 
 English manufacturers, we increased our import of 
 some important articles three hundred per cent. A great 
 body of workmen were thrown out of employment. 
 The revenue fell from a surplus to a deficit, and in 
 a time of peace the treasury had to borrow money 
 for current expenses at usurious rates. President 
 Buchanan called attention to the harm that had been 
 done by the reduction of duties and suggested their 
 restoration. But Congress was too much occupied 
 with the closing scenes of the great struggle between 
 slavery and freedom to give the matter much attention. 
 
 In 1 861 the Republican party came into power, 
 pledged by its national declaration of principles to 
 legislate on protectionist linos. The Morrill Tariff of 
 that year was the fulfilment of promises made to the 
 public and especially to the laboring part of the public, 
 much rather than to the special representatives of the 
 manufacturing interests. Many of these were timid, 
 and wanted to be let alone in the course they were 
 moving in. But the feeling of the Northern people 
 and the necessities of the war, which had already 
 befjun, suc:"crested a bolder course. 
 
 The period of protection thus begun is the longest 
 of persistence in any one policy that the country
 
 THE EVIDENCE OF HISTORY. 
 
 57 
 
 has had. That policy is challenged now to justify 
 itself by its works at the bar of public opinion. We 
 are not afraid of that test. We ask your attention to 
 its broad results. 
 
 It has raised the average of our national wealth 
 from $514 a head (slaves included) in 1850, to $870 
 a head in 1880. 
 
 It has increased the value of our manufactures five 
 hundred per cent, and that of our foreign commerce 
 in the same ratio, while the commerce of England 
 increased but three hundred and fifty per cent. 
 
 It has secured higher wages to our workmen and 
 better prices to our farmers, without increasing to 
 either the cost of staple manufactures, as is shown by 
 comparing the prices of textiles and hardwares before 
 and since i860. 
 
 It has diversified our industries and raised our 
 people out of that uniformity of occupation which is 
 the mark of a low industrial development. 
 
 It has stimulated inventions and improvements to 
 the degree that some of the great staples of necessary 
 use have been permanently cheapened to the whole 
 world. 
 
 It has drawn the different sections of the country 
 into closer business relations, and has interlaced the 
 great trunk lines of railroad to the West with others 
 running Southward. 
 
 It has brought the foreign artizan across the ocean, 
 and has naturalized his craft on our shores, whereas 
 Free Trade would have brought his work only. 
 
 It has made us as regards the great staples inde- 
 pendent of all other countries in case of war, while it 
 has consolidated the national unity and increased the
 
 58 UNIVERSITY LECTURES. 
 
 national strength to a degree that makes the rest of 
 mankind anxious to be at peace with us. 
 
 It has created a sentiment in favor of this poHcy so 
 powerful that no political party ventures to oppose it 
 openly, and such that the friends of Free Trade are 
 hardly heard in our national campaigns. 
 
 Around the splendid public buildings we are erect- 
 ing in Philadelphia, there stood till very recently a 
 stiff and angular structure of wood. It could not be 
 said to add to the beauty of the marble edifice it en- 
 compassed. I never heard any one admiring it, nor 
 do I know that the students of our School of Design, 
 which looked out upon it, ever sketched it as a thing 
 of beauty. But it was indispensable to the erection 
 of the building, and it could not be taken down till 
 the roof was on. We could not hire winged workmen 
 to carry the hod and lay the stone work. Like that 
 scaffolding is the Tariff around the edifice of our 
 national industries. It is not aesthetic. It adds 
 nothing to the beauty of the edifice. But we cannot 
 do without it. We must have respect to the neces- 
 sities of the case in the industrial edifice also. 
 
 Three times in our history, in compliance with the 
 demand of theory, we have torn down that national 
 scaffolding to our industrial system. Three times we 
 have had to put it up again, in compliance with the 
 demands of hard fact. Each time we have had to 
 resume the building at a less advanced stage than that 
 it had reached before we gave in to theory in making 
 the change. This time the American people seem to 
 me to have made up their minds that it is to stay up 
 until the roof is on !
 
 III. 
 
 THE WORKINGMAN. 
 
 Gentlemen of the University : — 
 
 The argument I am about to present to-night is in 
 a large measure independent of those I have ah'eady 
 presented to you. It is that the protective poHcy is a 
 necessary means to secure to the American workman 
 such a compensation for his toil, as will enable him to 
 live on that level of comfort which our American 
 ideals require for him. 
 
 I may premise that the democratic ideal of equality 
 on which we pride ourselves, and which found expres- 
 sion in Burns's song, " A man's a man for a' that ! " is 
 of very recent origin and of slow growth even in 
 America. In Europe it may be said to have begun to 
 have made headway about the year 1848, and in 
 America about two decades earlier. But there lingers 
 even among the educated classes in America another 
 ideal, which belongs rather to the Middle Ages than to 
 our industrial and democratic era. The way in which 
 Trades' Unions and their strikes are still spoken of in 
 our newspapers, appears to me to imply the temper in 
 which the laws to fix the rate of wages were passed 
 by the English Parliament five hundred years ago. It 
 seems to be assumed that the workman has no right 
 to refuse to work where the terms are not satisfactory 
 
 59
 
 5o UNIVERSITY LECTURES. 
 
 to him, and that his association with his fellows to 
 secure fair play in the matter of hours and wages, is 
 an unlawful encroachment upon the rights of other 
 people. Every time a strike fails to secure the result 
 its authors had in view, this is received with a certain 
 exultation by perhaps a majority of our newspapers. 
 The ficfures are "•one over with a relish, to show how 
 gigantic the folly which forfeited so large a sum in 
 wages. A little sympathy with the workingir.an's 
 position might bring us to see, perhaps, that the strike 
 was morally necessary as an assertion of his manhood 
 against what he regarded as an injustice. Of course 
 this is no apology for the acts of violence which have 
 attended some great strikes. But I venture the sug- 
 gestion that a more sympathetic tone on the part of the 
 public toward the w^orkingman would tend to repress the 
 evil tempers which break out in violence. Nothing is so 
 likely to make an Ishmael of a man, as in the discovery 
 that every man's voice, if not his hand, is against him. 
 Whatever view you may take of Protection or of 
 Free Trade, I hope you will feel the responsibility you 
 have, not only for acts, but even for opinions, which 
 may affect the position and character of the most 
 numerous class in our society. By doing so, you may 
 each help to save our nation from the growth of great 
 gaps and refts in the social structure, such as are proving 
 so perilous to Europe. You must not think of such a 
 peril as a thing of the past ; rather it is a thing of the 
 present. Even in the Middle Ages it was less than it 
 is now. The old feudal baron dealt with his serfs and 
 dependents face to face ; and when human beings meet 
 in that way, there is reached some modus vh'endi,vjh\ch 
 kee;.:is their relations human and natural. But the
 
 THE WORKINGMAN. ^j 
 
 changes which have taken place in the last century 
 have brought it about that we are served by people 
 who are for the most part behind stone walls to us. 
 Our danger is that it will be out '' of sight, out of mind," 
 in their case, and they will come to feel that they are 
 nothings and nobodies in the social estimate. Be 
 assured that that feeling is as dangerous to society as 
 the existence of solid grievances would be. 
 
 The protectionist policy stands, among other things, 
 for an expression of the national interest in the welfare 
 of the working classes. It is a declaration that the 
 national concern is not for the wealthy only, but for 
 the wage-earner as well. 
 
 But here I am met by the general objection that if 
 it be true that the American workman is better off than 
 his brother in Europe, this may be explained without 
 any reference to the Tariff. It is said, " Our circum- 
 stances are very different from those of Western 
 Europe. We have an abundance of unoccupied land. 
 Every workman has his choice between the factory 
 and the farm which he may obtain, and on which he 
 will be his own master. It is this choice which makes 
 wages high in America." I presume it will be admitted 
 that this advantage existed equally in the period which 
 came after the war for independence. There was even 
 more unoccupied land then than now, and it lay much 
 nearer to the more densely settled districts of the 
 country. The artizan's opportunities of becoming a 
 farmer were much greater than they are to-day. Yet 
 his condition was not such as to suggest that he was 
 a very highly favored workman. He was paid lower 
 wages, and his mode of life was humbler and harder. 
 My friend and colleague, Prof McMaster, in his " His-
 
 (52 UXIVERSITY LECTURES. 
 
 tory of the American People," describes the situation 
 of American labor after the return of peace : 
 
 " There can b^ no doubt that wonderful amelioration 
 has taken place since that day in the condition of the 
 poor. Their houses were meaner, their food was 
 coarser, their clothincj was of commoner stuff; their 
 wages were, despite the depreciation that has gone on 
 in the value of money, lower by one half than at 
 present. A man who performed what would now be 
 called unskilled labor — who sawed wood, who dug 
 ditches, who mended roads, who mixed mortar, who 
 carried boards to the carpenterand bricks to the mason 
 or helped to cut hay in the harvest-time — usually 
 received as the fruit of his daily toil two shillings. 
 Sometimes, when laborers were few, he was paid more, 
 and became the envy of his fellows if at the end of a 
 week he took home to his family fifteen shillings, a 
 sum now greatly exceeded by four dollars. Yet all 
 authorities agree that in 1784 the hire of workmen 
 was twice as great as in 1774. 
 
 " On such a pittance it was only by the strictest 
 economy that a mechanic kept his children from 
 starvation and himself from jail. In the low and 
 dingy rooms which he called his home, were wanting 
 many articles of adornment and use, now to be found 
 in the dwellings of the poorest of his class. Sand 
 sprinkled on the floor did duty as a carpet. There was 
 no glass on his table, there was no china in his cup- 
 board, there were no prints on his wall. . . . 
 Over a fire of fragments of boxes and barrels, which 
 he Ht with sparks struck from a flint, or with live coals 
 brought from a neighbor's hearth, his wife cooked up 
 a rude meal and served it in pewter dishes. He rarely
 
 THE WORKINGMAN. 
 
 63 
 
 tasted meat as often as once a week, and paid for it a 
 much higher price than his posterity. Everything, 
 indeed, which ranked as a staple of hfe, was very 
 costly. Corn stood at three shillings the bushel ; 
 wheat at eight and sixpence ; an assize of bread was 
 fourpence ; a pound of salt pork was tenpence. Many 
 other commodities now to be seen on the tables of the 
 poor, were either quite unknown or far beyond the 
 reach of his scanty means." 
 
 In 1793 the Schuylkill and Susquehanna Canal 
 Company advertised for workmen, offering five dollars 
 a month for the winter months, and six dollars for 
 summer, with board and lodging. The next year 
 there was a debate in the House of Representatives, 
 which brought out the fact that soldiers got but $3 a 
 month. A Vermont member, discussing the proposal 
 to raise it to 54, said that in his state men were hired 
 for ^18 a year, or $4 a month, with board and clothing. 
 Mr. Wadsworth of Pennsylvania said, " In the states 
 north of Pennsylvania, the wages of the common 
 laborer are not, upon the whole, superior to those of 
 the common soldier." In 1795 skilled laborers, such 
 as type-setters and the like, earned $\ a day in Phila- 
 delphia. A French traveller tells us that at Albany 
 laborers could be had in great abundance for three 
 (York) shillings a day. At Richmond wages ran from 
 IS. 6d. to IS. lod., except in harvest, when from 2s. 4d. 
 to 3s. lod. was paid, in Virginian currency worth 
 i^3-33 to the pound. In New York in 1794 hatters 
 ■could earn as much as $2 a day, and carpenters lod. 
 an hour, while sailors were paid $24 a month.^ 
 
 ^ For these facts I am indebted to the kindness of Prof. McMaster.
 
 64 
 
 C W'll'EKS/'J-y LECTURES. 
 
 \\\ I'JC)'/ a Rhode Island farmer hired good farm- 
 hands at 33 a month ; and $5 a month was paid to 
 those who got employment for the eight busy months 
 of the farmer's year. A strong boy could be had at 
 that time in Connecticut for $\ a month through those 
 months, and he earned it by working from day-break 
 till 8 or 9 o'clock at night. He could buy a coarse 
 cotton shirt with the earnings of three such months. 
 The farmers could pay no better, for the price they got 
 for produce was wretched. Butter sold at eight cents 
 a pound, and when it rose suddenly to ten cents, 
 several farmers' wives and daughters went out of their 
 minds with the excitement. Women picked the wool 
 off the bushes and briars, where the sheep had left it, 
 and spun and knit it into mittens to earn $1 a year by 
 this toilsome business. They hired out as help for 
 twenty-five cents a month and their board. By a day's 
 hard work at the spinning-wheel a woman and girl 
 together could earn twelve cents. As late as 182 1 
 the best farm-hands could be had for twenty-five cents 
 a day, or twice as much in mowing time.' 
 
 Matthew Carey, in his " Letters on the Charities of 
 Philadelphia" (1829) gives a painful picture of the 
 condition of the working classes at that time. Every 
 avenue to employment was choked with applicants. 
 Men left the city to find work on the canals at from 
 sixty to seventy-five cents a day, and to encounter the 
 malaria, which laid them low in numbers. The highest 
 wages paid to women was twenty-five cents a day, and 
 even the women who made clothes for the arsenal 
 were paid by the government at no higher rates. 
 
 'Mr. Thomas Hazard in The Providence Journal.
 
 THE WORKINGMAN. 
 
 65 
 
 When the ladies of the city begged for an improve- 
 ment on this rate, the Secretary hesitated lest it 
 should di.arninge the relations of capital and labor 
 throughout the city! Poor people died of cold and 
 want every winter in the city, and the fact seems to 
 have made an impression only on benevolently dis- 
 posed persons like Mr. Carey. 
 
 The spirit of the times was very different in this 
 respect from what it now is. It was aristocratic rather 
 than genuinely democratic. The American Republic 
 was a country in which the property-owning class 
 was vastly preponderant. The very war for independ- 
 ence grew out of a strike of the tax-payers against 
 the imposition of illegal taxes. Property weighed 
 more than manhood in public opinion. None but its 
 owners were admitted to the suffrage ; and in Penn- 
 sylvania there was a controversy whether a rich man 
 who owned merely personal property should be allowed 
 to vote. So essentially aristocratic was society, that 
 the students in the American colleges were seated 
 with strict reference to the social importance of their 
 fathers. The wage-earning class was small and not 
 much thought of In such a community the maxims 
 of the English economists found a congenial soil, and 
 Matthew Carey tells us that appeals for charitable aid 
 were met by Malthusian answers or profound indiffer- 
 ence. He says that the condition of the workman 
 in America was not essentially better than in Europe, 
 and he quotes Dr. Ely as saying that the slaves of the 
 South were better fed, clothed and lodged than the 
 laborers in the North. 
 
 The existence of slavery had much to do with this. 
 Even the Northern states were slave states which had 
 5
 
 ^5 L'XIVEHSITV LECTURES. 
 
 but rccentl}' abolished chattel slavery, and in many of 
 them there had been large numbers of white slaves, 
 called " reclcmptioners," who had been working out 
 the cost of their passage to America. The taint of 
 slavery still lingered in the social atmosphere, as it 
 still does in the South, and slavery made labor a dis- 
 grace. 
 
 Various forces co-operated to change all this. One 
 was the indirect influence of the levelling doctrines of 
 the French Revolution, with which one political party 
 coquetted, and which were coming to be believed. 
 Another was the immigration of large bodies of Euro- 
 peans, who had been imbued ^\ith those doctrines 
 much more deeply, and who began to insist on a logi- 
 cal application of the principles of the republican sys- 
 tem. These immigrants sought the free states, because 
 they hated slavery and all its works. They demanded 
 to be treated on the principles of equality, and they 
 administered a fatal blow to the remains of privilege 
 in America. The Irish of the Protestant faith, who 
 ^' were out in '98," played an especially important part 
 in moulding opinion in the new direction in the Mid- 
 dle and Western states. 
 
 Another cause of the change was the rise of the 
 American manufacturing system under the protection 
 given by the Tariffs of 1824 and 1828. When the 
 disasters of 1837 fell upon the country, the laboring 
 class had attained a relative importance which it never 
 had had before. It was the sufferings of the work- 
 ingmen in 1837-40 that, more than any other circum- 
 stance, roused the people to expel from power the party 
 which was held responsible for the depression of our 
 industries, and which refused to undertake a remcdv.
 
 THE WORKINGMAN. 
 
 67 
 
 It is said that the workingman now appears in the argu- 
 ments of the Protectionists because their other argu- 
 ments had broken down ; but this is not the reason. 
 There is not an argument in any of Matthew Carey's 
 multitudinous pamphlets, or in Frederick List's 
 "Outlines of American Political Economy" (1827), 
 or in Alexander Hamilton's Treasury Report, that is 
 not used by Protectionists as freely as before 1840. 
 The reason that we hear of protection for American 
 labor since 1840 as not before that date, is that the 
 workingman was rising to his rightful place in the 
 American state through the decay of aristocratic pre- 
 judice, and that his increase in numbers made his injury 
 from the Free Trade policy a much more serious ele- 
 ment in the situation. 
 
 That opinion pla}'S a great part in determining the 
 rate of wages, is admitted by the English economists. 
 They say in their definition of the "natural and neces- 
 sary rate of wages," that this embraces what will fur- 
 nish the single workman not only with the real neces- 
 saries of life, but with " those things which his class 
 regard. as necessaries." That is, the public opinion of 
 a class, and that the weakest although the most numer- 
 ous, suffices to add the price of beer to the English 
 workman's wages ; and if the temperance people were 
 to persuade him to forswear beer, they would cause a 
 corresponding reduction of his wages. What is thus 
 ascribed to the public opinion of a class, is far truer 
 of the general public opinion. It establishes an ideal 
 of what the condition of the working man should be, 
 and it is the great force which operates to lift or lower 
 his condition. In aristocratic Europe public opinion 
 has depressed him, because the conviction of human
 
 68 UNIVERSITY LECTURES. 
 
 equality which came in with the French Revokition is 
 still the propcrt}' of a minority. The translation of 
 the ideas of that Revolution into economic fact has 
 gone forward more rapidly in America, although far 
 from complete. We are giving freer scope to the 
 economic laws which tend to equalize the condition of 
 the capitalist and the wage-earner, and which enable 
 the workman to command the services of capital on 
 terms increasingly favorable to himself We are doing 
 this by lifting off this class the weight of social 
 prejudices, which once held it down even in America. 
 We are enabling that progress from what is worse to 
 better in the case of labor and wages, wdiich is the 
 law of economic development. 
 
 " But what has all this to do with the Tariff? " 
 Much every way. The Tariff is the arrangement by 
 which we give the law its chance. It is not the origi- 
 native force in raising wages, I most cordially admit. 
 But it is the means of isolating the field of our na- 
 tional industries from European competitions, to an 
 extent which enables us to carry our ideals into prac- 
 tice. Remove the Tariff, and you throw the American 
 workman into competition with the underpaid labor 
 of Europe, and you force his employer to pay him at 
 substantially European rates. I am aware that the 
 rate could not fall so low as in Europe, and need not. 
 Decades of high wages in America have lifted Ameri- 
 can labor in most departments to a level of efficiency, 
 which would give it some permanent advantages. But 
 this higher efficiency is not enough to achieve its 
 independence of protection, and of this there probably 
 would be steady decline in amount and effect, under 
 the regime of low wages. Higher efficiency has been
 
 THE WORKINGMAX. 
 
 69 
 
 in large measure due to the better spirit infused into 
 the workman by wages that enabled him to feel that 
 he could live like a human being and educate his 
 children. Any decline from these, — and Free Traders 
 generally admit that under Free Tra<3e there would be 
 a decline, — is to be deprecated on account of its social 
 and moral as well as its economic effects. I know of 
 nothing more touching the literature of labor than the 
 protest made some years ago against a reduction of 
 wages in the coal-mining districts of Pennsylvania. 
 The authors of the protest said it was not a question 
 of comfort merely. It was the social status of their 
 class that was at stake. They dreaded going back to 
 the wages of the years before the war, because they 
 feared that it would take them down to the level of 
 their life in general at that time. 
 
 The Tariff then is like the circle the magician draws 
 around himself before he can work his wonders. It 
 bounds and circumscribes for the sake of the greater 
 efficiency thus to be had. In considering its results 
 in this connection for the last twenty-five years in this 
 country, it is but fair to bear in mind under what spe- 
 cial disadvantages these have been achieved. The 
 burdens, losses and ravages of civil war began this 
 period. The pressure of a national debt greater than 
 the country ever had known, and the evils of a depre- 
 ciated and fluctuating currency, prolonged the mis- 
 chiefs of the war into the years of peace. The rapid 
 readjustments of industry to new labor-saving inven- 
 tions have gone on as not since the era of Watt and 
 Arkwright, and have disturbed the labor market to 
 an extent which has hardly been appreciated. And 
 whereas formerly this disturbance was confined to man-
 
 yo 
 
 IWIIEKSITY LECTURES. 
 
 ufacturcs, since 1S55 it has affected commerce and 
 agriculture equally. The sailor has been largely dis- 
 placed by steam, and Mr. IMcCormick's reaper has 
 enabled the harvesting of far greater crops at a far 
 less expense for 'labor. Although patented in 1835, 
 it had to wait twenty years before its merits were 
 appreciated ; and it did not attract the attention of th ; 
 American farmer until its great success at the French 
 Exhibition of 1855 showed the world of w'hat it was 
 capable. During the war it and a group of similar 
 inventions did grand service in preventing the drain 
 of men to the front from reducing our productivity 
 in agriculture. But they have carried this difficulty 
 of adjusting labor to new conditions into our farming. 
 In manufactures the progress in this direction has 
 been equally embarrassing. In some of our factories, 
 the working force has been reduced to one-half of 
 what it was, without any reduction in the output. 
 
 Yet in spite of all this there has been an undeniable 
 and great advance in the condition of the American 
 laborer, and an advance whose fruits have not been 
 lost to him even by this world-wide depression of the 
 last ten years. It is true that until last summer there 
 was a disposition to call this in question, and it is to 
 your Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics that we are 
 indebted for evidence such as puts the matter beyond 
 doubt or dispute. The Report made by that Bureau 
 last summer is one of the most careful pieces of work 
 that has been undertaken by modern statists. It 
 shows by a comparison of English with Massachusetts 
 facts, that the mass of labor least favorably situated 
 in this country has attained a position which English 
 laborers must envy. Until this Report of Colonel
 
 THE WORKINGMAN. 
 
 71 
 
 Wright's appeared, it was said, " The Tariff takes 
 from the working man as much as it gives him. It 
 may be true that it secures him the doubtful advantage 
 of higher wages ; but what does this avail him if at 
 the same time it increases the cost of living to such a 
 degree that he has no better results in food, clothing, 
 housing and saving than his English competitor?" 
 Now Colonel Wright's Report shows that wages in 
 Massachusetts average sixty-two per cent higher than 
 in England ; that living is but seventeen and one- 
 quarter per cent higher ; and that eleven per cent of 
 this difference is due to the higher cost of house-rent. 
 He shows that the actual standard of living is fifty per 
 cent higher in Massachusetts than in England ; and 
 that if the Massachusetts workman were to eat as 
 poor food, wear as poor clothing, and live in as mean 
 a house as the English workman, he could save three- 
 eighths of his income; whereas the English workman, 
 living at that mean rate, can save less than two per 
 cent. He shows that in the trades carried on in both 
 Massachusetts and England, the English maximum 
 wages are below ^20 for men and about $6 for women ; 
 while the Massachusetts maximums are ^40 and ;$20 
 respectively. One Scotch manufacturer said to ex- 
 Governor Cheney of New Hampshire, when facts like 
 these were pressed upon him, " Our people don't require 
 so much as yours, and they are not accustomed to it." 
 Colonel Wright's figures were anticipated by the 
 Special Report of Mr. Edward Young on " Labor in 
 Europe and America" (Washington, 1875); and by 
 Mr. Robert P. Porter's valuable letters in TJic Trilntnc. 
 They may be said to run parallel to the figures fur- 
 nished by the Agricultural Bureau, which show that
 
 72 
 
 UNIVERSITY LECTURES. 
 
 wherever the Tariff has done its work of bringing our 
 industries into equiHbrium, there the rate of wages is 
 higher than in the more agricultural parts of the 
 country. 
 
 To another Massachusetts statist wc are indebted 
 for a proof of the freedom with which the law of tend- 
 ency towards equality is working in America. That 
 law was enunciated by Mr. Carey very early in his ca- 
 reer as an economist. It was adopted by M. Bastiat 
 in his " Harmonies Economiques," without any credit 
 given; and from M. Bastiat Mr. Edward Atkinson has 
 taken it, apparently without any knowledge as to its 
 real authorship. According to Mr. Carey the capitalist 
 receives a constantly diminishing share of the joint 
 earnings of labor and capital, while the share of the 
 laborer is constantly increasing. The same is true of 
 the distribution of the harvest between landlord and 
 tenant. The landlord's share diminishes relatively to 
 the amount of the harvest, even while increasing in 
 absolute amount. And so important is this law in 
 the view of Mr. Carey's school, that they would test 
 the naturalness of any system by the degree to which 
 this tendency to equality operates under that system. 
 Mr. Atkinson, in his Address before the British Asso- 
 ciation at Montreal last summer, took for the basis of 
 his argument the cotton industry of New England, 
 with which he possesses an unrivalled familiarity. He 
 showed, comparing 1830 with 1884, that the capital 
 needed to start a spinning-mill was thirty-seven per cent 
 less than in 1830; that the number of spindles was two 
 hundred and seventy-six per cent greater on an aver- 
 age in each mill; that the number of operatives re- 
 quired to attend to a thousand spindles was sixty-four
 
 THE VVORKINGMAN. y-^ 
 
 per cent less; and that the product of each spindle 
 was three hundred and fourteen per cent greater. But 
 his most important fact was that while competition had 
 kept the profits down to a lev^el of not more than ten per 
 cent on the capital invested, wages had risen. Profits 
 had fallen eighty-three per cent, while wages had risen 
 seventy-seven per cent. And he carries the comparison 
 on to the other decades as compared with the present. 
 That is genuine progress! Prices fall; profits fall; 
 wages rise. Man gains and tiling^ decline in value. 
 
 Mr. Atkinson admits that American wages are 
 higher than in Europe, and gives as the reason that 
 we have no artificial land system and no system of 
 caste or privilege. You know how heartily I agree 
 with him on this point. We differ only as to his 
 assumption that if the Tariff were out of the way, 
 American wages would not be injuriously affected by 
 the competition of countries in which caste and privi- 
 lege are still built into the social order, and where the 
 land system is one of the many expressions of this 
 fact. If you join two tanks by an open pipe, the water 
 in the two will find a common level. If you throw 
 open the markets of America to English competition, 
 then wages must come down to something like the 
 English level. And this some Free Traders are candid 
 enough and consistent enough to admit. It is a neces- 
 sary corollary to the principle of the efficacy of com- 
 petition in bringing things to a level. 
 
 Is this law of tendency to equality at work in Eng- 
 land as freely as in America? Mr. Robert Gififen 
 thinks he has shown that while the income of the 
 capitalist class has increased one hundred and ten per 
 cent since 1843, that of the working classes has in-
 
 y^ UNIVERSITY LECTURES. 
 
 creased one hundred and thirty per cent. But the part 
 of this income which is covered by the exact figures 
 of the income-tax returns gives a different result. It 
 shows an increase of but one hundred per cent, 
 being ten per cent behind the gains of the capitahst 
 class. The other part of his statement is based upon 
 conjecture. And when we recall the fact that Mr. 
 Mulhall finds the average wealth of the English sub- 
 ject to amount to $i lOO, while that of the American 
 citizen is but i^pSo, we see reason to doubt Mr. Giffen's 
 estimates. Of this wealth a very large part has beea 
 accumulated in the last forty years, and yet English 
 wages fall far below American. That can only mean 
 that there has been no such operation of the tendency 
 to equality in England as in this country. Mr. W.. 
 Cunningham, in his admirable book, " The Growth of 
 English Industry and Commerce" (Cambridge, 1882),, 
 denies the existence even of such a tendency. He 
 says, "Under the regime of free competition, which 
 has been dominant for more than a century and a 
 half, . . . there is a constant tendency for the 
 position of laborers to be depressed relatively to that 
 of capitalists." He admits that the wealth of the nation 
 has adv^anced enormously, but insists that that of the 
 laborer has not advanced so fast as the whole wealth 
 of the country, or that of other classes. And Mr. 
 Thorold Rogers in his " Six Centuries of Work and 
 Wages," maintains that the condition of the working- 
 man on English land was better in the Middle Ages 
 than it is to-day. Of Mr. Giffen's Essay, he says, "I 
 have read nothing lately, the results of which are more 
 open to debate." Mr. Giffen's materials he pronounces 
 "of very unequal value,"
 
 THE WORKINGMAN. 
 
 75 
 
 Even in considering such progress as has been 
 made in England, it is not fair to leave America out of 
 account. Forty years ago Mr. Cobden advised the 
 English workman to save the price of a passage to 
 America, and with this in his pocket to negotiate with 
 his employer for such wages as he thought it fair to 
 ask. If that advice has not been followed to the 
 letter, its spirit has been acted on. The knowledge 
 that America is so accessible, that it is a country 
 where labor is honored, and that it furnishes a growing 
 market for industrial skill, has had much to do with 
 the terms on which English labor has been hired since 
 the time we began to lift ourselves out of industrial 
 dependence upon England. English masters remem- 
 ber it, and feel that their problem with their " hands " 
 would be easier if we were not in their way. 
 
 " But there you have reached the rediictio ad absur- 
 dum of Protection. You profess to protect labor, and 
 yet you permit its free importation in any quantity. 
 To be consistent you should put a protective duty on 
 such importations." Nay ; we should do better than 
 that. We should put an absolute prohibition upon the 
 importation of labor. We have done so with the im- 
 ported coolie labor of China, and I hope to see a 
 similar prohibition on all such importations, whether 
 they are from China, or Italy or Hungary or Ireland.' 
 The coolie, who comes here without his family, who 
 strikes no root in our soil, who is a virtual slave until 
 he has earned as much as pays his passage-money, 
 and who only wants to sa\x' a pittance to spend at 
 home, — him we do not want on any terms. He is the 
 
 ^ This was done by the Congress then in session.
 
 76 
 
 I W/rERS/TY LECTURES. 
 
 imported laborer. But the free immigrant, who comes 
 to cast in his lot and that of his posterity with the 
 American people, to accept their standard of living, 
 and to make a home here for the wife and children he 
 brings, — him we do want always. It is true he is a 
 competitor in one particular line of production with 
 the workmen who are here already; but true also that 
 he is a fresh customer for those in every other line of 
 production that ministers to general wants, and espe- 
 cially for our producers of food. 
 
 Mr. Rathbone of Liverpool has made an ingenious 
 criticism on our American wages system, which de- 
 serves some attention. He admits that American 
 wages are higher than English, but he claims for the 
 latter that they are steadier and therefore on the whole 
 more beneficial. He finds in the comparative unsteadi- 
 ness of American wages a " demoralizing " influence, 
 which he says must work against the highest interests 
 of those who receive them. This way of reasoning at 
 once recalls Mr. Carlylc's " Ilias Americana in Nuce." 
 According to Mr. Carlyle and other apologists for 
 human bondage, the great merit of slavery was in the 
 steadiness of condition it secured to the laborer, and 
 the security it gave him against such shifts from better 
 to worse as befell the free laborer. And there is no 
 doubt that slavery did all this, which Mr. Rathbone 
 thinks of such importance; and no doubt also that 
 when a nation's work-people have been brought down 
 to what the English economists define as "the natural 
 rate of wages," there is for them also a stability not 
 unlike that of the slave. When workmen have been 
 made to live upon such wages as secure them the real 
 and the su])posed necessaries of existence, you cannot
 
 THE IVOR KINGMAN. 
 
 77 
 
 bring them much lower than that. They may as well 
 starve in idleness as starve working, so they are insured 
 from depression of wages below that standard. But it 
 seems that the English workmen are not content with 
 that rate, and by their Trades' Unions have secured a 
 higher rate, in spite of the demonstrations of the ortho- 
 dox economists that a higher rate is impossible. And 
 as the steadiness of the old rate has disappeared, the 
 " demoralization" mourned by Mr. Rathbone h.as set 
 in. An English rector quotes the working men's 
 wives as saying that an increase in wages means little 
 more than a larger consumption of strong drink, and 
 a more liberal beating of wives. 
 
 In America it has meant something very different 
 from that. In this State the deposits in the savings' 
 banks have increased fivefold since 1861, and the 
 number of depositors has nearly doubled. In the 
 savings' banks of New England there are deposits ex- 
 ceeding by forty millions all the deposits in the Eng- 
 lish savings' banks ; and in New York the deposits are 
 fully up to the English aggregate. This is not due to 
 the greater facilities given for such deposits in Amer- 
 ica. On the contrary we have nothing so admirable 
 as the English Post-Office Savings' Banks, and in 
 England every pains has been taken to make the habit 
 of saving general and popular. It is due to the fact 
 that the English workman has but two per cent mar- 
 gin for saving, while the American has a very con- 
 siderable margin, and makes this "demoralizing" use 
 of it. We do not use savings' banks to any great ex- 
 tent in Philadelphia, because we think we have some- 
 thing much better in our building associations. These 
 are managed by the investors themselves, and they use
 
 78 
 
 i'X/rERS/TV LFXTURES. 
 
 the savings of our workingmen to secure homes for 
 their own class. They have added twenty per cent 
 of the value of all the real estate in our city, and have 
 coxered a large area with small houses. I know of no 
 finer sight in America than the one I had from the 
 third storx" of a house in which I used to live in the 
 South-western part of the city, where I overlooked 
 nearl}- a square mile of such houses, — all the homes 
 of those who were living by their toil in workshop and 
 store, and who there enjoyed a family life in that pri- 
 vacy which is the first condition of refinement and 
 social elevation. I see nothing " demoralizing" in such 
 results as these. 
 
 It is precisely to the moral results of higher wages 
 that we appeal as the real vindication of our policy 
 and our ideals. Higher wages have made the Ameri- 
 can workman more effective as a workman. . They have 
 put a readier spirit into him. They have made him 
 willing to turn his hand to anything there is to be 
 done in workshop or factory, while the English work- 
 man is bound by rules which caricature the caste 
 restrictions of aristocratic societv'. They have given 
 him a promptness of attention, which is of incalculable 
 value to his employer. At the Centennial an English 
 capitalist bought a machine which works on the prin- 
 ciple of a stamp. It was worked by an American 
 workman, who never lost a stroke. When it went to 
 England it was found that an English workman, with 
 a boy to help him in getting his work ready, lost from 
 twent)' to thirty strokes out of every hundred. 
 Higher wages have given the American workman a 
 genuine interest in the success of the business in 
 which he is at work. An employer once wrote to me
 
 THE WORKIKGMAN. jg 
 
 tliat he found that one of his men had been lying 
 awake at night trying to devise an improvement which 
 would overcome a defect in the machine he was using, 
 and that without any expectation of reward for so 
 doing. In many of our workshops there is a standing 
 offer of remuneration for the invention of such im- 
 provements ; and the remarkable achievements of our 
 inventors are but the summit-peaks of the general 
 high level of intelligence in cur workmen. Mr. 
 Tiffany's establishment has furnished as abundant 
 opportunities for testing the quality of American and 
 foreign labor as can be found anywhere ; and his fore- 
 man declares that the American workman has no 
 superior in the world. 
 
 Higher wages have made possible to the great body 
 of our workmen a very different kind of home life from 
 that which is usual in Europe. It is not merely that 
 their homes are much superior as buildings, but that 
 so large a proportion of their wives are at home 
 and their children at school, where in Europe they 
 would all be in the factory or even in the workshop. 
 Take the case of nail-making. In the British Islands 
 nearly all the nails are made by hand ; it is only a few 
 years since nail-making machinery from America was 
 set up for the first time in Belfast, and was, I believe, 
 the first of the kind known in the United Kingdom. 
 Throughout the Black Country in central Iuigland,}-ou 
 will see women and girls cased in leather aprons work- 
 ing at the nail-forges. So with the hoop-iron ties used 
 in the fastening of cotton-bales. In 1883 there was a 
 great and a successful outcr)^ against the duty on these 
 ties, which are made in America by men exclusively. 
 In England they are made by women and girls. Even
 
 ^so u.yirEA's/Tv lectures. 
 
 where women and girls are employed in our manu- 
 factures, it is in less laborious and unwomanly work 
 than is required of them in luigland, Belgium and 
 Germany. 
 
 " All this," we are told, " only illustrates the self- 
 ishness of the protective system. It means a refusal 
 of the American people to give any employment to 
 the toiling millions of Europe. It means that we are 
 to be content to have them live in their hunger and 
 nakedness, and not to minister to their wants." I 
 have already given you my reasons for believing that 
 we can render no higher service to the working classes 
 of Europe, than to maintain our own workmen at the 
 highest possible level of comfort. It is that which has 
 furnished them with the fulcrum for the raising of 
 their wages, so far as this has been effected already. 
 It is that which is now giving them their best help in 
 carrying on that peaceful, social revolution, by which 
 the aristocratic ideals are driven out of politics and 
 industry alike, and a truer conception of the worth of 
 man and workman is taking their place. Whatever 
 depresses the conditicm of labor in America, gives new 
 strength to the friends of restriction and privilege in 
 Europe. Whatever deviates that condition, makes the 
 advance of the social forces of reform and equality 
 more rapid. And as this is the effect of our Tariff, no 
 other class has a greater interest in its maintenance 
 than the working people of Europe. 
 
 But even if it were not so, the simple fact that it is 
 best for American labor to impose restrictions on the 
 competition with Europe, would be reason enough. 
 Our first tluty in this matter is to our neighbors at 
 home. That word " nei</hbor " seems to mc to be the
 
 THE IVOR KING MAN. gj 
 
 foundation of social ethics. It is .a grand Bible word, 
 to which we cannot give too much weight. It means 
 that in the divine order of human hfe, I am not related 
 equally and indifferently to all mankind. A few stand 
 very close to me, and my duty to them comes first. 
 To a much larger body I am bound by varying de- 
 grees of social nearness, or neighborhood ; — to the 
 community, to the state, to the nation. My neighbor 
 is the man whom this divine order of life brings into 
 my lifj, and whose claim upon me grows out of this 
 nearness to me. It is not the man of my sect, or even 
 the man of the same nativity with me, or of my race. 
 It is the man who comes into my life who has the 
 neighbor's claim. And if a collision were possible be- 
 tween the interest of workmen in Europe and of those 
 in our own country, I for one would do what I thought 
 best for the latter, and would feel that I had discharged 
 the highest responsibility in discharging the nearest. 
 In so doing I should be no more selfish, than in heed- 
 ing the Apostle's words : " If any provide not for his 
 own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath 
 denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel." 
 
 Nor is this code of ethics negative. You may turn 
 maxims of this kind into mere negations, — into mere 
 denials of your obligations to others than those whom 
 you know, as some people urge their dut}' to " the 
 heathen at home " as a reason for giving nothing to for- 
 eign missions. But if you take it the other wa\', and look 
 at it as a positive law, you will find it a most exacting 
 law. It will help to bring you into right relations 
 with th-e imperfect specimens of humanity^ who rub 
 elbows with you, with the brother whom you have 
 seen and whose faults you cannot help seeing also. 
 6
 
 82 UNI VERS/ TV LEC'JURES. 
 
 Above all it will help you to recognize the kinship of 
 humanity as binding you to all who render you indus- 
 trial service, however humble ; and it will keep you from 
 thinking of them as merely "hands," or tools for your 
 service.
 
 IV. 
 ANSWERS TO OBJECTIONS. 
 
 'Gentlemen of the University : — 
 
 I SHOULD be sorry to ha\e you suppose that my first 
 three lectures covered the whole ground of the argu- 
 ment for Protective Tariffs. Some important branches 
 of that argument, such as the necessity of Protection 
 on the part of a less wealthy country for the retention 
 of its supply of gold coin, I have not been able to 
 "touch upon at all. And instead of proceeding to deal 
 with these, I feel constrained to occupy this last lecture 
 with an answer to some of the objections to this policy 
 •of Protection, you are likely to hear. 
 
 Permit me again to remind you that there is no such 
 thing as ideal legislation. Every law has in it an ele- 
 ment of compromise ; it sacrifices something for the 
 sake of a greater gain. It is necessary to lay great 
 stress on this point; for if we forget it, we lay ourselves 
 open to those arts by which the doctrinaire seeks to 
 discredit the best and the most valuable methods of 
 social procedure. It is only necessary for him to fix 
 attention upon the lesser good which the law .sacrifices, 
 to treat this as though it were the main thing to be 
 thought of, and by exaggeration of its value to bring 
 it to fill a place in men's thoughts to which it has no 
 claim. Such men are they who provoked Burke'^ 
 
 83
 
 84 UNI J 'ERSIT ) ' LECTURES. 
 
 saying that "a penny held close to the eye, comes to 
 look bigger than a sovereign in the distance." There 
 never was a marriage law, for instance, which did not 
 work hardship by either its looseness or its severity. 
 And there never was a Tariff law, to which human 
 ingenuity could not find or devise some plausible ob- 
 jections. The best is but a rough and ready way of 
 accomplishing certain economic results, and must be 
 judged broadly by its effects. 
 
 Furthermore the Tariff is no cure-all. There are 
 no panaceas in medicine, and it is only quacks who say 
 there are. There are some well ascertained specifics for 
 certain diseases; and the Tariff is like them. It is the 
 specific for the evil of a defective home production in 
 some line of industry which is essential to the national 
 welfare. Its object is to effect such an equalization of 
 Conditions, as will induce and enable the capitalist at 
 home to put his capital into the neglected and djfect- 
 ive industry, and bring home production up to the level 
 of national demand. It seeks in this way the diversi- 
 fication of our industry, and if it has accomplished 
 that it has done its work, and is not to be censured for 
 not making men wise, virtuous or anything else that 
 is not within its proper scope. And yet for these 
 things it is censured. 
 
 It is said, for instance, "The Tariff is the instrument 
 of dishonesty. It enables excessive charges in the 
 years after its establishment, in that it gives a kind of 
 monopoly, until the amount of home capital invested 
 in the industry has become sufficient to cause a vigor- 
 ous competition for the home market." It is quite pos- 
 sible that there have been excessive charges made and 
 excessive profits reaped under such circumstances. If
 
 ANSWERS rO OBJECTIONS. g- 
 
 it be so, the remedy is both near at hand and certain 
 in its operation. But certainly no censor of our busi- 
 ness morals would think of selecting our protected 
 manufactures as the most glaring illustration of want 
 of principle and overcharges in their dealings with the 
 public. He would speak of the great " Corners" in 
 oil, pork and wheat, and of the speculations in railroad 
 securities, as the darkest stains on our commercial 
 morality. Dr. Lyon Playfair, who was in this country 
 some years ago, wrote in Macmillan s Magasine on 
 his return an expression of his admiration for the 
 honesty of the work done by the manufacturers of 
 New England, and said he recognized a survival of 
 the old Puritan spirit in this. 
 
 It is said with equal unreason, that "the Tariff 
 tempts men to undertake industries under conditions, 
 in whicn permanent success is as good as impossible." 
 It maybe quite true that protected manufactures ha\-e 
 been begun under such conditions. But so have un- 
 protected manufactures. "Against stupidity even the 
 gods are powerless." The shift of English cotton 
 spinning from Manchester to Oldham shows that even 
 the Manchester school may put an indu.stry in the 
 wrong place. And when an American tries to spin 
 cotton yarn in central New York, away from the sea 
 air which plays so prominent a part in the industry, 
 we may expect that he will go to school to experience 
 for a sharp lesson. But manufacturers have no mo- 
 nopoly of stupidity. It is seen among commercial 
 men in at least equal measure. On the revolt of the 
 Spanish colonies, English exporting firms .sent invoices 
 of skates to cities where ice and snow had never been 
 seen, and enough Epsom Salts to some places to
 
 86 UNI J EH SIT V LEC TURES. 
 
 physic the whole population once a day for several- 
 years. 
 
 The great objection to the Tariff, and one into which 
 so many others resolve themselves, is to its effects upon 
 prices of protected commodities. It is charged that " it 
 operates to make things dear and scarce, and therefore 
 it oppresses the country upon which it is imposed." 
 
 I answer, in the first place, that neither scarcity nor 
 dearness is the object of the Tariff, but the reverse. 
 Its object is to cause an increased production of the 
 articles it affects. If for instance we had had no duty 
 on iron, then the production of iron for the world's 
 use would have been much smaller than it now is. 
 And by consequence it would have been dearer to the 
 world than it is. Free Traders vindicate England for 
 leaving herself dependent upon other countries for her 
 supply of wheat, by the argument that she is the more 
 secure from scarcity and famine, since she draws her 
 food supply from a larger area. Whatever then en- 
 larges, the area from which we derive our supply of 
 the manufactures we need must tend in the same way 
 to cheapness and plenty. 
 
 Sometimes a duty on an article not largely made at 
 home before its imposition causes no increase in the 
 price, either soon or late. The reason for this is that 
 the profits exacted by the middleman are often exces- 
 sive, and the Tariff has the effect of forcing him to be 
 content with less. ' Mr. Thomas Hughes, when he 
 was last in Philadelphia, told us that our Tariff had 
 effected such an increase of prices, that what had cost 
 him but a shilling at home, he was asked a dollar for 
 in America. Let us look at that statement closely :. 
 The duties in our Tariff did not amount to so much as-
 
 ANSWERS TO OBJECTIONS. 87 
 
 sixty-six per cent ad valorem, or 8 pence on the Eng- 
 lish shilling. Deducting is 8d from the 4s which 
 make a dollar, there is left 2s 4d. What became of 
 that 2s 4d which was neither part of the English price, 
 not part of the American duty ? I will be told that Mr. 
 Hughes put his case too strongly. I do not believe 
 that he did. He came to this country with a preference, 
 as was natural, for certain articles of English make and 
 use, and in which there is little or no American com- 
 petition. He had to pay accordingly. My own family 
 had just the same experience, when we had not yet 
 been sufficiently Americanized to make our purchases 
 on American lines. We found the shilling was the 
 equivalent of the dollar. And that was in 1857, under 
 the nearest approach to Free Trade this country ever 
 had or is likely to have. 
 
 In such circumstances the trader finds it necessary 
 to accept a reduction of his profits to hold the market. 
 Or he finds the law has cut so heavily into them, that 
 it is better worth his while to sell the home-made article 
 at the old price, than to try to keep the market for his 
 foreign correspondents. This is the change which has 
 been going on in New York for the last fifteen years. 
 Firms which once dealt only in imported textiles or 
 hardwares and were zealous for Free Trade, are now 
 selling American goods alone, and are either friendly to 
 the protective policy or indifferent. They know from 
 their own list of prices that the country is served as 
 cheaply as before with the goods they deal in. The 
 lists of prices furnished in 1869 to Mr. David A. Wells 
 by the principal New York dealers in textiles showed 
 that prices were no higher than in 1859 under Free. 
 Trade. At present they are much lower.
 
 88 UNiJ'ERsn^y lectl-res. 
 
 Sometimes a protective duty keeps prices in favor 
 of the consumer simply b)- enabling the home pro- 
 ducer to extend his operations to a much <jreater scale. 
 As in publishing a newspaper, eveiy increase in the 
 circulation enables the publisher to give a better paper 
 at a lower price, so, but in a less degree, is it with 
 manufactures. There are certain elements of cost 
 which are equal with a great out-put and a small one. 
 Every extension of the business makes the costs from 
 these outlays smaller in proportion to the whole quan- 
 tity. Thus the duties on cotton goods laid by the 
 Tariff of 1842, instead of making those goods dearer, 
 actually reduced the price. 
 
 Even where a protective duty does cause an in- 
 crease in prices, this increase is very seldom permanent. 
 If the profits in any line of production be above the 
 average, capital will usually be attracted into that busi- 
 ness, until the home competition pulls down prices and 
 profits to the normal level. This levelling does not 
 proceed with the rapidity and uniformity which the 
 older economists took for granted. But it does oper- 
 ate sooner or later, and the Protective policy put no 
 restraint on its operation. English Free Traders insist 
 on this fact as a reason against Protection. They say, 
 "Your tariff aimed at an increase of prices; but as it 
 put no limit to home competition, that pulled prices 
 and profits in the protected industries down to the 
 usual level, and thus defeated the object of the Tariff" 
 We reply, " That was the very intention of our Tariff 
 laws, to bring prices and profits in the protected lines 
 of production to the normal level." American Free 
 Traders seem to differ from their English brethren, by 
 denying that this will be the result. They seem to
 
 ANSWERS TO OBJECTIONS. 89 
 
 assert that the amount of the protective duty will be 
 added to the price, in spite of the home competition. In 
 this they seem to me to abandon that faith in the efficacy 
 of competition as an equalizing force, which is the 
 foundation of Adam Smith's teaching. They " read 
 themselves out of" his school, by taking this position. 
 There are more serious objections to this notion 
 that the protected manufacturer can add the duty to 
 price, than that it is in collision with Free Trade 
 orthodoxy. It is in conflict with common sense. To 
 use a favorite illustration of Horace Greeley's, would 
 ■a thousand dollar duty on a ton of imported iron, put 
 the price of iron up to a thousand dollars a ton? Does 
 the duty of fifteen cents a bushel upon imported pota- 
 toes enable the farmers to extract fifteen million dol- 
 lars a year out of the consumers, which we would not 
 have to pay if there were no such duty. Suppose that 
 our Tariff were prohibitory upon every article on which 
 it imposes a protective duty ; — would there then be no 
 limit to the price at which those articles would be sold 
 in this country? Suppose there were no other country 
 on the planet than ourselves ; — would our fifty -five 
 millions not manage to supply each other with all the 
 great staples of necessary use on reasonable and honest 
 terms ? Or are we to suppose that our only hold upon 
 life's comforts and upon the Ten Commandments 
 besides, is through the existence of other countries, 
 which are eager to share in the work of supplying our 
 needs? The very utmost that a prohibitory Tariff 
 could do would be to throw us on our own resources 
 to a degree which no protectionist ever has proposed 
 or even thought of. Even in that case it would be 
 found that there are laws which determine prices apart
 
 90 
 
 UNIVERSITY LECTURES. 
 
 from the duties of the Tariff, or the foreign competition 
 it checks. 
 
 Is it safe to assume, as our Free Traders seem 
 always to assume, that in the absence of the home 
 competition which the Tariff has caused, we would be 
 able to buy foreign goods at the lowest price at which 
 they could be reasonably afforded, or that we would 
 get them as cheap as we do now ? Mr. Hughes sug- 
 gests the contrary by his shilling and dollar argument. 
 We have had repeated instances of the sudden lower- 
 ing of prices upon the beginning of home competition 
 with the foreign producer. The most notable case is 
 that of steel rails. During the Civil War, when this 
 manufacture was already established in England, an 
 agent was sent by several of our largest railroads to 
 ask at what price steel rails could be furnished at the 
 wharf in Philadelphia. The answer was, " One hun- 
 dred and forty dollars (twenty-eight pounds) in gold a 
 ton." The price seemed exorbitant to those railroads, 
 and they combined to establish the manufacture in 
 America. Before a single rail had been rolled in this 
 country, the English makers revised their offer and 
 proposed to furnish rails at sixteen pounds a ton ! If 
 we now can buy them at half that price, it is becau.se 
 John Bull has not the monopoly of the business. In 
 1869-70 there was a sudden increase in our demand 
 for pig-iron. At once the English producer put the 
 price up to twice what it had been before. Here again 
 we may borrow from our Free Tiaclcrs the maxim 
 that it is wisest to have " a large field from which to 
 draw our supply" of necessaries such as iron. 
 
 Thus far I have been accepting and arguing from 
 this assumption that the question of the price at which
 
 ANSWERS TO OBJECTIONS. qi 
 
 articles can be bought is the main point in national 
 economy. Let me now suggest that this assumption 
 is itself a fallacy, and that the protective policy would 
 be the wiser one, even if its effects were to increase the 
 price of every protected article, both greatly and per- 
 manently. It is said, " We should buy in the cheapest 
 market and sell in the dearest." But what if buying 
 in the cheapest market leaves us no dearest market to 
 sell in, but only a cheapest market for that purpose 
 also ? What if, by refusing to buy in the cheapest 
 market, we can create at our own doors markets ia 
 which the relation of price to price is more favorable 
 than is possible under any other arrangement ? It is 
 this matter of the relation of price to price that 
 chiefly interests every one who has something to sell. 
 It is little gain to him that he can buy cheaply, if he 
 has either no market to sell in, or a wretchedly bad 
 one. To fix his attention upon the one side of the 
 account alone, and to distract his attention from the 
 other, is not the work of a wise and just adviser. And 
 this is exactly what makes up most of the arguments 
 for the Free Trade policy. The citizen in these argu- 
 ments is always buying. That he has anything to sell, 
 and needs to look to both sides of the account, he i'> 
 not reminded. Protection looks to both sides. It 
 brings the farmer and the artizan into neighborhood, 
 that the former may get a better price for his produce. 
 It effects that div^ersification of industry, in whose 
 absence there is no competition for labor, or only such 
 a competition — Cliffe Leslie tells us — as results in 
 forcing wages down. It secures that more rapid 
 societary circulation, in which exchanges are made 
 with greater rapidity and greater advantage to all par-
 
 Q 2 i '■'^'Z VERS IT V LECTURES. 
 
 ties, and in which the demand for every kind o( ser- 
 vice, — intellectual as well as manual toil, — is constantly 
 on tliJ increase. 
 
 "Ah! Yes; the producer! That is all your cry. 
 But we think of the consumer first and last. The 
 interest of the producer is but tlie interest of a class, 
 after all is said, while the interest of the consumer is 
 that of society- at large. Your protective legislation is 
 legislation for class interests, and against the interest 
 of the consumer, which is in getting things cheap, from 
 whatever market or workshop they may come. Pro- 
 tective legislation is essentially anti-social." 
 
 This, I admit, is a very strong argument — for the 
 longitude of London. It will have force and weight 
 also in any community that resembles London society, 
 — in which a great body of persons are living off the 
 earnings and accumulations of others, without doing 
 anything to earn a living for themselves. They are 
 indeed consumers, natl consiinicrc fnigcs, whose inter- 
 est is only in the price of what they buy ; for they live 
 a butterfly existence whose industrial problems are 
 summed up in the questions, " What shall we eat, and 
 what shall we drink, and wherewithal shall we be 
 clothed, and with what pastime shall we fill up the 
 hours for which we have no useful work ? " In a great 
 city where such a class gives tone to society, there 
 always is a large body of unwavering Free Traders. 
 And this is the explanation of the contempt and indif- 
 ference with \\hich London has ignored the cries of 
 distress which go up from the mining, iron-working 
 and ship-building districts of Northern and Middle- 
 England this hard winter. This is the reason of its 
 attitude towards that Fair Trade movement, which has
 
 ANSWERS TO OBJECTIONS. qj 
 
 taken root in even Manchester. It is the reason why 
 London with every year becomes more ahen in poHtics 
 and otherwise from the feehngs and convictions of 
 the busy England she no longer represents. 
 
 But in America this w^orship of the Consumer l;as 
 not rooted itself very deeply, or spread its branches 
 very widely. We have a small butterfly class in our 
 great cities, but a constant drain of its members to 
 Europe in search of congenial elements keeps it small. 
 In America we all are producers in some sort. By 
 mind or hand we are adding to the resources of the 
 community, and are interested in the prosperity of its 
 producing classes. 
 
 These " hard times " serve to enable us to see how 
 closely the welfare of society at large is identified with 
 that of the producing classes. If the Free Trader be 
 right, — if cheapness be the interest of the consumer, 
 and if the interest of the consumer be identical with 
 that of society, — then hard times are the best of 
 times, are in fact the paradise of the Free Trader. For 
 hard times are times characterized by a great cheap- 
 ness of all kind of commodities, that being indeed one 
 of their essential characters. Yet the Free Trader does 
 not like hard times a bit better than any of the rest of 
 us, — fails in fact to recognize his paradise as a paradise 
 at all. He looks for an " improvement in prices" with 
 as much anxiety as the rest of the world, and by that 
 he means not a fall but a rise in prices. At times he 
 abuses the Tariff for bringing about hard times, that is 
 for causing this great cheapness of everything, just as 
 before he abused it for making things dear. Surely he 
 is hard to please ! On his principles the Tariff could not 
 do anything better for us than to cause hard times.
 
 94 
 
 UXn'ERSITY LECTURES. 
 
 "But has not the Tariff overstimulated production? 
 Is it not the cause of our making too much of every- 
 thing, and is not ovcr-prpduction a chief cause of hard 
 times?" If this question be asked by any one but a 
 Free Trader, it is entitled to an answer. He is not 
 entitled to any. Possibly it is true that over-produc- 
 tion is a cause of hard times. Perhaps we are making 
 more goods of all kinds — food not excepted, — than 
 we have a right to expect a market for. And again, 
 possibly we are doing nothing of the kind. There is 
 such a thing as a normal demand for commodities, and 
 there seem to be times when the demand is less than 
 normal, through some obstacle coming between the 
 producer and the consumer, and preventing the ex- 
 changes of commodities and services. It seems as if 
 we were in just such a period now, and that the pres- 
 ent strange distrust and paralysis of confidence stood 
 in the way of exchange. These are the times when 
 no man will purchase more than he must, — when the 
 merchant lets his stock of goods run low, and the 
 customer puts up with an old stove or an old kettle, 
 which in ordinary times he would replace with a new 
 one. And not until the st 'ck of goods must be re- 
 placed and the old stove must give way to a new one, 
 and the old kettle must be replaced, will there be a 
 return to normal demand. 
 
 It is one of the unfortunate features of hard times 
 that they tend of themsch'es to stimulate over-pro- 
 duction, by making production so much cheaper. The 
 article made at new rates of cost of raw materials and 
 lower rates of wages, naturally can be furnished and 
 used at more advantageous terms, than can what was 
 produced before hard times began. English ship-
 
 ANSWERS TO OBJECTIONS. p^ 
 
 building, for instance, received a great impulse in the 
 opening years of this period of depression, because 
 ships could be built so cheaply that the ships already 
 in use could not compete with them. The new ships 
 "cut under" the old ones. 
 
 That Protection is the cause of hard times will be 
 said only by those who shut their eyes to the fact that 
 business depression is a world-wide calamity in these 
 years. America has no monopoly of it, and our people 
 are not suffering nearly so severely as are the working 
 classes in England. The most pitiful talcs of suffering 
 reach us from the North of England in particular, and 
 the suffering in Eastern London has reached a depth 
 not known for many years even in that haunt of peren- 
 nial want and misery. I think it very notable that 
 the only workmen around Newcastle who are keeping 
 their heads above water, are those who have a bit of 
 land in connection with their cottages, on which they 
 raise some food for their families. It is this that points 
 to the true remedy for distress among the working 
 people of England. The people who have been rent 
 away from the land, must find their way back to it. 
 
 Free Trade has not averted hard times ; and if Pro- 
 tection in America has not done so, it has saved us 
 from some of the worst consequences of depression. 
 Ill off as we are, Free Trade would have made matters 
 much worse. In that cold wave we had just before 
 Christmas week, we who live on the hills above Phila- 
 delphia found it very hard to keep warm in our houses. 
 We crouched around registers and fire-places to but 
 little purpose. But I did not hear any ope propose to 
 tear down the house, and try how we could get on 
 upon the open hill-side. And I do not see how hard
 
 96 
 
 C WIVEKS/TV LECTURES. 
 
 times are to be remedied by tearing down the Tariff, 
 and making our ports the open dumping-ground for 
 the goods with w hich the markets of Europe are sur- 
 feited. I know it is said that our chief need is larger 
 exports, and that Free Trade, by effecting a general 
 reduction in the cost of manufacture, would enable us 
 to export more freely. But England has all the access 
 to foreign markets which it is supposed Free Trade 
 would secure to us. and yet she is at least no more 
 happy or prosperous than we are without it. 
 
 " Protection," it is charged, " is the enemy of com- 
 merce. It has almost driven our flag from the ocean. 
 It prevents exports by restricting imports, by raising 
 prices and increasing the cost of production." What 
 is commerce? As we use the word in Mr. Carey's 
 school, it is the interchange of services or of commo- 
 dities between persons or groups of different industrial 
 functions. In this sense the United States has the 
 greatest commerce in the world, and would continue 
 to have it, if we had not a single port on our sea-board. 
 It is a bit of English narrowness to make the word 
 cover only the transactions represented by the tables 
 of exports and imports. It is natural enough for 
 England to measure her commerce by that standard, 
 for the vicious policy she has been pursuing for the 
 last century or more, has made her prosperity and 
 almost her existence depend upon the exports and im- 
 ports of commodities through her ports. But it is to 
 shut our eyes to our own happier situation, if we 
 identify our commerce with the amount of our trans- 
 actions with foreign nations effected through the {qv^ 
 harbors on our inhospitable coast. We have the 
 largest commerce of any countr\' in tlie world, in the
 
 A. \^ HE US TO OBJECTIOXS. gy 
 
 true and broad sense of the term, which is sanctioned 
 by old EngUsh .usage. And the tonnage we employ 
 in moving it is the largest any country possesses, if we 
 include all that floats on fresh as well as salt water. 
 
 Our ordinary collections of statistics are quite mis- 
 leading in this respect. They gather up for us only 
 those parts of our commercial exchanges, which take 
 place under conditions which permit of easy calcula- 
 tion and collection. They fix our eyes generally on 
 those bulks of commodities, which are gathered at some 
 one point, and igrlore the much greater bulks which 
 never are so gathered. They tell us of the magnitude 
 of the grain trade, and mean thereby the bulks of 
 wheat and corn that come to New York and other sea- 
 ports for export, and not the far \'aster bulks that are 
 consumed in the vicinity of the farm or cross the Alle- 
 ghenies, not to touch salt water, but to be consumed 
 in our great manufacturing districts. We need to pay 
 much more attention to the aggregate magnitude of 
 small amounts, if we are to estimate justly the course 
 of our commerce. 
 
 But if we accept this English test of the bulk and 
 value of exports, as showing the extent of our com- 
 merce, we shall find reason to believe that protective 
 tariffs are not so great an impediment to its growth as 
 is alleged. In 1848 the combined exports of France 
 and the United States exceeded those of England in 
 value by but i?i, 87 5, 000. In 1878 their excess \\'as 
 '^76. 1 5 3-4' 8. The growth was about equally divided, 
 and these were the thirty years which followed the 
 adoption of Free Trade in England. In 1881 their 
 excess over England was ;!^ 15 2, 49 1,800. 
 
 It is said that our exports are chiefly food and raw 
 7
 
 ■98 
 
 LWIl 'EKSITY LLCJUKES. 
 
 materials, and that wo exported more manufactures 
 proportionally in i860 under Free Trade, than we now 
 ■do under a Tariff whose purpose is to develop our 
 manufactures. If this were true, it would prove the 
 reverse of what is intended. If we make vastly more 
 manufactures, and export less than in i860, that must 
 mean that the people's power to consume has been 
 greatly increased in the meantime ; and the power to 
 consume is the final test of national prosperity. But 
 great as has been the increase in the export of food 
 and raw materials, that of manufactures has been rela- 
 tively greater. In i860 we exported twenty-eight per 
 cent of manufactured and half-manufactured goods. 
 In 1 88 1 the proportion was forty-four per cent. We 
 send stoves to fifty-two countries ; machinery to fifty ; 
 tools to forty-eight ; firearms to forty-five ; files and 
 saws to forty-two ; cutlery to thirty-six ; and twenty- 
 five million yards of honest American cottons to 
 England.' 
 
 "Why then cannot we export our whole surplus to 
 other countries, and especially to South America, from 
 whom we buy twice as much as we sell ? " Chiefly 
 because we have neglected the development of our 
 merchant marine by leaving it entirely outsidj tliat 
 protective legislation, by which the prosperity of other 
 industries lias been sought and achieved. The result 
 has been exactly what any Protectionist would have 
 foretold. While other countries were fostering their 
 great lines of steamships by subsidies, America re- 
 mained passive. At first something was done, and 
 with good results. But in 1855 the United States 
 
 ' Col. Giosvenor in The Nnu York Triliuitt'.
 
 ANSIVERS TO OBJECTIONS. 
 
 99 
 
 Senate, on the motion of Mr. Jefferson Davis, placed 
 .its veto upon the subsidy system, and at once the de- 
 cHne of our mercantile marine began. Other countries 
 made it more profitable to sail ships under their flags, 
 than it was under ours ; and as'we put no restrictions 
 •on their use of our ports, and discriminated in no way 
 ill favor of ships bearing the American flag, ours began 
 to be the one most seldom seen at the mast-head of 
 •an\- but coasting vessels. The war helped the decline, 
 not only through the destruction of our vessels by 
 privateers, but by the transfer of many to English and 
 other registrations. Since the war nothing has been 
 done to retrieve the loss, and the country has followed 
 Mr. Davis's leadership in this matter for just thirty 
 years. As a consequence the countries which do our 
 carrying-trade for us are free to arrange it for their 
 own profit and advantage. Thus our purchases from 
 South America are largely paid by the export of Eng- 
 lish manufactures from Liverpool to Rio Janeiro in 
 vessels which load with coffee and hides for New York, 
 and then return from New York to Liverpool with a 
 •cargo of grain. These three-cornered voyages enable 
 English manufacturers to use our purchases to promote 
 their sales. 
 
 It is said that if Americans had the liberty to buy 
 their ships of British builders, there would be a much 
 larger investment of American capital in shipping, and 
 we would do our own carrying trade and thus increase 
 our exports. Hence the cry for " free ships." But 
 we have " free ships" now, and Americans are free to 
 buy ships where they please, and to own them to any 
 extent that they please. That there is no restriction 
 laid by our laws upon either the purchase or use of
 
 lOO UXIVERSITY LECTURES. 
 
 vessels of foreign build, is shown by the fact that many 
 such ships are so owned. The Guion Line in New 
 York for instance, is owned entirely or mainly by 
 American capitalists. The American line in Philadel- 
 phia has recently be^ sold to a nominally Belgian 
 Company, which owns several steamers of Belgian 
 build. But that company is made up of Philadelphia 
 capitalists, who find it more profitable to run their 
 ships under the Belgian than the American flag, as 
 Belgium pays a subsidy and we do not. Our laws 
 place them under no disadvantage whatever in the 
 matter of access to our ports and the incidence of 
 charges, while till very recently our laws for the pro- 
 tection of the American sailor put American ship- 
 owners under very serious disadvantages as compared 
 with their foreign compL-titors. A ship is the one 
 article that comes into our country without paying a 
 penny in discriminating duties. As for the common 
 charges levied on all vessels, they are lighter in Amer- 
 ica than in any part of P^urope. We have no light- 
 dues for the maintenance of out Light-House system, 
 as England and most of our commercial rivals have. 
 This makes our ports the favorite haunt of " ocean 
 tramps," which arc " tooting" for a cargo. There is 
 no place in the world so cheap for a ship to lounge in 
 as an American sea-port. 
 
 What then does this cry for " free ships " mean ? 
 It is a demand for the repeal of our Registration laws, 
 which exclude vessels of foreign build from American 
 registry. Those laws were passed in President Wash- 
 ington's first administration. They have remained 
 unrepealed through all changes of administration and 
 of party policy since that time. Free Traders equally
 
 ANSWERS TO OBJECTIONS. iqi 
 
 with Protectionists have kept them intact. The de- 
 mand for their repeal began after the war, when those 
 ship-owners who had transferred their vessels from our 
 registry to that of England wished to bring them 
 back again. The country made answer, " If our flag 
 is not good enough for you in time of war, you must 
 just do without it in time of peace. We will alter no 
 law for the benefit of people who did not believe the 
 nation strong enough to protect them on the seas or 
 to secure them redress of their losses from English- 
 built privateers." The country still says that the ship 
 that flies the American flag at the mast-head, shall 
 bear the marks of the American hammer on its keel. 
 There are special objections made to protective du- 
 ties on two classes of commodities. The first of these 
 is necessaries. I hold that no class should be more 
 steadily and eflectively protected than these. You 
 will find in the messages of our early presidents a 
 constant urgency for such duties as will make the 
 country independent of all others for the supply of 
 necessary articles. The need for this was brought 
 home to them by the experiences of both the first and 
 the second wars with Great Britain. It was brought 
 home to the South in the war for the maintenance of 
 the Union. It was a great source of weakness to the 
 Southern Confederacy that it allowed itself to remain 
 dependent upon other countries for even such neces- 
 sary articles as salt and paper. It was a great part of 
 the strength of the North, that it was in a position to 
 supply itself promptly with so much, and in a short 
 time, — thanks to the Protective Tariff, — with all that it 
 needed. How far that Tariff has brought us toward 
 industrial independence, such as our elder statesmen
 
 , 02 L:\71 E/^S/TV LECTURES. 
 
 desired for the nation, may be seen by comparing our 
 imports with our manufacturing product. We import * 
 one hundred and twelve sorts of manufactured goods. 
 Of ninety of these sorts we produce eighty per cent 
 of our annual consumption, and in many cases all but 
 about three or four per cent. In but three of the one 
 hundred and twelve, do the imports amount to tlie 
 greater part of the consumption. 
 
 Special objection is made to the imposition of 
 Jutics on the raw material of a manufacture. This 
 objection is sustained by such good Protectionist 
 authorities as Alexander Hamilton and Professor 
 Bo wen. I confess that even this high authority has 
 not enabled me to see much force in the objection. 
 The Protective Tariff has not for its object the promo- 
 tion of manufactures only, but the development of the 
 national industry in every direction in which the na- 
 tion comes short of supplying itself with what its 
 resources and the capacities of its people fit it to ob- 
 tain at home. In this view the protection of the wool- 
 grower, for instance, is as legitimate as is that of the 
 woolen manufacturer. It is as necessary for the nation 
 to have a home supply of wool and pig iron and the 
 like, as to have a home supply of anything that is 
 made of these. And in view of the fact that the 
 American farmer has so much overdone the business 
 of raising wheat, it would be especially desirable to 
 give him every inducement to go forward with that 
 remarkable development of our wool-growing industry 
 which has been the result of the protective duty on 
 wool since 1861. 
 
 It is objected that " A Protective Tariff is found to 
 produce a surplus of revenue far in excess of the needs
 
 ANSWERS TO OBJECTIOiXS. iq.^ 
 
 of the national government. This excess of revenue 
 leads to all kinds of jobs in Congressional legislation, 
 of which some recent pension laws and River and 
 Harbor bills are the best known specimens. It is 
 demoralizing our national politics, and there must be a. 
 reduction of duties to bring the revenue within the 
 compass of the needs of the go\'crnment for legitimate 
 expenditure." As a matter of fact we have no surplus 
 yet, and will have none until the bonds within 
 our reach are paid off, which will not be for years. If 
 national money has been taken for jobs, it has not 
 been because there has not been a legitimate use for 
 every penny of it in paying the national debt. It is 
 the American notion of a national debt that it is a 
 good thing to get rid of as fast as the resources of the 
 nation permit. There are those among us who call 
 this foolish, and point us to the example of Europe as 
 worthy of our imitation. But European financiers 
 like Mr. Gladstone think we are wise to pay as fast as 
 we can ; and nothing has done more to strengthen our 
 position in Europe than our rapid discharge of our 
 obligations. It was predicted at the close of the war 
 that a party of repudiation would arise, and would 
 wipe out the debt by a confiscatory law. But now 
 Europeans are saying: "A democracy can deny them- 
 selves and make sacrifices, for the maintenance of the 
 national honor and the payment of the national debt." 
 As to what shall be done when the bonds now acces- 
 sible for payment are exhausted, there is no agreement 
 among Protectionists. They are agreed, however, that 
 if the revenue is to be reduced, it is not by the mis- 
 chievous and uncertain method of reducing duties. A 
 reduction of duties generally increases the revenue by
 
 104 
 
 CW/rERS/TV LECTURES. 
 
 Stimulating imports ; and if \vc had a deficit of revenue 
 instead of an excess, our Free Trade friends would 
 be the first to remind us of this fact. It is only when 
 a duty is in excess of what is needed for protection, or 
 the reduction is very great, that a reduction produces 
 a diminished income to the government. The revision 
 of 1883 has removed from the American Tariff all 
 such duties as fit the former supposition. Even our 
 revenue reformers assure us that they do not mean to 
 ask for any sweeping changes in the duties enacted for 
 protection. It would therefore be extremely unwise 
 to take their advice as to reducing the Tariff, as they 
 would be almost certain to make the surplus of revenue 
 more embarrassing than it now is. 
 
 Some Protectionists agree with Mr. Randall that the 
 repeal of the remaining Internal Revenue taxes would 
 be the most desirable course to take. They want 
 " Revenue from the Tariff only " instead of " A Tariff 
 for Revenue only." This plan is open to the serious 
 objection that whiskey and tobacco are articles whose 
 taxation in order to discourage their use, meets (and 
 justly) with the general approval of the country. Nor 
 is it true, as the friends of the plan have suggested, that 
 the states can reimpose the duties for their own benefit 
 as fast as the general government abolishes them. 
 They cannot tax the mamifacture of tobacco or whiskey, 
 as this would dri\'e the business from such states as did 
 tax it into those which did not. Nor can they make 
 any agreement among themselves as to the establish- 
 ment of a common rate of taxation, for all such agree- 
 ments are prohibited by the Constitution. Only the 
 nation can deal with the question in this way. That 
 a state cannot successfully tax the consumption of
 
 ANSWERS TO OBJECTIONS. 105 
 
 whiskey even, has been shown by the failure of Vir- 
 ginia to do this. Nothing remains for the states but 
 taxation by Hcense to sell, and that most of them 
 have already. 
 
 Other Protectionists propose the abolition of the 
 sugar duties, and for this there is a vi^ry strong case. 
 It is true that they were imposed with the purpose of de- 
 veloping our home production of sugar to the point of 
 meeting the national demand. But the result has 
 shown this to be impossible. We do not produce 
 more sugar now than when the war began, and it is 
 certain that the supply from Louisiana and other 
 Southern states never will come up to our demand. In 
 1883 we produced but about two hundred millions 
 pounds of sugar, and imported more that eleven times 
 as much. On every pound of this import the Ameri- 
 can consumer paid duty, — a tax from which no one 
 could exempt himself, and the only duty in the Tariff 
 of which this could be said. On Protectionist princi- 
 ples the duty should be repealed, as it neither has nor 
 can fulfill the purpose of a protectionist duty. If the 
 country is to continue to favor our own sugar pro- 
 ducers, it should be done by a premium on their 
 produce. 
 
 For my part I think we need a better and more 
 elastic means for the adjustment of revenue to expendi- 
 ture, than can be effected by an\- alteration of duties. 
 I look to the precedent of 1836 as pointing us to the 
 wisest way out of the difficulty. I agree with Presi- 
 dent Jackson in his rejection of the plan proposed by 
 Mr. Clay and revived by Mr. Logan and Mr. Blaine, 
 to set aside definite parts of the national revenue for 
 the use of the states. But I think that we mieht well
 
 106 UNIVERSITY LECTURES. 
 
 follow his suggestion, adopted by Mr. Calhoun and 
 finally sanctioned by Congress, that any surplus of 
 revenue should be distributed among the states on the 
 basis of population. 
 
 The Constitution of 1787 effected a distribution of 
 functions and of revenues between the states and the 
 nation, which has proved in the main both practical 
 and wise. Rut it has not been a faultless arrangement. 
 And one of its most striking defects is that it gives the 
 nation the command of all the eas\^ and popular 
 source of revenue, while it leaves to the states a much 
 larger share of the duties and burdens of government 
 than can well be met by direct taxation. And direct 
 taxation on personal property and real estate is the 
 only source of revenue to which the states can look, 
 import duties being forbidden and excise duties im- 
 practicable. As a consequence of this the work done 
 by the state governments and their subordinate local 
 governments is both oppressively burdensome to their 
 ])eopIc, and as a rule it is done vciy imj)crfectly. 
 No country in the world throws upon the pa\'crs of 
 direct taxes so much of the public burdens as does the 
 United States. It is not to be wondered at that the 
 collection of such a mass of direct taxes as this should 
 prove a most vexatious and often a demoralizing busi- 
 ness. Each state has its own methods, and since Mr. 
 David A. Wells has praised it, we venture to believe 
 that ours in Pennsylvania is none of the worst. In 
 some states, notably in Vermont, the methods are 
 inquisitorial and annoying in the extreme. All of 
 them, our own not excepted, are oppressive in the 
 incidence of their amounts, and they put a constant 
 premium on evasions and deceit. I am told that the
 
 ANSWERS TO OBJECTIONS. iq-j 
 
 taxation system of Massachusetts has driven out of 
 your state industries that otherwise would have made 
 their homes here, and serves to account for the large 
 number of things made in other states which are seen 
 in use among you. 
 
 When we pass from the collection to the outlay of 
 state and local taxation, we find a most unsatisfactory 
 state of things. Here in New England, through the 
 conscientiousness of your people and the efficiency of 
 your town meetings, local government is more expen- 
 sive and more efficient than elsewhere. In other com- 
 munities much less is done, and that little as cheaply 
 as possible. When I was in a school district of South- 
 ern Illinois, I was told that the office of school teacher 
 was disposed of by the directors at a kind of Dutch 
 auction, the lowest bidder being invariably accepted, 
 to the just indignation of the mothers of the children. 
 That is only an extreme case of the kind of local gov- 
 ernment meanness which exists almost all over this 
 countr}-, and the schools and the roads have suffered 
 the worst from it. In wealthy and populous districts 
 of America the roads are worse than in Connemara or 
 the Mauritius. And the frightful amount of illiteracy 
 among our American voters, which, in several of our 
 states, puts a practical control of elections into the 
 hands of masses who can neither read nor write, is a 
 comment on the condition of popular education in a 
 country whose public order rests on the intelligence 
 and good will of the people. In these days there is a 
 great awakening of interest in popular education in 
 the Southern .states ; but the Southern people find 
 themseKes weakened in their efforts in this direction 
 by want of money to establish and maintain schools.
 
 I08 LNirEKSITV LEcruREr^. 
 
 Their local resources of revenue do not suffice for the 
 proper education of their whole people. 
 
 This then is our national situation. We have too 
 much in the big governmental pocket at Washington^ 
 and too little in the lesser pockets at the state and 
 county and township centres of our system. And by 
 reason of the constitutional restrictions we have laid 
 on ourselves, we cannot divert the flow of this surplus 
 from the big pockets to the little ones. We only can 
 take the money from the former and transfer it to the 
 latter, as did the statesmen of the last generation in 
 1836. Why not do it over again, since after all these 
 pockets are all the pockets of Uncle Sam, although 
 they are in different coats ? If we did there would be, 
 as Mr. Calhoun well urged, an end to congressional 
 jobs of every sort. The members of the House would 
 all become "watch dogs of the Treasury," in order to 
 secure a larger share to their states by carrying out a 
 policy of economy and retrenchment. As the share 
 given to each state would be determined simply by its 
 population, there would be no room for partizan favor- 
 itism or any other sort of manipulation, such as now 
 attends the passage of appropriation bills for public 
 works. The one danger we would have to guard 
 against would be the temptation to cut down the ap- 
 propriations for national purposes below the real needs 
 of the government. 
 
 In connection with this plan it might be possible to 
 secure the payment of the state and local debts of the 
 country, both acknowledged and repudiated. A share 
 of each distribution might be set apart for this purpose, 
 and the payment might be made through the national 
 Treasurv in the order of the issue of the state or local
 
 AXSIVEKS TO OBJECTIONS. 
 
 109 
 
 bonds, and Avithout reference to any legislation by 
 A\hich the validity of contracts had been impaired. 
 
 Do not regard this proposal to distribute the surplus 
 as standing in any essential connection with the policy 
 of Protection. Mr. John C. Calhoun, certainly was 
 not a Protectionist at the time he proposed it. It fits 
 equally well into any fiscal policy, and obviates the 
 necessity for a constant readjustment of our customs 
 duties to the needs of the national revenue. It also 
 furnishes the means to maintain the national revenue 
 at the debt-paying point, through the interval when 
 there will be no bonds within reach of the Treasury 
 for redemption. Neither is it a proposal which must 
 array one political party against the other. It was 
 passed by the Jackson and Calhoun Democrats in 
 1836; it was taken up by the Whigs in 1842, and it 
 was only Mr. Tylor's veto that prevented it from 
 becoming a part of the settled policy of the national 
 government. 
 
 In concluding these lectures, gentlemen of the uni- 
 x'ersity, I will not thank you for the courteous attention 
 you have given me throughout them. That would be 
 to assume that it was something less than your interest 
 in these great questions which has brought you to hear 
 one who came among you as an entire stranger and 
 with nothing but his subject to commend him to vdur 
 regards. I shall end therefore with the pra\'er that 
 you may go from Harvard with higher and truer con- 
 ceptions of that "partnership in all science, in all art, 
 in ever}^ virtue, and in all perfection," into which )-ou 
 were born as citizens of the nation.
 
 ifORNIA
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 JAN 3 ^^0^ 
 
 Form L9 — 15?n-10,'48 (B1039)44.4
 
 -^P Thompson ~ 
 
 1755 Protection to 
 "^oTp honie industry. 
 
 JAN 3 1955 
 
 HP 
 
 1755 
 
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