John Bigelow the Folly of Building Temples of Peace With Untempered Mortar New York 1910

8/3/2019 John Bigelow the Folly of Building Temples of Peace With Untempered Mortar New York 1910

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THE FOLLY OF BUILDINGTEMPLES OF PEACE WITH.UNTEMPERED MORTAR.: c : . ~THE NECESSITY OF BUILDINGTEMPLES OF PEACE WITH TEM-PERED MORTAR: t t t t t

B y JOHN BIGELOW

B. W. HUEBSCH NEW YORK 1910

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NOV 12 1926.


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~ b e r e f o r e tbus saftb tbe SOrl) Gol>:J3ecause VC ba"c spollen "anftp, a n seen lies, tberefore. b e b o l ~ , I am agatnst lOll,sattb tbe S O r ~ GoD. ! 1 n ~ mine banD sballbe against tbe propbets tbat see "anttp, a n tbat ~ i " i n e lies: tbq sball not be tn tbecouncil of mv people. J3ecause, e\teft be-cause tbev ba"e s e ~ u c e ~ mv people, saving,~ a c e ; anb tbere is no peace; anb wben onebutlDetb up a wall, b e b o [ ~ , tbe Daub it witbuntempereD mortar: sav unto tbem wbtcb~ a u b it wttb untempereD mortar, tbat it sballfall. I wi[[ el'en r e n ~ it witb a stormvwinD in mv fut $0 wtlll brealll)owntbe wall tbat ve ba"e b a u b e ~ witb untemperebmortar, anD bring tt l)own to tbe grount), sotbat tbe fount)atton tbereof sball be ~ t ..co"eret): a n it sball fall, a n ve sball be con-sumet) in tbe mtt)st tbereof; anD pe sball knowtbat I am tbe lorD. 1tbus wtlll accomplfsbmv fut upon tb.e wal[, anD upon tbem tbatba"e ~ a u b e l ) it wttb u n t e m p e r e ~ mortar; a n I will sav unto pou, 1tbe wall is no more,nettber tbep tbat I)aubeb it; to wit, tbepropbets of Israel wbtcb propbeq concern-ing SCrusalem, anD wbicb see "tstons ofpeace for ber, a n tbere is no peace, saftbtbe S O r ~ G o ~ . 1tbc Sooll of tbc J)ropbccl

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. PART' FIRSTTHE FOLLY OF BUILDING TEMPLES

OF PEACE WITHUNTEMPEREDMORTAR

I HAVE received several invitations of late to associatemyself with as many different organizations institutedfor the ostensible purpose of "promoting peace amongthe nations of the earth and for the reconciliation of international differences, a substitute for war." Amongthe officers of these organizations and their coadjutorsare some personal friends and many others w h o ~ Igreatly respect.In the following pages I propose to give what I hopewill prove an adequate excuse for declining all these invitations, not because I am not but because I am an ardentfriend of peace, and because of my conviction that all theplans proposed by these organizations will prove practically abortive.

IIT is now scarcely a dozen years since Nicholas 11 ofRussia invited all the nations of the world to unite withhim in a general reduction of armaments as a prelimi-

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nary to a universal peace. As Russia was at that timethe most formidable military power in the world, theother great powers took this proposal of the Czar quiteseriously. But before the hurrahs which followed hisproclamation had subsided, the Czar had locked hornswith the Sultan of Turkey and with the Finns withoutasking any of the other powers to assist him in keepingthe peace. Nor, indeed, had the other great powers formany years previously shown the solicitude for peacewhich their enthusiasm over the Czar's proclamationnlight have led one to suppose had been slumbering intheir bosoms. Not two generations have passed awaysince England was at war with the Dutch settlers ineastern Africa; or since France was at war with Mexico,to result incontinently in a war which established anempire in Germany and substituted a republican for animperial government in France; yet in no one of thesecases did either of these belligerents-solicitous forpeace as all must be presumed to have been from thewarm reception they so soon after gave to the Czar'sovertures for disarmament-take counsel with any neutral power in the interests of peace, except in some instances asking them to p ~ r c h a s e its bonds for the morevigorous prosecution of its wars. Can anything be morechimerical than the dream that any nation either inEurope or America would submit any differences ofgreater import than such as lawyers commonly submitto a sheriff's jury-not for the proof of damage,butmerely for an assessment of the amount of i t - to anytribunat and especially to one to be constituted mainlyby foreign states with all of which they have often beenat war (and are always beggaring their people with

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costly preparations for future wars), even supposing thepossibility of getting them ever to agree to form such atribunal-about which our President, in his note to oneof the more recent peace organizations of which he is anofficer, admits less doubt than he obviously feels. Andbesides, to what purpose do we keep a diplomatic forceat every court, if international differences can all besettled by argument and on their merits?

If the American people were of a breed of foxes thatwould accept the suggestion of the lion to make himking of the forest, such a policy might have a livingchance of securing the approval of the lion, at least.But our people have not as yet proved to be of that breedof foxes. Of this we have not to look far for the proofs.Since we set up housekeeping for ourselves we have hadalready two, nay, three wars with England, the countryof all others with which peace should most easily becultivated:

The first because we refused as colonists to be taxedwithout representation; that resulted in our conversionfrom a colony into an independent republic.

Our second war with her was because she impressedour seamen into her navy. That resulted in securing tous the freedom of the seas, of which we promptly availedourselves so successfully that before our Civil War, andunder the revenue tariff of 1844, we had a larger oceancommercial tonnage afloat than England or any othernation had ever had. That supremacy we deliberatelysurrendered for McKinley and Dingley tariffs, whichhave expelled our flag from every ocean, except whenfloating at the masthead of ships of war.

The third was contemporaneous with our Civil War)7


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when England furnished our slaveholding States steamers with which to help them in the extermination of ourmaritime comnlerce. It was her collaboration with theconfederated insurgents that compelled us as a militarymeasure to enfranchise all of our bondmen-for whichwe are in so far her debtors-and which later compelledEngland to pay a round sum for at least a portion of thedamage which the piratical ships of her manufacture andequipment had done to us.

Will anyone pretend that either of these wars couldhave been declined by us without national degradation?Nay, is there anyone weak-minded enough to supposethe people of the United States w o ~ l d have l ~ s t e n e d amoment to a proposal to submit either of these issues toany tribunal that the "great powers of the world" wouldhave constituted-no others could have constituted sqcha tribunal-but everyone of which then regarded ourrepublic as the greatest peril to which their respectivedynasties were exposed?

In fact, it would be difficult to name any war betweennations within historic times to prevent which a proposalto settle their differences, except for an adjustment of theamount of the pecuniary damage sustained from undisputed injuries, would not have been rejected as futile orimpertinent, witll a single exception. That was thepeace concocted at Portsmouth in September, 1905, between Russia and Japan, after one of the bloodiest andmost costly wars ever waged, and after each belligerenthad become so entirely exhausted as to be physically andfinancially unable to continue the fight. And what wasgained by the treaty of Portsmouth except the release ofthe Cossacks from watching their enemy in Manchuria

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that they 'might come home to deprive the proletariat ofRussia of the hope they were indulging that the warwould last long enough to insure an ultimate recognitionby the Czar of at least some of the rights of manhoodwhich had been withheld from theln? Yet thIs boastedpeace treaty of Portsmottth involved the promptdownfallof the Japanese ministry that assented to it, thus provingit to be a peace most fitly to be compared, so far as producing harmony between the belligerents, to that produced by turning the hose upon a dog-fight. Both haveever since been impoverishing their people by buildingmore vessels of war in an ill-disguised contemplation ofthe necessity of renewing the fight.Such is a specinlen of the kind of peace which oblit

erated the lessons in the process of being taugpt to twoof the most despotic governments in the world when ourgovernment presumed to interfere with and suspendthose lessons which both belligerents were in the way ofreceiving at the hands of a merciful Providence.

11I TRUST the gentlemen who have invited me to become.one of their associates will pardon me for askingwhether, in plucking the mote out of others' eyes, theyarenot overlooking the beam in their own. Perhaps they donot realize that ever since our own Civil War there hasbeen a yet more flagrant war raging in our own country,a war annually becoming more menacing and disastrous.It is not a civil war only, but a foreign war as well; awar not against one nation only, b u against all commer-

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cial nations. It is a domestic as well as a universal for-eign war to enforce our preposterous claim to an averagehalf of what any foreign shipper brings to our ports forsale, before permission is given him to land it on ourwharves or put it in our Dlarkets. It is civil war becauseit impoverishes the ninety millions of consumers to justthe amount that tke foreign shipper is compelled to addto the price of what he brings. The machinery by whichthis unrighteous policy is engineered is called in the law-books, in which it has been clothed with a fictitious ap-pearance of legality, a "tariff upon imports."

It is to this tariff that we owe the war between laborand capital, in which we have more soldiers embattled atthe present moment than we ever had in action at anyperiod of our Civil War for the Union, while the cost tothe country has already been far greater than the costDfour Civil War to either if not both of its belligerents.That cost, too, is annually increasing.

Our war with foreign nations is proving even moreexpensive to us, for the tariff compels us to pay:( I) The price at which the foreign merchandise is of-fered us;

(2) The average 50 per cent. tariff;(3) The cost of transporting such merchandise to us

in foreign ships instead of our own; andFinally, the cost of transporting in foreign ships the

products with which we pay for all such imports.Now let me ask whether, instead of projecting a newpeace society and staging a new concert of peace orators,

it were not better to leave the mote in our neighbor's eyeuntil we have enabled ourselves to see the beam in ourown eye; for it is only after removing thebeam from one's

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own eye that he is ever able to see the mote in a neighbor's eye. No court of equity, human or divine, willlisten to an appeal for equity from anyone who does notfirst do equity.To bring both of these wars, the domestic and foreign,

to a peaceful close, and to insure that the lion and the foxlie down together in a peaceful embrace, we have to repeal all our tariff laws, turn our custom-houses intowarehouses, and make every harbor on our coasts free tothe commerce of all the world.It is only this war of our own waging that keeps us at

odds, not only with each other, but with all other commercial nations. Remove it, and in less than a generation we would have the largest commercial navy in theworld, as we had before the Civil War furnished atreacherous pretext to the selfish counsellors of our government to enact what was euphemistically called a "wartariff." It was indeed in its origin nominally a wartariff, but never before so exclusively a war-breedingtariff as it is to-day. Abolish it, and we would absorb thebest commerce of the whole world and, like England,build Dreadnoughts to sell to nations that blindly discourage cOlnnlerce as we wantonly persist in doing.Of course the million who profit by this tariff bonus,

disguised under the name of protection, live extravagantly, spend profusely, waste wickedly of the cO\1ntry'swealth, thereby creating delusive standards of domesticlife, all of which contribute to increase the cost of livingfar more and faster than the tariff increases the wagesof ninety millions of the proletariat,who do most of thework that earns that wealth. Hence tIle chronic discontent of the latter. If they strike successfully for an ad-

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vance of wages to-day, the result is no guaranty that ina few weeks at most they will not find their increasedwages fall as far short of their necessaries as before, anda new strike follows. There is not a single railway or industrial corporation in the country that is sure for amonth at a time that it will not be compelled to submitto new exactions from its workmen which threaten ruinwhether granted or denied.

During the last fiscal year we have imported preciousgems to the value of $45,000,000, a million and a halfmore in amount than ever before. About 80 per cent. ofthese imports.have been diamonds. Precious gems havealways been a favorite investment of people who distrustthe honesty of their government. There is no other formin which so much wealth can be so easilyconcealed fromextortionate government exactions.

A curious object-lesson of the cost of this internecineconflict between labor and capital in our country, whichhas pretty uniformly resulted in the triumph of labor andthe defeat of capital, notwithstanding all the support itcould command from the government, has been recentlymade conspicuous in a single department of industry. Ihave before me the result of an actual adjustment ofwages that has occurred on over 55,000 miles of railroadin the Eastern States alone, involving increases in thepay-rolls aggregating $50,000,000 annually. When theremaining lines, including the semi-Canadian lines whichare in this district, have been settled up, it is estimatedthat the increases will add from thirty to forty millionsto the above total, or an approximate increase of wagesfor all the Eastern lines of between eighty and ninetymillions annually. That is a perpetual expense which

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this war has entailed upon only a fraction of our railwaysystem. When we consider the hundreds of other industries that have revolted or are now again in revolt forhigher wages to indemnify them ~ o the increased cost ofliving, it requires no statistician to show how insignificant was the expense of our Civil War when conlparedwith that of the war we have been waging with all thecommercial nations of the world for at least half a century. Though much more expensive than the Civil War,it has not been so bloody only because capital and thegovernment have pretty uniformly capitulated before aresort to arms, though not always without bloodshedAs was very wisely remarked recently by a writer inthe New York Evening Post: "The basis of taxationcannot be otherwise than insecure when the tax-framersundertake simultaneously to exclude foreign merchandise from our markets and to support the governmentthrough the taxes on foreign merchandise which comesin. These mutually destructive purposes have been atthe root of allthe violent and disastrous fluctuations ofthe public finances. Expenditure, meantime, increasesregardless of any other consideration. For the fiscalyear to date, it has run $35,000,000 ahead of 1908, andthe full year 1908 ran $81,000,000 beyond 1907, and$go,ooo,ooo beyond 1906."

111THE loss of our maritime commerce and our dependenceupon foreign ships for the transport of our mails and ourexports are far from being the most grievous effects of

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our tariff upon imports. It seems to be rapidly deadening the moral sensibilities of our people. The combinations of labor agitators for higher wages and lesswork are no longer content with refusing to work forwhat they think inadequate compensation, but they evenconspire to maltreat men who prefer to work rather thanlet their families starve. The excuse for this interference with individual liberty is furnished by the tariff.We open our ports to foreign labor at the rate of overone million heads per annum. Attracted by the higherrates of wage-Iabor incidental to the tariff, people fromall parts of the world, accustomed to much lower standards of domestic life, flock hither and take the place ofthe strikers. That is the American laborers' defencefor making it dangerous to these imported laborers notto join them; still more dangerous to accept the place ofa striker, for that means civil war.The Governor of Pennsylvania had ten thousand

troops in readiness to march only a short time since, toquiet labor riots in Philadelphia. The troops did notmarch to the s.eat of war only because the corporation involved capitulated. During the strike last July on theGrand Trunk Railway-it was called a tie-up-the losswas $117,000 a day for the several weeks that it lasted.In our own State of New York its Senate was for a

good part of its session of 1910 the theatre of the mostshameful spectacle that has ever occurred, I believe, inthe State's history. One of its Senators, who had justbeen elected as the official leader of his party in thatbody, was expelled by an almost unanimous vote forbarratry. His trial brought suspicion upon so manymore qf the same body that a further investigation rec-

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ommended by the governor is being prosecuted to protectthe characters of the honest Senators, if, as I hope, thereare some, while theSenatorwhomade the charges agail1sthis degraded colleague has resigned his seat in that bodyto avoid the expense if not the shame of defending him-self from a similar charge with which he had beenthreatened. The legislative investigation is now inprogress, but that it will leave the character of anymember of that Senate worth protecting is daily grow-ing more dubious.When Mr. Taft entered into o f f i c ~ as President he

selected for his Secretary of State a member of theUnited States Senate who had voted for a law increasingthe compensation of that among the other Cabinet offices,upon the condition, however, that no Senator, duringhis term as such, should accept anyone of the officesthus made financially more remunerative by his vote.The Senator's term had yet one year to.run. He qualifiedhimself to accept the proffered seat in the Cabinet.of Mr.Taft by promising, as the newspapers tell us, to takenone of the increase of salary, at least during the re-mainder of his senatorial term-both the Senator andthe President having overlooked or closed their eyes tothe fact that it was the office, not the salary, that the lawforbade the former to accept. As the incidental salaryissue was "such a little one," and Pennsylvania beingthe very coryphreus and head centre of protectionism, theSenate cheerfully confirmed the nomination.When Philip 11 replied to the Duke of Alva, who ad-vised the extermination of the house of Braganza, that

that would be at war with the principles of his religion,the duke said proudly that kingdoms were governed by

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tnaxims o state, not by scruples of conscience. Has ourrepublic been converted into a kingdom, or are we goingback to the sixteenth century for maxims of statesmanship?The gentleman whom the new President put in chargeof the national treasury-quite the most influentialpolitical engine under our Constitution-was Mr. MacVeagh, a prominent merchant of Chicago. He had oncebeen an unsuccessful candidate of the ,Democratic partyfor the United States Senate from Illinois. He wastherefore gazetted as a good enough Democrat for Mr.Taft's Cabinet. His brother, a prominent citizen ofPhiladelphia, was a devoted political and personal friendof the late Samuel J. Tilden, which gave calor to therurnor that Mr. Taft was trying to make terms with theDemocratic Mammon of Unrighteousness.Mr. MacVeagh appointed as Collector of the Port of

New York the fidus Acl1,ates of President Roosevelt, whohas been irreverently styled the Vermiform Appendix ofPresident Taft. Mr. Loeb had hardly got warm in hisseat before a list of a hundred or more inspectors andweighers, who had been in the habit of taking pourboiresfor their con:venient blindness when searching the trunksand boxes of smuggling travellers and importers, wasgazetted for punishment. This new sensationalism Mr.Loeb characterized as "house-cleaning." SecretaryMacVeagh backed up his Collector with the remark thathe did not expect that "such a nest of rattlesnakes" ashad b ~ e n stirred up in ~ e York would be discoveredanywhere else, but he was determined to "clean house"everywhere until the perpetration of undervaluationfrauds had been stopped. These were brave words and

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no doubt meant all they implied, though thus far none ofLoeb's snakes have been heard to Hsqueal."

When Colbert was disciplining oneof the tax-assessorsor intendants, as they were called in his day, he told him,"You may pluck the goose's feathers, but you mustnever make it squawk." I have thus far heard none ofthese rattlesnakes asking for sympathy or complainingof their lot. Perhaps, as is the serpents' wont, they onlyshed their political skins for a season.

But assuming that this snake-hunt is not a mere windstorm, the like of which our people have been periodicallyhonored with since our confiscatingtariffs began to grindus, nor a mere dodge to disguise the disparity of thepromises made by the Republicans in their Presidentialcampaign and platform of 1908 and their failure offulfilment in 190


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longing to the whole nation. What we at the customhouse take is 'not a flea-bite' to what they take. Whydon't you discipline our masters the snakes in Congress,who originated and constantly are increasing these tarifflaws by which they get the money and jobs for theirconstituents, secure their own reelections to Congress,and peddle diplomatic and other lucrative appointments?They take more dollars in a winter's session than we takepennies in a year. If your lawmakers did notplunder, wewould never steal; but if they make us help them plunder,why should we not take a share in some proportion to theperilous and ignominious service we render them?"It is difficult to see what answer the Secretarycan maketo his snakes that would not disqualify him fatally for apublic service which is officially prostituted to the sordidlusts of the protectionists. But will the snakes stopthere?

Serpens nisi serpentem c o m m e d e r ~ t non fit draco.In other words, unless a serpent is fed on serpents hecannot become a dragon, nor can a mere Secretary ofWar become the President of a party organized to impoverish the multitude for the creation of a plutocracy.

It has been reported in the public press that Mr. MacVeagh talked of withdrawing from the Cabinet beforeCongress meets again. Nothing is more probable thanthat he has found himself confronted by too many conundrums that neither he nor any other sound Democratcould successfully solve and yet retain a position in theCabinet of a President ,vho signed tIle Payne, Aldrich,and Lodge Tariff Bill.

And speaking of Presidents, the Rev. Lyman Abbott,18


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senior editor of the Outlook-whose loyalty to theadministration is no more to be sniffed at than theMarchioness's lemonade made out of orange-peel,"though," as she admitted, "one has to make believe agood deal"-told us the other day, when speaking of thelate disappointing tariff concoction, what not only putsthe President himself in the snakes' nest, but makes himabout as venomous as any of the Secretary's rattlesnakes:

When lle [the President] commended the bill [ofAldrich and Payne] as satisfying the country's ideals, :and when he commended the men who had put the billthrough Congress as leaders to be followed, and whenhe condemned as 'anti-Republican the men who hadfougllt for legislation more fully in accord with theRepublican platform, it was impossible for him tocarry the country with him. The people began tothink that he was working with the machine, not themachine with him. They did not doubt his honesty.[Not anybody?] The continuing faith in Mr. Taft isa fine testimony to his character. [Fine testimonycertainly, but what court will allow it to go to thejury?] But when they see Mr. Aldrich, whom theybelieve to be the representative of special interests,and Mr. Taft, whom they believe to be the representative of the public welfare, standing on the same platform, cooperating to the same end, and sponsors forthe same legislation, they cannot but wonder whichone is leading, which one is following. [Does anyone wonder but Dr. Abbott?]

IVWHETHER the very reverend editor or his more or lessreverend associates wonder who is the head or who are

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'the bicephalate of the federal government, is not thepractical question which t h public has now to deal with;still less future wars, if, as I hope, when that practicalquestion has been properly dealt with, there will be fewif any future wars with or by the United States. It isthe actual war that we have been waging for nearly acentury, and are now waging with more violence thanever, not orily with our own people, butwith all the world,that first requires our attention. A wise man who pro-poses to build a house does not commence with its roof,nor does the builder of a kitchen chimney begin at theend provided for the escape of the smoke.The cause of the unholy war we are now waging is thetariff on imports.. Our philanthropists may cry peace,they may orate peace, they may print, write, and evenpray for peace, but while fire burns and water runs wewill have, nay, we can have, no peace, nor deserve any.General Sherman, who knew what he was speaking of,said, without a shade of profanity, "War is hell." But atariff war is many times more satanic than any war ofwhich the general had ever any professional ex-perience, for it is e'ssentially a fratricidal war, conceivedof the most degenerate attributes of our human nature.Our prayers for peace, while, like Cain, we are delib-erately threatening our brothers all over the world withour flagitious tariffs, will be justly treated by the Princeof Peace as blasphemy. There is no attribute of warthat does not infect, nay, that does not incriminate, anytariff upon imports. It is the taking of property to whichwe have no shadow of right, in violation of the mostnatural of all rights, and giving what we feloniouslytake, to a class whose rights to it deserve no more respect

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benefit the trade of those who handle onlyone thirty-fifthof it.Dr. Abbott, though still an apologist for custom-houseslave-pens, admits in the following table that the pricesof the food for the wage-earning classes in this countryhave increased on an average more than 150 per cent. inthe last fifteen years.

ADVANCE IN PRICES, 1896-1910CRUDE FARM: MANUI'ACTUREDPRODUCTS FARM: PRODUCTSPer ca t . of Pe r cent. ofiDcreaae iacreaseWheat lOO Flour . 66Corn 106 Beef carcasses 50Oats 119 Hogs 196Barley 133 Mutton 109;Rye 127 Pork, barrelled . 196

,. Beans. 148 Bacon. . 2 0 2Peas 114 Hams. 45Potatoes 100 Lard 201Eggs 216 Butter 140Milk 66 Cheese 164Cotton 113 Cottonseed-oil 163Wool 118 Hides. 15Cottonseed .250 Leather 5Live beeves . 72 Linseed-oil 97Live sheep 5Live hogs 152The pretext with which the late Horace Greetey

wheedled most of our Western States through hisWeekly Tribune was that the tariff is necessary to a newcountry like ours to develop infant industries, etc., untilthey are strong enough to take care of themselves. Yet.nearly if not everyone of the articles on Dr. Abbott's

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list is produced in greater abundance by nature in theUnited States than in any other 'part of the world.But a more remarkable commentary upon RoraceGreeley's infant industry delusion is revealed by a recentreport from the Bureau of Statistics in Washington. Itinforms us that among our imports of finished prod-

ucts-that is, "manufactures ready for consutnption"-w e will find $47,000,000 worth of manufacturedcotton goods, $23,500,000 worth of silk manufa'ctures,$16,500,000 of the manufactures of wool, and a gain of100,000,000 pounds of imported hides and skins.

Yet, mature as. all these infant industries now are,every American will find it better economy to buy all hiscotton and silk garments in France, all his shoes or bootsand woollen garments in England, and pay all the dutybesides upon them, than to buy commodities of the samename and pretension anywhere in the U n i t ~ d States.The reason is that, thanks to the coddling of these indus-tries by the government, they have retained all the leastdesirable attributes of infancy and have acquired noneof those that are due from maturity.And why is it that no American gentleman wears aYankee woollen coat, trousers, or shirt, no Americanlady wears a silk dress fronl New Jersey, and why doboth sexes fit themselves out with European shoes andboots and shirts whenever they are where such can beconveniently bought?

The answer to this question is very simple. The tariffputs a high price upon the foreign article here. It is oneof the plainest principles of economics that there is noroom in any market for two prices for the same com-modity. Therefore the Yankee manufacturer has but

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to produce a commodity having an external resemblanceto the European article and offer it on the market asgenuine, but at a price just enough lower to attract the. poor and the ignorant consumer and the knavish shopkeeper. Reason enough why the shopkeeper likes thetariff, for it enables him to put off his shoddy staples ofNew England and New Jersey as genuine commoditiesat a far higher price than they could have been marketed,if at all, without the tariff. And Canal Street haberdashers call that "good business."

In this way a system and practice of knavery whichoriginated in Washington percolates through every city,town, village, and hamlet in the United States, until theconscience of the whole nation is becoming atrophied.We have establislled an international reputation for themanufacture of rubbish.There is no more firmly established principle of politi- '

cal economy or ethics than that no workman can deliberately produce poor work or take any part in its production without moral deterioration; neither can anygovernment prostitute its power by legislation that notonly tempts but practically compels workmen to producepoor-that is, fraudulent-work without not only becoming primarily responsible for it, but sharing in moraldeterioration.Myron T. Herrick, the former Republican Governor

of Ohio, whose reelection President Taft is reported tohavt defeated by putting one of his feet into the scalesin favor of another candidate, in a speech made lastspring before the National Metal Trades' Associationin New York City, had the courage to give the followingstatements, which could not be suspected of partisan

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prejudice, unless from his silence about the fact that thewaste and extravagance he refers to have all occurrednot only subsequent to the time our government was entirely out of debt under the administration of General]ackson, but since the revenue tariff of 1844 was displaced by the war tariff of 1860 and its more virulentsuccessors. As the governor was addressing a corporatebody which consisted largely if not exclusively of thebeneficiaries of our confiscatory tariff, he had some excuse for not closing the ears of his audience to the factshere detailed by referring to the cause of which all thosefacts are the inevitable results, to which, of course, theywould have been as deaf as adders.

In many branches of the government service therehas been little or no progress in half a century, exceptin the size of the a p p r o p r ~ a t i o n s required to operatethem. In III years government expenses have increased five times as fast as population. Some of thebureaus are now spending more than the entire government service in 1853. Since 18g7 the cost of allgovernment has increased 32 per cent. for each person.Senator Carter is authority for the statement thatthe methods of the post-office have not changed since1835. The Postmaster-General asserts that 8 cents apound, or $64,000,000 a year, is being lost on one classof mail matter alone. . . . It is now proposed that thisdepartment, which can lose $64,000,000 on one branchof its business without exciting more than a passingcomment, and which has not changed its methods since1835, shall become the custodian of the people's savings.

In the Navy Department the Secretary's reportshows that although the German and United Statesnavies are practically equal in number of ships and25


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tonnage, the naval expenses, exclusive of new constructions, are only $47,000,000 annually in Germanyagainst $100,000,000 in this country.Senator Aldrich gives it as his opinion that thenational government could save $300,000,000 a yearif it were conducted on a business basis and managedas cleverly and efficiently as a large corporation.The country has been shaken from ocean to ocean

by the disclosures of graft and dishonesty in connection with the life-insurance companies and the sugarcompanies. The total amount involved was ridiculously small as compared with one year's waste frominefficiency and extravagance in conducting the publicbusiness; yet these conditions have obtained for generations, and it is only when they have grown into suchproportions that they affect the public credit and thetaxes of the country become burdensome that we recognize their appalling purport.

vTHE reckless and stupid way in which we are using upour national capital to pay our debts to foreign nations,contracted for things we could have had at half the priceif our ports were open to them as freely as to theiremigrants, can only be fitly compared to the folly ofthe man who feeds himself through his nose instead ofhis mouth, or on what he. smells rather than on what hechews. Both must, of course, grow poorer every day,and rattlesnakes proportionately more abundant.Though endowed by Providence with a greater abundance of every commodity required for the constructionof vessels for ocean navigation and for sailing them than

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any other nation in the world, the tariff has swept ourcommercial navy from the ocean, while our imports arepaid for largely, not out of our surplus earnings, but outof our capital--..:our forests, our mines, and the productsof our agriculture, which resources are in turn beingrapidly exhausted to indulge the reckless extravaganceof this generation to the criminal prejudice of -its posterity. Our product of agriculture, except on our limitedremaining patches of virgin soil, is scarcely half theproduct per acre of the fa:rm lands in any other part ofthe world, except perhaps inAfrica and Greenland. Our"wheat yield per acre for the past forty years," says.]. ]. Hill (there is no better authority), "has averaged12.7 bushels to the acre. In Germany they import fertilizers from the United States and yet sell wheat ascheap as we can. If we got the same yield per acre asGermany, we would have enough wheat for home consumption and 800,000,000 bushels for export."The cost of working our farms is becoming so enor

mous, and labor so dear, that the young men who inheritthem are swarming toWall Street or to other places withcongener outfits, where they live upon the crumbs whichfall from the tariffly enriched men's tables, honestly ifthey can, and otherwise when they think they must.


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bling as a vice, when the government of the UnitedStates spits upon both the two great commandments, on,which hang all the Law and the Prophets, and instead ofdoing to others as we would have them do to us, insteadof loving our.neighbor as ourselves, treats him with aslittle respect as the Apache Indians used to treat ourprairie travellers before railroads and the telegraphoffered their protection?

The silence of the American clergy in their pulpitsabout the wickedness of the tariff would be incredible iftheir bread and butter were not so largely dependentupon it. There is no class so lavish with their bountiesto the churches as those whose wealth has been amassedwith a more or less scandalous indifference about themeans by which it has been acquired. No Italian high-wayman was ever known to pass a cross at the roadsidewithout stopping to make the sign of the cross upon hisforehead.Nevertheless the great Head of the Church is never

forgetting his Church. He is never more present thanwhen he seems to have turned his back upon it. At ameeting of the Presbyterian General Asserrlbly in Maylast, the Board of Ministerial Relief in its report "re-ferred to the constantly increasing number of families ofministers that need aid, and asked the General Assemblyto call the attention of the churches to the urgent needsof the board." It was stated that the increase in thecost of food, clothing, and other necessaries had made itimperative for the church to increase its payments to dis-abled clergymen and widows of clergymen from $300 to$500 for the former and from $250 to $300 for the latter.It was also stated in the report that there were 4480

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churches which had not contributed a cent to the causeduring the last year. This brought out a resolution,which was passed, ordering that such churches as failedin future to make proper contributions should bereportedto the Assembly and publicly censured.But reporting these churches to the Assembly will not

bring down the cost of food or clothing. Nor will acensure of them make the 4480 churches whose uddershave dried up feel any more disposed to give down theirmilk. These recalcitrants may be the mysterious instru-ments of Providence to let the shepherds know that theirflocks are not properly fed and that, while tithing theirmint and cummin, their ministry is not lifting a fingerto correct the cause of their destitution. Jesus is neveraccidentally or without a purpose sleeping in the bottomof the boat while his disciples are struggling with thewaves. It is when they feel the need of aid and clamorfor it that he awakes and the sea becomes calm.

VIAs the most vicious enemy of commerce that has everbeen devised, the tariff upon imports is, ex vi terminis,the most uncompromising of all the enemies of civiliza-tion."l"hank you," wrote to me our common friend the late

Samuel L. Clemens, whose gentle humor made his wis-dom the currency of the nations, "thank you for anyhard word you may say about the tariff. I guess thegovernment that robs its own people earns the future itis preparing for itself."


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In the year 1839 a speech was made in the Senate ofthe United States by John C. Calhoun, one of the mostconsummate logicians that ever had a seat in that forttm,in which, speaking of an amendment to a tariff bill thathad been introduced by Senator Benton, he said that atits very basis lay the assumption of a power which ifestablished would have assumed that duties and taxesmight be laid for revenue, but might be perverted to thepurpose of encouraging one pursuit and discouraginganother; that is, that the revenue power might be converted into a penal or stipendiary power.

Acting upon this false and dangerous presumption[he continued], the protective system had been introduced, and pushed to the most extravagant extent,under the act of 1828. By its baneful influence thegreat staple interest of the South and that of the navigation of the East were paralyzed, while certain otherswere made to flourish. To effect this, millions andmillions were taken from the people and poured intothe treasury-where it constituted a vast sum for extravagance and unconstitutional expenditures-corrupting the community, and extending the patronageand power of the government beyond the limits consistent with our free institutions. This vast patronage, concentrated in the hands of the Executive, hadrendered that department all-powerful: and wasthereby rapidly leading the way to the consolidation,not only of the powers of the legislative, but the wholepowers of the entire government, in that department.It was against such a system, producing such effects,that the blow was struck-bravelyandmagnanimouslystruck-that led to the Compromise Act, which thismotion is intended to disturb. It was successful. It .was directed at the root of the evil. It has stopped theexcessive flow into the treasury; and, followed up by

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the Deposit Act of 1836, it h ~ emptied it of its corrupting mass. He saw clearly that reform with anoverflowing treasury was impossible, especially whenthat overflow consisted of bank-notes. It was impossible to arrest waste or linlit patronage until the nleanswhich sustained them was exhausted. This greatobject is now effected; and retrenchment, economy,and reform must follow, or woe to those in power!And when these shall gain the ascendancy, then willthe blow which was dealt against consolidation, andfor the Union and our free institutions, have effectedthe great and patriotic purpose intended by those whodirected it, and of whom I shall ever be proud of having been one. The protective system, which has beenthe cause of all the mischief, has fallen prostrate before it in the dust. He who undertakes to revive itsputrid carcass will perish in the attempt.How fitly and grandly would these words ring through

the halls of Congress to-day if, alas! i f -It was as one of the echoes of those prophetic words,

and under the very administration which this prophetcommended, that our republic came to enjoy the distinction of being the only government then in the wholeworld that was free from debt.The relief of those evils by the Compromise measures,

like all compromises, was of transient endurance, simply because the tariff root was left alive in the soil.There is no such thing as a peaceful or durable compromise with vice in any form, as there is no such thingas a small sin. Will our people realize this before it"earns the future it is preparing for itself"?

In further support of my contention that the tariff "isevil and for evil only good," I will now inv?ke the manes

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of another American statesman whose shoe-latchets noPresident of the United States, since Lincoln at least,would be worthy to unloose, and this I say without derogating from the merits of any of President Lincoln'ssuccessors. On the 22d of July, 1778, .Benjamin Franklin addressed from Paris the following letter to JamesLovell:

Commerce among nations, as between private persons, should be fair and equitable, by equivalent exchanges and mutual supplies. The taking unfair advantages of a neighbor's necessities, though attendedwith temporary success, always breeds bad blood. Tolay duties on a commodity exported, which our neighhors want, is a knavish attempt to get something fornothing. The statesman who first invented it had thegenius of a pickpocket, and would have been a pickpocket if fortune had suitably placed him. Thenationswho have practised it have suffered fourfold, as pickpockets ought to suffer. Savoy, by a duty on exportedwines, lost the trade of Switzerland, which thenceforth raised its own wine; and (to waive other instances) Britain, by her duty on exported tea, has lostthe trade of her colonies. But, as we produce no commodity that is peculiar to our country, and which maynot be obtained elsewhere, the discouraging the consumption of ours by duties on exportation, and therebyencouraging a rivalship from other nations in theports we trade to, is absolute folly, which indeed ismixed more or less with all knavery. For my ownpart, if my protest were of any consequence, I shouldprotest against our ever doing it, even by way of reprisal. It is a meanness with which I would not dirtythe conscience or character of my count,.y.

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VIIOF one at least of several peace organizations to whosecourtesy I am indebted for invitations to associate myselftherewith, Colonel Theodore Roosevelt is the honorarypresident. On 11is return from his African hunt hetouched at Christiania, in Norway, to deliver an addresson "International Peace" before the Nobel Prize Com-mittee. In the course o'f his remarks he made the bestpossible use of the occasion to address the followingcounsel to the peace apostles assembled there:

We must ever bear in mind that the great end inview is righteousness, justice as between man andman, nation and nation, the chance to lead our liveson a somewhat higher level, with a broader spirit ofbrotherly good will one for another. Peace is gen-erally good in itself, but it is never the highest goodunless it comes as the handmaid of righteousness. . . .Moreover, and above all, let us remember thatwordscount only when they give expression to deeds or areto be translated into them. . . . Our words must bejudged by our deeds; and in striving for a lofty ideal

we must use practical methods.To my great regret, though scarcely to my surprise,

the colonel made no allusion whatever to the tariff uponimports, manifestly the most powerful centrifugal forceto which civilized nations have ever been subjected, ex-cepting, of course, the natural depravity of the humanheart.It is reported that the colonel has promised to break

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to his native land in order to take part in the fall congressional campaign in behalf of his nephew, should thelatter be nominated as a candidate for the House of Representatives. Nothing would be more .opportune orinteresting than for him to profit by this occasion toanswer four or five questions which the foregoing extracts suggest to the "plain people," to w'hom. thismonograph is addressed:

I . If righteousness is the great end of nations, whatis the great end of governments that 'impose tariffs uponimports?

2. If their ends differ, please explain their points ofdifference. If, on the other hand, their ends are thesame, please define righteousness, and also unrighteousness, its opposite.

3. In the Bible, of which I believe the colonel is afaithful reader, the prophet Isaiah says: "Thou shaltknow that I the Lord am thy Saviour and thy Redeemer,the Mighty One of Jacob. For brass I will bring gold,and for iron I will bring silver, and for wood brass, andfor stones iron: I will also make thy officers peace, andthine exactors righteousness. Violence shall no more beheard in thy land, desolation nor destruction within thyborders." Are the functions of the "officers" and "exactors" here referred to the same as those of Mr. Loeb'srattlesnakes at the custom-houses of our country, and ifnot, in what do they differ?.4- Does the peace prevail in our land that our Lordpromised, or is ours only the peace that man giveth?

And when shall the violence no more be heard, nor thedesolation and destruction within our borders, especially

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those with which our railway and industrial organizations are battling for their very lives?

5. Does the tariff bring gold for brass, and silver foriron, to us, and if so, to what class or proportion of ourpeople does it deliver them?

In his discourse at Christiania as all: apostle emeritusof peace, the colonel puts his own valor conspicuously inevidence in the following comprehensive indictment of"cowards" :

No man is worth calling a man who will not fightrather than submit to infamy or see those who are nearto him suffer wrong.Jesus of Nazareth submitted to both, to an extent

never experienced by any other human being, and yetno one has ever doubted his courage except the scoffersat his crucifixion.

But'as the rest of us, at least, are prepared to admitthat Jesus was b ~ r n with some advantages shared fullyby no other person, the colonel may content himself withembracing such an eligible opportunity of telling us h o much he has done as Legislator, President, Peace-Maker,Hunter, or Prophesier to ~ e l i e v e the millions of hiscountry-people, whether near or far off, so many ofwhom are suffering-many to starvation and not a fewto suicide-in consequence of that monument of unrighteousness, our tariff upon imports. And also while on thesubject he may be kind enough to tell us why, in a d ~ s -course in no respect conspicuous for brevity, in commendation of peace, he never once referred to the warwhich, while President, he and the government over

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which he presided were constantly waging against everycountry which conferred upon him its honors and ofwhich he was a privileged guest.

VIIITRAVELLING some thirty years ago through the canesugar country of Louisiana, I casually fell into conversation in the cars with a large sugar-planter of that region.From him I learned that the sugar plantations ofLouisiana, for the protection of which the sugar tariffwas originally imposed, yielded a crop on an averageonly once in three years. Upon further inquiries aboutthe cost of growing, harvesting, grinding, and marketing the crop, he admitted that, with all the aid of thetariff, the entire sugar crop of the State netted to itsproducers only about $450,0CX>. The value of the sugarimported into the United States during the current fiscalyear 1910 was $101,435,108. The tariff to which it wassubjected ad valorem was 56.22 per cent., that is, $ 5 7 , ~.024,675, in other words a wanton burden annually ofover fifty-seven millions of dollars upon the consumersof sugar alone. I then suggested to theplanter theadvantage it would be if, instead of a tariff, which was a seriousburden to every family in the nation, the governmentwere to give Louisiana a bounty of $4so,OCX> every threeyears and let the land be devoted to some other moreproductive use. He replied that the negroes did notknow how to grow anything else, and it was important togive them the employment. This was an intelligent, educated man, apparently the equal of the average legislator

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or Congressman, but he seemed to have no idea of whata set of Issachars he was making out the Louisianasugar-planters to be.Had our Congress wished in 1907 to adjust the latetariff exclusively with a view of securing the most revenue with the least burden to the people, it had only to reduce it to one half of its present rate. That would notonly have greatly increased its present revenue, but itwould have involved a corresponding diminution of therattlesnake brood with which our country seems toswarm. It was not reduced because the tariff on sugar

is purely a protective tax maintained to compel the peopleto pay $57,024,675 more than the sugar is really worth,in addition to the same amount that goes into the publictreasury and to the official rattlesnakes.One of the reasons now urged by some feeble-mindedenthusiasts for an income tax is that it would distributethe burdens of taxation more proportionately to thestrength of the backs upon which they would fall. Thisis a delusion not unlike those which lubricated the original introduction' of the tariff rattlesnake: a temporaryencouragenlent of infant industries; later, under the pretext of saving the Union, it was baptized a "war tariff";and now it is avowedly protection for the sake of protec-tion-that and nothing less. Whoever supposes that theRepublican party, which is now the synonym for a partyof "protection for the sake of protection," would reducethe tariff a single penny because of what an income tax,however oppressive, might yield, would make as egregious a blunder as the silly man who plunged into a laketo lay hold of the full moon which he saw reflected in itswater, mistaking it for a green cheese. Had Congress

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possessed the power in 1909 to raise $57,, by an income tax, the sugar taxwould have been retained just thesame, unless increased, and appropriations would havebeen increased to absorb it. The tariff rattlesnakes arejust as sacred and as devoutly worshipped on CapitolHill as snakes ever were in Africa or Hayti. Congressmen may come and Congressmen may go, but the tariffextortions will go on so long obviously as a Republicanadministration controls in Washington.We have paid in pensions since the month of June,1863, $3,551,025,6SI-nearly or quite the amount of

extraordinary expenses of our government during theCivil War. The number on the pension roll in 1907was 985,971-a larger number than we ever had ofsoldiers at one time in the field during that war, oreither b e f o ~ e or since we becanle an independent nation.These pensioners are now drawing $138,030,894 annually; and though we have had no war since 1865,except the three or four months' scrap with Spain, thepension roll has been annually increasing for the lastforty-five years. It would be interesting and instructiveto know how small a room it would take to hold all thesurviving soldiers of the Mexicanand the CivilWar, andthe widows of those deceased. No other country has orever had such a pension list. Would we ever have hadsuch a burden to carry had not a shameful proportionof it been appropriated by Congress to secure the reelection of its members pledged to protection ? Would thatspecies of graft have been practicable had it not beenfor the delusion of a majority of our people that it is theforeigner, not ourselves, that pays the duty on foreignimports? Nay, in spite of such delusion, would it have

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been practicable were there no special inducements toguard the treasury against a surplus, and the administration against a clamor from the people for a reduction oftheir burdens?

IXWERE there ever many, if any, wars more just than'would ensue if a man brought into our town a load ofpotatoes to sell and a publican and sinner were to tellhim that half or even a peck out of each bushel must beset apart for him and his associate hotel-keepers beforethe other three pecks of every bushel could be put on salein the markets?

In what respect morally or financially would this differfrom the publicans' going in person or sending theirservants to their neighbors' potato patches and carryingaway the potatoes from every third or fourth hill? Nay,in what important respect would this tariff upon ourneighbor's potato patch differ from the provocation of atleast ninety out of every hundred wars recorded in history? Yet, morally as well as economically, we, as anation, have been for a century or more acting uponprecisely the same principle as these sinful publicans.

A tariff upon foreign imports provokes reprisals asnaturally as predatory encroachment upon foreign territory, for it is equally a wanton appropriation of anothernation's property. Indeed, most wars in modern times,and all with which the world seems now to be tllreatened,have been waged to secure new or retain old markets.For this reason and no other is so much of the wealth ofnations absorbed in constantly increasing armies and

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navies. It simply means that each nation does not wishanother's capacity for depredation to exceed its own, andassumes that depredation will follow if it does. Notariffed nation gives any other nation the credit of respecting its territorial rights any longer than it thinksthat nation is the weaker. The most renowned if not themost capable military chieftains in human history weresimply highwaymen writ large. What biographical dictionary would ever have given more than a paragraph tothe names of Alexander, Hannibal, Charlemagne, or theBonapartes, but for the wars they waged for what theyhad no semblance of a right to? The pzans to theirglory in last analysis are but the war-whoops of thesavage vaunting his belt of scalps. The clamor forpeace, of which we hear so much of late, is only a clamorfor "the peace that man giveth." It means, to thosemaking most noise and professions about it, little morethan a change of weapons with which to fight. Thepredatory class nowadays make war by securing the protection of a tariff for their own industries, of which theunprotected millions have to bear all the burden. It isthe sham coat of arms of Vanity Fair, assumed from thepeerage, with Pace in bello for its motto.

xBEFORE the Civil War of 1861-1865 we knew nothing ofthe recent conflicts between labor and capital, nor was'such a financial phenomenon as a Debs or a Gompersknown in the land. The idea that any man should not

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sell his labor for what it would bring in any market hechose to offer it in was a craze which was only to be encountered, if anywhere, in lunatic asylums. Patriotismand the preservation of the Ul1ion were made the excusesfor increasing the tariff in order to obtain money to carryon the war, excuses justified neither by sound statesmanship nor intelljgent patriotism, but hastily and inconsiderately imposed upon the country for the sake of a highertariff on imports and more protection under the speciousguise of a war tariff, and therefore professedly a temporary one.

Though the mode adopted for providing means forprosecuting our war cost the country more than doublewhat it would have cost had we relied upon our wealthand credit, as a few years later was done by the two powerful nations engaged in the prosecution of the FrancoGerman War, yet that unnecessary cost was far frombeing the greatest calamity which has resulted from thatill-omened mistake. It so whetted the appetite of theprotected class by what they had fed on, that at theconclusion of the war there was not a word uttered aboutinfant industries or of a war tariff, nor any seriousthought given by. the administration to any reduction ofany kind of tariff. By its aid-by the retirement fromCongress during the war of the Southern representatives, who were pretty unanimously in favor of lowduties if any, and who, when returned to Congress, wereadmitted as hostiles and regarded with so much suspicion by the Republican majority as to have little influencethere-the tariff was steadily increasing, until it soonhad a plenty of champions of the principle of protectionfor the sake of protection. In fact, it has now no other.

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No tariff can remain stationary long without impoverishing somebody. It attracts capital and, of course,in the same degree increases competition against whichthere is no relief possible except by increaseof the duties.Fifty years have elapsed since the tariff for revenueadopted in 1844 gave place to the war tariff of 1860.That tariff under various pretexts has been altered-or"revised," as seems now the phrase most in fashion-:some half-dozen or more times in the interval, and inevery instance increased.

Of our last three Presidents, Roosevelt and Clevelandwere birthright free-traders, and though McKinley gavehis name and vote for the vilest tariff bill the countryhad ever been afflicted with up to his time, his four years'experience as our cl1ief magistrate converted him into atariff reformer. The last public utterance that came fromhis lips was an urgent appeal in that sense. Yet all threeof these statesmen learned by more or less humiliatingexperiences that neither the Republican nor the Democratic party could be led to a victory under a free tradeor even a tariff reduction banner. All succumbed andacted in the spirit, if they never used the words, of thesimilarly humiliated King of France, "Paris is wellworth amass."

Industries stimulated by protection are like the victimsof delirium tremens-both clamor madly for more, andthe protected class has become so powerful by its numbers and unjustly begotten wealth that, as in the caseof the whiskied lunatic, "because protection is such agood thing, of course we cannot have too much of it."Mr. Roosevelt's candidate for the Presidency two yearsago, in response to the public clamor for a revision of the

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tariff, said that he would call an extra session of Congress for that purpose immediately after his inauguration, and that a committee should be appointed to reducethe schedules that are too high and raise such as are toolow. The result of such a revision was, as I at the timepredicted, much like our early fur traffic with the Indians-one of the buyer's feet always in the scale that weighedthe pelt. "The cockroach never wins its cause," says aHaytian proverb, "when the chicken is judge."

About every eight years since the Republican partywas founded, now fifty-six years, we have had what was_called a revision of the tariff, or an attempt of that name,and in every instance it was increased. What has beenshall be, saith the Preacher. In every one of those fiftysix years the appetite for more protection has increased,and the power to resist it has proportionately diminished.

Protection is a poisonous stimulant that provokes appetites which it can never satisfy even temporarily butby increased indulgences, and must ultimately result indisaster to those who continue to confide in it.I may pertinently cite here a letter of very recent datefrom the president of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Mr. Charles Francis Adams, to a friend who bearsan historic name, in which he says, speaking of the recentInternational Free Trade Conference in London:

I suppose that it is our duty to keep the sacredflame alive, and have faith in its future. Nevertheless, I am obliged to say that, so far as the cause offree trade in this country is concerned, the outlooknever seemed to me less encouraging than now.You know perfectly well the class of men withwhom we have to deal. They are tricksters, infinitely43


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skilled in their work, and little better in any respectthan the thimble-rigger at the country fair.I have no doubt that there will be a revision of thetariff next year, no matter which of the two candidates, Taft or Bryan, occupies the Presidential chair.Both candidates, as well as both parties, are pledgedto it. Meanwhile, you know just as well as I, how thegame will be worked.I state what is of common knowledge when I sayit is perfectly feasible to make an ostensible averagereduction of 25 per cent. in the present tariff schedules, and yet in reality increase the actual protectiveburden by at least 5 per cent. It is only necessary tostrike off that excess of duty which was imposedthroughthe different schedules when theDingleyTariffwas framed, with a view to trading thereon upon thepassage of the reciprocity treaties then in negotiation.Those treaties have not been confirmed; and now thisexcess duty, judiciously applied in way of ostensiblereduction, would in no way lower the actual protectivesystem. Meanwhile, on the other hand, a neatly arranged increase of certain schedules, as suggested byMr. Taft, would fill out and complete the protectedabominations. Here is "the little joker"; and yet, asa result of the whole, it might publicly, and mostplausibly, be proclaimed that a net tariff reduction of20 per cent. had been effected.That the whole thing was a thimble-rigging fraudwould be only too manifest to the well-informed. Tothe unthinking, however, a campaign pledge wouldhave been faithfully redeemed.

Mark you, I do not for a momept suggest that thisscheme is in the mind of either Mr. Taft or Mr.Bryan. That, however, it will be tile game of thetariff manipulators of Congress I have little, if any,doubt.As an all-round illustration in point! I send you a

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clipping from this morning's Boston Herald, entitled"Puck in the Campaign."Mr. Taft I believe to be a perfectly honest man,but you will there see that he has "been advised bymen who know" that a certain schedule could beraised to advantage. The facts in the case are clearlyset forth in the clipping. The duty on the commodityreferred to (pottery) is already fixed in the DingleyBill of Abominations at from 55 per cent. to 60 percent., or "practically twice the total cost of production" ; and yet, as a measure of tariff reform, Mr. Taftunconsciously advises such further protection as shallpractically be prohibitive.It was Macbeth, I believe, who, on a certain occasion, energetically exclaimed:

le And be these juggling fiends no more believed,That palter with us in a double sense;That keep the word of promise to our ear,And break it to our hope.".

I am confirmed in the above view by informationwhich reaches me from well-informed quarters, thatthe steel men, the wool men, and the sugar men allsay, privately but with confidence, that they do notapprehend that their several schedules will be affectedadversely. You know their persuasiveness and theirpower!

XIPROTECTION gives a very substantial pecuniary advantage to a limited class of industrialists at the expense ofall outside of that class, and thus has laid the foundationof our American plutocracy, just as our forefathers inAmerica gave to the slave States a larger per capita representation in the Congress than was enjoyed by the

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non-slaveholding.States, and thus founded a plutocraticaristocracy in those States to which its members, in 1861,attached more value than to the Union.

After more than half a century's discontent of theNorth with the dictatorial supremacy which the Southacquired through this inequality, the census of 1860 revealed the fact that the political supremacy of the country had crossed the Potomac River and that cotton wasno longer king.. As a consequence of the trifling concession, as it was regarded by our forefathers, to secure theassent of two or three refractory slave States to theconstitutional organization of their government in 1792,that concession had swelled and festered in the nationuntil it could only be eliminated by the most expensiveand bloodywar up to its time.

That war was purely a labor war, at least so far as theSouth, which brought it on, was concerned. So soon asthe census revealed that its supremacy at Washingtonhad terminated, the planters in that section were determined to perpetuate the system by which they had obtained all the labor they required for little more than thepork and hominy necessary to feed the negroes whoselabor supplied both. An appeal to arms by the South hadno otl1er rational purpose than to retain, or secure at atrifling price, an abundance of involuntary labor.

In what did the situation which furnished the purposeand provocation of that war differ from the situationconfronting us to-day? Must we tolerate it until obligedto rid ourselves of it in the sameway?

The tariff has built up an aristocracy already morenumerous than were the refractory slave-owners in theSouth. It has built i t up, too, by privileges quite as un-

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just, and as exclusively for money's worth, but a thousand times more lucrative to its beneficiaries than slaveryever was. The consequences a ~ that it has divided ourpeople again into two classes-one, of those who havemore wealth than they know what to do with orhow togive away, and another, of breadwinners who, if theylose a day's wages, even by illness, have to go in debt for.their next day's expenses. The increased cost of livingcompels an increase of wages from time to time, but always the cost of living increases faster, until now thefood of the proletariat has reached famine prices in mostof our large cities and is daily increasing. With foodenough produced in the United States to nourish twiceits population, the average wage-earner can lay upnothing, can provide few privileges for his family, andpractically no recreations.

"Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will a mangive for his life." Is it strange that there is friction between labor and capital with us? The mass of our ownpeople are not political economists and know little, if anything, about tariffs, except what is their fatal delusion:that the tariff promises to protect them from the competition of foreign labor. Is it strange, therefore, that ourbreadwinners combine for higher wages to meet the constantly increasing cost of the necessaries of life? Whencapital takes advantage of unemployed labor to avoidsuch increase, is it strange that the wage-earners dismissed, treat those who at lower rates supply their placesas enemies, as traitors who betray the rights of tIle classto which they in common belong? Hence the labor warwhich has cost us in America many millions of dollarsthrough the industries it has suspended, interrupted, or

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impoverished, and by such interruptions filled the country with idle, starving, and desperate men. Is not suchthe natural and inevitable fruit of all tariffs upon imports? While the tariff lasts can we ever again be freefrom serious apprehensions that any day no inconsiderable part of all the machinery upon which our civilizationis hourly dependent shall be blocked by refractory laborcombinations?

The following language recently used at a Republicanconvention by the senior United States Senator fromMassachusetts is unhappily too true, and it is a pleasureto hear or read it from the lips or pen of so prominent amember of the Republican party as Henry Cabot Lodge:

It is the huge size of private fortunes, the vast extent and power of modern combinations of capitalmade possible by present conditions, which havebrought upon us in these later years problems portentous in their possibilities and threatening not only oursocial and political welfare, but even our personal freedom, if they are not boldly met and wisely solved.Mr. Lodge forbears or at least neglects to state what

the "present conditions" really are which have broughtupon us these portentous problems, for, like Br'er Rabbit,with only a racial distinction, he, too, was born and bredin the brier-bush tangle of New England protectionism.He therefore very respectfully refers only to presentconditions, but forbears to say a word of the pathogenesis of those conditions.Mr. Lodge's solicitude for personal freedom remindsone of a story Thomas Jefferson used to relate of anincident occurring on one of his journeys through Virginia. He chanced to stop at an inn ~ h landlady of

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which had just returned from the funeral of one whomshe lamented with much feeling. "But, Mr. ]efferson,"she said, "we have the consolation of mowing that everything was done for him that could be done. He was bledno less than twenty-six times."

XIITo give some idea of the cost and prevailing results ofthe war waging in our country at present between thetariff-skinned wage-earners and the government, it maybe instructive to note that on over 55,000 miles of railroads in the Eastern States alone the concessions to thestrikers involve increases in the annual pay-rolls aggregating $5,000,000. When the other Eastern and theWestern lines shall have settled up with the strikers, theamount to be paid will be more than doubled. Yet therailways are but one of the hundreds of industrial armies

I

that the tariff has put into the field to war against theprotected capitalists and their rattlesnakes.Another illuminating illustration of the discouraginginfluence upon national prosperity wrought by restrictions upon foreign commerce and of the advantagessecured by their removal is given in a table of the lastcentury of Great Britain's exports. A nation's exportsare the most reliable if not the only available test of itsprosperity.Prior to the free trade budget of 1842 the exports ofGreat Britain amounted to $175,000,000; after thebudget of 1842, to $200,000,000; after the repeal of theCorn Laws in 1846 and the Navigation Laws in 1847

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they rose promptly to $275,000,000. From that time onher exports increased pretty regularly every seven yearsat the rate of about $125,000,000, so that her exports in1901 amounted to $1,375,000,000; in 1907 to $2,000,000,000; and for the last year are authoritatively estimated as $2,200,000,000.The slaveholders took the desperate risks of a civil

war to avoid paying a fair price for the culture of theircotton, sugar, and tobacco fields. Is the time very distant when the protectionists will be ready to risk anothercivil war for precisely similar economical reasons andwith even more disastrous results? Such a revolutionmight, and probably would, leave a tariff upon importsbehind it, as its predecessor did, though shorn of a portion of its claws and teeth, if still retnaining our mainreliance for revenue. That would be like surgery for acancer. The disease would soon reappear with increasing vigor if a single root or fibre of it were permitted tosurvive; and what can so surely, so quietly, so geniallysupply its place as the opening of our harbors freely tothe commerce of all the world, and for the purposes ofrevenue reserving a quota of what it would thus directlycontribute to the new industries and national resourcescreated by its new-born commerce?

XIIIIN d ~ a l i n g with its foreign commerce our governmentseems to have been bewitched with the Calvinistic notionthat the more commerce has to suffer and struggle, themore it will thrive. I t not only taxes the foreign mer-

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chant for what he sends one half of its home cost, but itfurther discourages his coming to us at all by chargingfor our harbor hospitalities two or three times as muchas he would be charged in the harbors of any othermaritime nation in the world.

The Savoie of the Compagnie Transatlantique has topay for the privilege of landing her passengers andcargo in New York over $4. She pays $I forwharfage; $214 for her tonnage tax; for her custom-house expenses, $26.20; health officer and board of war-dens, $35 ; transfer of immigrants and baggage, $85.25;pilotage, entering and leaving, $32; hospital expensesand surveillance, etc., at Ellis Island, $138.63; head taxfor 592 aliens, $2368; besides many other expenses whichvary with each voyage. The Savoie is now a relativelysmall ship, though not an old one. The vessels sincebuilt for the transatlantic service in England and Ger-many are of nearly twice her tonnage, and those whichharbor in New York City naturally incur fully twice theharbor expenses. The Kaiser Wilhelm of a Germanline pays on her net registered tonnage, for five trips,$1900, or six cents per registered ton for each of herfive trips; a head tax of $4 a head on an average ofI passengers; pilotage for entrance and departure,$242; for transferring immigrants, on an average, $120.New Jersey, with a sagacious liberality, makes no munic-ipal charges for docking in Hoboken, except the $10 forthe port warden. The German company owns itswharves. A proper return for the investment made bythe company on these wharves, however, is estimated foreach trip of one of its large steamers at about $300 aday, or about $2 a year.

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The harbor expenses of the Savoie in Havre are abouthalf what they are in New York. Those of the Germanlines in home ports are less than a quarter of New York'scharges.

For any vessel of between 6800 and 9O cubic metrescapacity the total charges from sea to Bremerhaven, andout from Bremerhaven to the first buoys, are less than$400. $


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I"dictate that all the privileges of the port ~ h o u l d be madeas free as possible.

What is the matter with the man's head who cannot"see that every merchant ship entering our harbors is so'much money by how much.1ess we pay for its commodities than we can produce them for, and in additionfurnishes a profitable market for so much of our ownsurplus as will give a return cargo to its skipper, whotherefore should be welcomed as a special providence,not as a beast of prey!

XIVBy nature the United States was constituted to becomethe Mistress of the Seas. It was this conviction thatgave to Napoleon the prophetic wisdom of ceding theTerritory of Louisiana to us for a nominal sum. Weought already to be Mistress of the Commerce of theSeas, and who can reasonably doubt we would be butfor the disorganizing and demoralizing influence of thetariff? We have over 19,000 miles of continuous ocean,gulf, and lake coast lines, which is considerably morethan is possessed by any other nation in the world. Wehave already some 200 ports of entry with custom-housesto match. Yet we would soon have many more but forour tariff and navigation laws, which have practicallygiven our immensely profitable ocean transportationservice over to foreign nations.We have a more abundant supply than any othernation in the world of the principal materials requiredfor the COl1struction of a commercial marine, such. as

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coal, iron, copper, lead, zinc, and wood, besides dozens ofother articles of secondary importance, without speakingof our numberless gold and silver mines.Why is it, then, that whenever we wish to visit a for

eign country or send it a bale of cotton or tobacco, wehave to pay for our passage or for the transport of ourfreight to a foreign ship-owner? Simply, first, becauseof our absurd navigation laws, and secondly, becauseeverything required in the construction of a ship, even Inails and hammers, is weighted by such a tariff that it Iadds fully 40 per cent. to the cost of a ship built in anAmerican yard. The price of whatever we contributeto the structure of a ship therefore rises to the level ofthe tariffed foreign products. Hence it is that GreatBritain, with a population of 40,000,000, exports morethan five times as much manufactured products for everyman, woman, and child in that country as the UnitedStates does with a population of more than 90,000,000.To make a striking exposure of the paralyzing and

destructive influence of the tariff, both on commerce andon the ship-building industry, let me cite a table recentlypresented by the. treasurer of the Cobden Club, the Hon.H. Russell Rea, to the British Parliament, to show therelations between the tariffs of maritime countries 'andthe amount of their steam shipping tonnage as comparedwith their average ad valorem duties:

AVERAGE AD VALOREM DUTIESPercent.

STEAM SHIPPING TONNAGEPER INHABITANTRussia . . . . . 131 Russia. I ton to every 330United States . . . 73 United States " 166Austria-Hungary. . 35 Austria-Hungary" 110France . 34 France "7 1 IItaly . 27 Italy "t, 72

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AVERAGE ADVALOUM: DUTIES STEAM SHIPPING TONNAGEPe r cent. PER INHABITANTGermany. 25 Germany 1 ton to every 34Sweden 23 Sweden " 24 Greece 19 Greece " 12 Denmark. 18 Denmark " 9Norway 12 Norway " 4Holland 3 Holland " 15 United Kingdom (no pro- United Kingdom " 46tectionist tariff)

Here we find that with an average ad valorem importduty of 73 per cent. the United States has but one ton ofshipping for every 166 of population, while the UnitedKingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, without, strictly,any protective tariff, has a ton of shipping to every 4.6of its population.

This was not always so. Far from it. In 1861, whenwe began to protect the country by a war tariff, our totaltonnage, oceanic and domestic, was over five and a halfmillion, and only three and a half thousand tons less'than that of the whole British Empire in that day.We actually owned at that time one third of the entiremaritime tonnage of the world. Even five years earlierthe value of our imports and exports carried in American bottoms was more than three times all that was car-ried in foreign bottoms. This shows what the Americanpeople were and still are capable of doing in free competition with the rest of the world for its commerce,when, if ever, they can disengage tllemselves from thetariff octopus.

Why is it, then, that the United States flag is nowrarely or never seen upon the oceans except on vessels ofwar? Why is it tl1at, of the millions upon millions,of

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bushels of grain shipped by us to Europe every year,not a solitary bushel finds transportation in an Americanbottom? Why are our shipyards deserted and the building of merchant ships in America become practicallyanother of the lost arts? And why are we building new.vessels of war under the pretext of protecting our com-'merce, when we have no commerce, nor the least prospect of any that we can call our own, to protect?Our chambers of commerce and exchanges are trying

every year to mend matters by appeals to the federalgovernment to develop a commercial navy by subsidiesor bounties, thus taking out of the people's pocket by thetariff, which kills our commerce, money enough to renewartificially that commerce which we enjoyed before theCivil War. I never hear of these appeals, nor of thetedious debates in Congress to which they give rise,wIthout thinking of a story told by Lucian, the Rigdumfunnidos of Samosata, about a simpleton who busiedhimself in milking a he-goat into a sieve.And yet our position appears even more ridiculouswhen we reflect that we are waging a war against every

commercial nation in the world as well as our own, anddo not blush to send missionaries to The Hague to recommend a universal peace, without any of them sayingor being expected to say a word about the unholy warwe are waging with increasing fury against every nationthat is represented there.

xvTHERE is one other objection to the tariff upon importswhich has not figured in the various tariff debates in

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Congress or elsewhere, that I have observed, since theadnlinistration of President Jackson. I refer to its unconstitutionality.

There is no authority in our federal Constitution forlevying any impost of any-kind upon foreign commerce.The Eighth Section of the First Article of that instrument, the one which relates expressly to the subject ofrevenues, says:

The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises to pay the debtsand provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United States, but all duties, imposts, andexcises shall be uniform throughout the UnitedStates.The word "tariff" was manifestly excluded, for the

Third Section of the same article alone dealswith foreigncommerce. It confers the power to regulate commercewith foreign nations

Documents

John Bigelow the Folly of Building Temples of Peace With Untempered Mortar New York 1910