442 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



TAEIFF EEVISION FEOM THE MANUFACTUREE'S 



STANDPOINT^ 



ByDe.A. b. farquhak, 



YORK, PA. 



My experience as a manufacturer for more than half a century, an 

 exporter and writer upon economic questions for about forty 

 years, enables me to unite practise with science in demonstrating the 

 truth of what I shall say to you. 



The manufacturer's occupation, in common with most other occu- 

 pations, has for its object to make money. As a social factor, his 

 function is the elaboration of material, to meet the increasingly com- 

 plex needs of a continually advancing civilization ; but that and all else 

 has to be subordinated, from a business man's point of view, to the 

 endless task of investing smaller quantities of money and realizing 

 larger; the difference of those two sets of quantities measuring his 

 success or failure. He is a constructor incidentally — essentially he ia 

 a merchant. His great study is how to buy cheapest and sell dearest. 



The tariff, considered as protective, is contrived and constructed 

 with the single purpose of aiding the producer to sell dear. That aid 

 is extended in part to production of mere raw material, but mainly to 

 that of more elaborated articles, and the manufacturer has accordingly 

 been always regarded as its chief beneficiary. Nor can manufacturers 

 in general be fairly charged with ingratitude for the assistance it so 

 graciously accords them in holding the hands of their customer while 

 they rifle his pockets. But this grateful sentiment, though general, 

 has never been quite universal; and the discordant voices, in the prev- 

 alent harmony, have of late grown more numerous than ever. The 

 reasons for this — why the manufacturer is coming more and more to 

 regard the tariff as not quite the most precious friend he has in this 

 cold world — are, after all, very simple indeed. First, he comes to find, 

 as his skill and facilities for production increase, that there is more 

 profit in the greater number of sales to be had at a moderate price than 

 in the smaller number at a high price, so that the ability to advance the 

 price of his goods is, beyond a certain limit, no favor to him. A second 

 and more important reason is that his interest is as much involved in 

 buying cheap as in selling dear, and his " raw material " is always the 

 finished product of some other producer, whose profits the tariff in- 



^This and the following papers on tariff revision were presented before 

 Section L — Social and Economic Science — at the recent Baltimore meeting of 

 the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 



