452 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



The Dingley committee had among its majority members only four 

 men, Messrs. Dingley, Payne, Dalzell and Hopkins, a newspaper editor 

 and tliree attorneys, and Mr. McMillan of the minority, with previous 

 experience. That men so inexperienced should have hastily made a 

 tariff for this nation was worse than a blunder — it was a crime. They 

 only made a great blind jab at the task. They began wrong by taking 

 classifications more than a generation old, inapplicable to their time. 

 The committee had neither knowledge nor time to consider this impor- 

 tant phase of the subject adequately. Consequently, we have had 30,000 

 lawsuits on the classifications of the appraisers, nine tenths of which 

 might have been avoided. They put in one classification, for instance, 

 buttons, stoves, electric fans, revolvers, nails, dress trimmings, railway 

 cars and enameled portraits, cannon for war and crosses for churches. 

 They were as careless as to rates. Said a member of the Ways and 

 Means Committee in conversing with me upon this subject, " Why, when 

 any one down in my district wants anything I get it for him, I get all 

 I can, and that is all there is to it." 



Wlien Congress passed the Dingley bill it went into the trust-making 

 business up to its eyes. A list which I have compiled of all the principal 

 industrial trusts in the United States shows an absolute and complete 

 disregard of the principle of measurement, or any other principle in 

 the making of the schedules in which trusts are interested. A table 

 showing the more important of these trusts was exhibited. 



The tariff is supposed to be a protection to wages. This table shows 

 that most of the trusts have tariff rates that are from one to fifteen 

 times their total pay-rolls and yet the tariff should measure but little 

 more than the difference between the American wage cost, per unit pro- 

 duced, and the foreign cost. In this sense these trusts have from 

 fifteen to one thousand times a just rate. When Congress gives more 

 than a just rate to any industry it invites, as a practical matter, those 

 in that industry to form a trust and add to their prices as against the 

 home consumer the difference between a fair protection and the excessive 

 protection given. 



Prohibition is not protection. An excessive tariff is usually prohibit- 

 ive. It makes foreign competition impossible. The home producers 

 by consolidation eliminate home competition and then have their 80,- 

 000,000 compatriots at their mercy. When, for instance. Congress 

 put a duty of 45 per cent, upon goods I make, 15 per cent, being enough, 

 it gave Congressional permit, if not a Congressional invitation, that all 

 in my industry consolidate and add to our present domestic prices the 

 difference between the necessary 15 per cent, and the 45 per cent, given. 

 This is what all our trusts have done. The question whether any indus- 

 try does add much or all of the tariff to its domestic prices is answered 

 by this other question, " Can they ? " If they can they do. Trusts can 

 and trusts do. 



