COMMON SENSE AND THE TARIFF QUESTION. 443 



tude, but also that it is one which could not be established in this 

 country without importing the Welshmen to do it, because we 

 have so many opportunities for work, under more wholesome and 

 profitable conditions, that we can no.t afford to do such work, no 

 matter what the inducement may be. 



In other words, the policy advocated by the Republican party is 

 one of privation and not of protection, and it is avowedly sustained 

 by many prominent Republicans against their avowed conviction of 

 what would be beneficial, and merely because an assumed party ne- 

 cessity compels them to surrender their own convictions of right. 



On the other side, the policy advocated by the Democratic 

 party for protecting American industry is to exempt from taxa- 

 tion all articles of foreign origin which, either in a crude or in a 

 partly manufactured state, are necessary or useful in the processes 

 of domestic industry. They hold that our capacity to produce 

 food which the world must have or suffer from hunger ; cotton, 

 without which the commerce of nations would be crippled ; oil 

 which we can not burn ourselves ; goods, wares, tools, and imple- 

 ments of many varieties, the best of their kind; all our great 

 crops made and all our goods being produced or manufactured at 

 the highest rates of wages and yet at the lowest cost as compared 

 with any other country in the world, enables us to exchange these 

 products for the crude or partly manufactured materials, the raw 

 wool, the tin plates, and for whatever we need which foreign 

 laborers or workmen desire to sell in exchange. They hold that 

 if we can get for one day's work at high wages in our own coun- 

 try the product of ten days' work even of foreign paupers, we 

 can not afford to do that kind of work for ourselves ; they hold 

 that by such exchange we may gain yet higher wages and larger 

 profits, the wider we can extend our commerce on such terms. 



They hold that what we receive from other countries in ex- 

 change for the excess of our products which we can not consume, 

 becomes as much a part of our own product as if these necessary 

 commodities had been produced on our own soil or from our own 

 mines and forests. 



They hold that the home market is most fully established 

 when all possible obstructions to the mutual service of nations 

 are removed and the utmost facility given to the people of every 

 land to send to our home market what we need and to buy in our 

 home market what we do not want for our own use. 



That is free trade, qualified by the necessity of obtaining a 

 revenue from duties on selected imports. When we have attained 

 it we may wonder why any one ever dreaded it ; and if I may once 

 more repeat my favorite quotation from Mr. Gladstone, " Then will 

 the ships that pass between this land and that be like the shuttle 

 of the loom, weaving the web of concord among the nations." 



