PROTECTION A DOUBLE FOE. 409 



value by the artificial obstacles set up in our ports to prevent the 

 return of the things which these exportables went forth to buy. If 

 everything else that I say be forgotten, I beg the farmers of the 

 West to remember, that protection cuts right into the heart of the 

 value of their exportable commodities. Nay more; it sometimes 

 prevents the export of these commodities altogether. The harvest 

 in Europe this season has been unusually good; the European de 

 mand for the bread-stuffs and other food products of our country is 

 likely in consequence to be rather slack. Already the price of wheat 

 in New York and Chicago has felt the influence of this in a decline; 

 still, if we were allowed by the tariff to take into this country freely 

 the things which we want, of which foreigners have a surplus to sell, 

 they would take now freely of us our surplus bread-stuffs, and we 

 could afford to let them have them. In one word, we could export 

 more food products at all times, with a greater profit on each trans 

 action provided we could get our return cargoes free of protective 

 taxes. We could sell more when the price was high, and longer 

 after it became lower, than we can possibly do now. A protective 

 tariff tends to stop the exports by making the imports dearer; and as 

 the farmers furnish the bulk of the exports, the principal losses of 

 the tariff fall upon them. As things now are, it is true indeed that 

 the gold price of produce in Liverpool determines the point of profit 

 able export from New York; but a lower gold price in Liverpool 

 would still allow a profitable export from New York, provided the 

 gold price received here would buy more of all the commodities 

 wanted by the farmers. Thus we see that protection is a double foe 

 to the farmers; it causes them to get less for what they raise and to 

 give more for what they buy. Protection in its best estate is a short 

 sighted, narrow-minded prejudice; whenever it passes beyond that, 

 it becomes a consciously deceitful scheme of plunder, by which a 

 few seek to enrich themselves at the expense of the many. Those 

 many are mainly the farmers. They are abundantly able, numerically 

 and otherwise, if they will only unite to do it, to put down forever 

 this monstrous injustice of legislation. I hope that their rising in 

 telligence and the courage that is born of union, will seize this lying 

 fraud by the throat, and shake the life out of it, as a dog shakes the 

 breath out of a woodchuck ! 



Poor money and protective tariffs are natural allies; carry on their 

 w r ork of destruction in similar ways; each intensifies the mischief of 

 the other; and both combine their results in hostility to the agricult 

 ural interests, since each compels the farmer to give more for his 

 supplies and take less for his produce. On the other hand, hard 

 money and free trade are natural allies also, working in the same 

 harness, defrauding nobody, just to all because natural and free, 

 and enabling the masses of mankind to maintain the advantageous 

 places which the Heavenly Father designed them to hold. To be 

 consistent with himself a hard-money man should be a free trader 

 also; and a man who believes that legislators are wiser than natural 

 laws, should consistently believe both in commercial restriction and 

 in rag-money, since both are artificial creatures of the Legislature. 

 Accordingly, there has been considerable tendency during the last 

 fifty years for men to range themselves in parties on the one side or 

 the other of these two combined questions; but unfortunately they 



