178 



CONGRESS. (THE TARIFF BILL.) 



trying to break into it. We do not appreciate 

 the nature of our market ourselves. 



" I have given you already the glowing testi- 

 mony of Englishmen who have seen us with 

 their own eyes. 'A mazing prosperity,' 'Greatest 

 market in the world.' k Paradise of the working- 

 man.' These are strong words ; but let us see if 

 cold mathematics do not put to shame the fervor 

 of adjectives. 



" We are nominally 70.000,000' people. That is 

 what we are in mere numbers. But as a market 

 for manufactures and choice foods we are poten- 

 tially 175,000,000 as compared with the next 

 best nation on the globe. Nor is this difficult 

 to prove. Whenever an Englishman earns one 

 dollar an American earns a dollar and sixty cents. 

 I speak within bounds. Both can get the food 

 that keeps body and soul together and the shel- 

 ter which the body must have for 60 cents. 

 Take 60 cents from a dollar and you have 40 

 cents left. Take that same 60 cents from the 

 dollar and sixty and you have a dollar left just 

 two and a half times as much. That surplus 

 can be spent in choice foods, in house furnish- 

 ings, in fine clothes, and all the comforts of life 

 in a word, in the products of our manufac- 

 tures. That makes our population as consumers 

 of products as compared with the English popu- 

 lation, 200,000,000. Their population is 37,000,- 

 000 as consumers of products which one century 

 ago were pure luxuries, while our population is 

 equivalent to 175,000,000. 



" If this is our comparison with England, what 

 is the comparison with the rest of the world, 

 whose markets our committee are so eager to 

 have in exchange for our own ? Mulhall gives 

 certain statistics which will serve to make the 

 comparison clear. On page 365 of his ' Diction- 

 ary of Statistics ' he says the total yearly prod- 

 uct of the manufactures of the world are 4,474,- 

 000,000, of which the United States produces 

 1,443,000,000. 



" I do not vouch, nor can anybody vouch, for 

 these figures, but the proportion of one third to 

 two thirds nobody can fairly dispute. We pro- 

 duce one third, and the rest of the world, Eng- 

 land included, two thirds. 



" The population of the world is 1,500,000,000, 

 of which we have 70.000,000, which leaves 1,430,- 

 000,000 for the rest of mankind. We use all our 

 manufactures, or the equivalent of them. Hence 

 we are equal to one half the whole globe outside 

 of ourselves, England included, and compared 

 as a market with the rest of the world our popu- 

 lation is equal to about 700,000,000. 



" I repeat, as compared with England herself 

 as a market our people are equivalent, to 175,- 

 000,000. As compared with the rest of the 

 world, England included, we are equal as a mar- 

 ket to 700,000,000. Those, figures more than 

 justify the adjectives of the Englishman, and 

 the cold facts of mathematics surpass the spasms 

 of rhetoric. 



" Instead of increasing this market by leaving 

 it to the steady increase of wages which the fig- 

 ures of the Aldrieh report so conclusively show, 

 and which have not only received the sanction 

 of the member from New York, the Secretary of 

 the Treasury, and the Democratic Bureau of 

 Statistics, but the sanction of everybody who 

 hears me, our committee propose to lower wages 



and so lessen the market and then divide that 

 market with somebody else, and all on the 

 chance of getting the markets of the world. 



" Who have these markets of the world now I 

 There is hardly a spot on the globe where 3 

 generations of Englishmen, Frenchmen, or Ger- 

 mans have not been camped in possession of 

 every avenue of trade. Do you suppose that 

 with machinery nearly as good as ours and 

 wages at one half these men are going to sur- 

 render to us the markets of the world? Why. 

 the very duties you keep on show that you do 

 not believe it. If we can not without duties 

 hold our own markets, how shall we pay freight, 

 and the expense of introducing goods, and meet 

 the foreigner where he lives? 



" To add to the interesting impossibilities of 

 this contention, the orators on the other side 

 say they are going to maintain wages. How can 

 that be possible? All things sell at the cost of 

 production. If the difference between cost of 

 production here and cost of production in Eng- 

 land be not equalized by the duty, then our cost 

 of production must go down or we must go out. 

 Therefore our labor, the great component part 

 of cost of production, must go down also. If 

 you say this will come out of profits, then profits 

 will be lessened in every occupation, for your 

 own political economists teach you that the 

 profits in protected industries can never be 

 greater than in other occupations, and will not 

 long consent to be less. Let it be noised abroad 

 that any occupation is making big profits, and 

 straightway it will be swamped with competi- 

 tors, so that overprofit is the sure precursor of 

 no profits at all. 



" But all these questions of wages are to be 

 met, says the gentleman from New York (Mr. 

 Cockran), by our superior civilization, and he ac- 

 cuses me of ' confessing that civilization at the 

 highest level is incapable of meeting the compe- 

 tition of civilization at its lowest level.' 



" Now, it is a great truth that civilization can 

 successfully meet barbarism, but it must do it 

 with brains and not with rhetoric. How often 

 have I heard this and similar eloquent outbursts 

 about our superiority, and therefore inevitable 

 conquest of the inferior. Survival of the supe- 

 rior ! That is not the way that the great natu- 

 ralist put it. 'Survival of the fittest ' was his 

 expression ; survival of the fittest to survive ; 

 not the superior, not the loveliest, not the most 

 intellectual, but the one who fitted best into the 

 surroundings. Compare the strong bull of 

 Bashan with a salt-water smelt. Who doubts 

 the superiority of the bull ? Yet, if you drop 

 them both into the Atlantic Ocean, I "will take 

 my chances with the smelt ? A little tomtit, in- 

 significant as a, bit of dust in the balance, can 

 not compare with the domestic swan either in 

 grace, beauty, or power. Yet. if both were 

 dropped from a balloon hung high in air, I would 

 rather be the insignificant tomtit than the grace- 

 ful swan. If I had a job to dig on the railway, 

 the competitor for that job whom I should fear 

 would not be my friend from New York, but 

 some child of sunny Italy, so newly imported 

 that he had not grown up to the wages of his 

 adopted country. 



" The only way to utilize all the powers of body 

 and mind in a nation is to have something 



