180 



CONGRESS. (THE TARIFF BILL.) 



"If the hope of agriculturists is in English 

 free trade, they had better ponder on the fact 

 that while the wages of artisans have increased 

 in England $2.43 per week since 1850, the wages 

 of agricultural laborers have only increased 72 

 Gents; and while the Lancashire operatives in 

 the factories live as well as anybody, except 

 Americans, the agricultural laborers are hardly 

 i >et t er off than the Continental peasantry. Eng- 

 land's example will not do for agriculture. 



- Here let me meet one other question, and let 

 nn> meet it fairly. We are charged with having 

 claimed that the tariff alone will raise wages, 

 and we are pointed triumphantly to the fact 

 that the wages of France and Germany, pro- 

 tected by a tariff, are lower than England, free 

 of all tariff, and to America with a tariff and 

 still higher wages. We have never made such a 

 claim in any such form. Free traders have set 

 up that claim for us in order to triumphantly 

 knock it over. What we do say is, that where 

 two nations have equal skill and equal appli- 

 ances and a market of nearly equal size, and one 

 of them can hire labor at one half less, nothing 

 but a tariff can maintain the higher wages, and 

 that we can prove. 



" If there be two bales of goods side by side, 

 made by the same kind of machinery and with 

 the labor of the human being in both of the 

 same degree of skill, and if the labor of one bale 

 cost only half, for example, as much as the 

 other, that other bale can never be sold until 

 the extra cost of the costlier labor is squeezed 

 out of it, provided there is an abundant supply 

 of the product of the cheaper labor. If the bale 

 with the cheaper labor of England in it meets 

 the bale with the dearer labor of America in it, 

 which will be bought at cost of production? I 

 leave that problem just there. The sale of the 

 English bale will be only limited by England's 

 production. 



" Xow, as to France and Germany. The gen- 

 tleman from Ohio [Mr. Barter] makes the same 

 blunder which he charges on us. He says the 

 tariff makes lower wages, and asks us to com- 

 pare the three countries, saying they are all the 

 same, except the tariff. I do not read history 

 that way. England had centuries of peace or 

 i list ant war, while both France and Germany 

 were the battlefields of Europe. Until Bismarck 

 made Germany a nation she was not even big 

 enough to enter successfully modern industrial 

 warfare. To compare either of those nations in 

 machinery or wealth to England, a hundred 

 years in advance of them both by reason of her 

 history before 1850 and her tributary provinces, 

 is absolutely farcical. 



" Let Germany and France get thoroughly 

 established within themselves as good ma- 

 chinery as England now has, together with her 

 factory system, and nothing but higher wages in 

 those countries or a tariff in their own will ever 

 save the English people from ruin. Lord Arm- 

 strong knew what he was doing when he estab- 

 lished an English iron manufactory in Italy 

 with English appliances and Italian labor at 

 half price. 



" No, no ; tariff does not make the blind see, 

 the lame walk, nor does it raise the dead to life, 

 but it is a good, sound, sensible policy for the 

 United States for its growth in riches and civili- 



zation, and if it is stricken down the people who 

 in their secret hearts will think us the most 

 shortsighted will be the foreigners who profit by 

 our folly. 



" There is still another argument which I de- 

 sire to present out of the large number yet 

 unused. What has made England rich? It is 

 the immense profits which come of converting 

 raw material into manufactured goods. She is 

 a huge workshop, doing the most profitable 

 work of the world: changing material to fin- 

 ished product. So long as she can persuade the 

 rest of the world to engage in the work which is 

 the least profitable and leave her the most en- 

 riching, she can well be content. 



" Let me give one item, and the figures shall 

 be furnished by the gentleman from Alabama 

 [Mr. Wheeler], who told me in your presence 

 that, the value of all the cotton raised in the 

 United States was only $300,000,000, while the 

 finished product of that cotton was $1,750,000,- 

 000. When cotton leaves the field it is worth 

 $300,000,000 ; when it leaves the mill it is worth 

 six times as much. On our own cotton crop 

 alone we might in time make the profits on a 

 billion and a half of manufactured goods. Nor 

 is there anything to prevent such a result in a 

 protective tariff. 



"Some men think, indeed, this bill and its 

 author's speeches proceed upon the supposition 

 that the first step toward gaining the markets 

 of the world is to give up our own ; just as if a 

 fortified army, with enemies on all flanks, should 

 overturn its own breastworks as the first pre- 

 liminary to a march into the open. Even the 

 foolish chivalry of the Marquis de Montcalra 

 which led him to his death on the Heights of 

 Abraham had not that crowning folly. Such is 

 not the history of the world ; such is not even 

 the example of England. Tariff duties, whether 

 levied for that purpose or for revenue, become a 

 dead letter when we are able to compete with 

 the outside world. 



" We are the only rival that England fears, 

 for we alone have in our borders the population 

 and the wages, the raw material, and within our- 

 selves the great market which insures to us the 

 most improved machinery. Our constant power 

 to increase our wages insures us also continuous 

 progress. If you wish us to follow the example 

 of England, I say yes, with all my heart, but her 

 real example and nothing less. Let us keep 

 protection, as she did. until no rival dares to 

 invade our territory, and then we may take our 

 chances for a future which by that time will not 

 be unknown. 



"Nobody knows so well as I do how much 

 even of my own comprehension of the great ar- 

 gument which should control this vote I have 

 failed to present. I have said not a word of the 

 great fall of prices which has always come from 

 the competition of the whole world within itself 

 rendered possible by protection and substituted 

 for the competition within a single island. ! 

 have said not a word of the great difference be- 

 tween the attitude of employers who find their 

 own workmen their best customers in their own 

 land, and who an? therefore moved by their own 

 best interests to give their workmen fair wages, 

 and those who sell abroad and are therefore anx- 

 ious for low wages at home, and on whom works 



