178 Presidential Addresses 



spoken of as a trust. Surely in rearranging the 

 schedules affecting such a corporation it would be 

 necessary to consider the interests of its smaller 

 competitors which control the remaining part, and 

 which, being weaker, would suffer most from any 

 tariff designed to punish all the producers; for, of 

 course, the tariff must be made light or heavy for 

 big and little producers alike. Moreover, such a 

 corporation necessarily employs very many thou 

 sands, often very many tens of thousands of work 

 men, and the minute we proceeded from denuncia 

 tion to action it would be necessary to consider the 

 interests of these workmen. Furthermore, the prod 

 ucts of many trusts are unprotected, and would be 

 entirely unaffected by any change in the tariff, or at 

 most very slightly so. The Standard Oil Company 

 offers a case in point; and the corporations which 

 control the anthracite coal output offer another 

 for there is no duty whatever on anthracite coal. 

 I am not now discussing the question of the tariff 

 as such ; whether from the standpoint of the funda 

 mental difference between those who believe in a 

 protective tariff and those who believe in free trade ; 

 or from the standpoint of those who, while they 

 believe in a protective tariff, feel that there could 

 be a rearrangement of our schedules, either by direct 

 legislation or by reciprocity treaties, which would 

 result in enlarging our markets; nor yet from the 

 standpoint of those who feel that stability of eco 

 nomic policy is at the moment our prime economic 

 need, and that the benefits to be derived from any 



