324 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



First, that no country, with the exception of the United States, 

 which had adopted in a greater or less degree the policy of protec- 

 tion through duties or restrictions on imports, had ever regarded 

 the taxation of the imports of "raw,"* or crude, or partly manu- 

 factured materials, to be subsequently used for larger manufac- 

 turing, as an element of protection in its largest sense to its domes- 

 tic industry, but rather as antagonistic to, and destructive of, 

 such industry ; and that, while such taxation in the United States 

 had undoubtedly built up some industries and enriched their 

 owners, it had been a great restraint on the development of a 

 much larger and higher class of industries, employing a greater 

 number of workmen, and paying much higher average wages. 

 Second, that the countries of Europe in which the average rates 

 of wages were lowest were the most clamorous for protective du- 

 ties on imports ; and that high wages in any country, conjoined 

 with the extensive and skillful use of machinery, instead of being 

 evidence of industrial weakness, were evidence of great indus- 

 trial strength ; inasmuch as no employer can continuously pay 

 high wages unless his product is large, his labor most effective, 

 and his cost of product, measured on the terms of labor, compara- 

 tively low. 



The announcement of these views, and especially their publica- 

 tion in a report in 1869, created much antagonism among the ad- 

 vocates of the policy of extreme protection in the country ; and 

 Horace Greeley and others publicly charged that the commis- 

 sioner had been induced to change his views through the corrupt- 

 ing agency of British gold. Notwithstanding this, a draft for 

 a complete revision of the tariff of the United States, prepared 

 under his almost sole supervision, and accompanied with a report 

 on the existing revenue resources and industrial and financial 

 condition of the country, was submitted to the Forty-first Con- 

 gress by Secretary McCulloch, with his indorsement, in Decem- 

 ber, 1887. This draft, subsequently embodied in the form of a 

 bill, with slight modifications by the Finance Committee of the 

 Senate, came very near enactment into law, the Senate passing it 

 by a vote of twenty-seven to ten. In the House of Representa- 

 tives it failed in the closing hours of the second session by a 

 very few votes, and not by a direct vote, but on a motion to sus- 



* The definition, or rather determination, of what constituted a " crude " or " raw " ma- 

 terial for manufacturing purposes has always been a matter of embarrassment to legislators 

 and economic writers, inasmuch as a confessedly manufactured and often elaborate product 

 may be relatively a raw or crude material for successively higher grades or processes of 

 manufacture. A proposition recently proposed by Mr. Lindley Vinton, of New York, to 

 restrict the application of the above terms in law, commerce, and economics, to the state or 

 condition in which any product first enters into trade or commerce, would seem to be 

 so free from any ambiguity of meaning as to be worthy of consideration. 



