Address. 5 



definitely taxed in order to hii'e him to cany on a brancli of business 

 alleged to be otherwise unprofitable, had been introduced into the 

 national legislation ; and this utterly false principle, working through 

 what are called "protective" duties, that have grown almost con- 

 stantly ever smce more unjust and onerous and abominable, is now 

 enthi'oned in the legislation of a great jDeople proudly callmg them- 

 selves free ! A\Tiy, there is not another civilized country in the world, 

 no matter how despotic its form of government may t3e, that would 

 stand for one year without a revolution the iniquitous taxation that 

 the people of the United States have borne almost without a groan 

 since 1861 ! 



The peculiarity of this taxation is, that it is not laid with the end 

 in view to get money into the cofl:ers of the Government, but with 

 the end in \dew to raise the price of siuidry home-made or home- 

 grow^n goods, so that the people shall pay, say on an average, five 

 times as much to these privileged persons as to the Government 

 under this tax. The peo23le are misled by deceiving words into be- 

 Heving that it is a revenue to the Government that they pay under 

 so-called protective duties, w^hile the men who get these duties put 

 on know^ perfectly that the bulk of all that is paid will be distributed 

 among themselves. Sometimes they work it so shrewdly that the 

 Government does not get a penny from a protective tax, while they 

 reap theii- thousands or millions from it. If onh' the protective tax 

 be so heav}'- as to keep the foreign goods of that class altogether out, 

 then the treasuiw gets nothing at all, but the home goods of that 

 class can be carried up in price to the neighborhood of what the for- 

 eign goods would be with the tax added to theii- natural price. Thus 

 the Bessemer steel men promised the Ways and Means Committee, 

 in 1870, that, if the duty on steel rails were raised to two cents a 

 pound, or $44.80 a ton, they w^ould supply the home market entii'ely 

 from their own mills. The steel men did not mean that the Govern- 

 ment should get one single penny from the high protective duty that 

 they asked for. As a matter of fact CongTess gave them one and 

 one-quarter cents a pound, or $28 a ton, and they did not fulfill theii* 

 promise of supplying w^holly. the home market, so that some foreign 

 rails still came m under the duty, and the Government got a com- 

 paratively small sum from the duty on rails, but in the ten years, 

 1870-80, the people paid more than six times as much to the Besse- 

 mer men in the price of home rails artificially raised by the taiift' tax 

 as to the Government dii'ectl}^ under that tax. David A. Wells, and 

 there is no higher authority in the w^orld for such a point, has recent- 

 ly calculated that the equivalent of tv^enty inilUons bushels of irheat 

 a year is now paid to the eleven Bessemer steel companies in the 

 extra prices of steel secured to them by this particular tariff tax. 



It w^as well understood in 1789, when this miserable protective 

 poHcy was entered upon, that it would be hostile to the interests of 

 farmers as such. Ehot, in his "History of the United States" (p. 282), 

 very truly says: '•''The interests of the Northern industry, its ship- 

 ping, its commerce, and its nianifactures, called for a very different 

 policy on the part of the Government from that demanded by the 



