PROTECTION FOR AGRICULTURE 115 



from foreign countries free of duty may be a 

 temporary benefit to consumers, but the price 

 to the nation is a serious injury to both agri- 

 cultural and other industries and a more far- 

 reaching effect in depressing our standards of 

 living. 



We need a new method of making a tariff. 

 The old system of collecting over 500 men from 

 all parts of the country, many wholly unfamiliar 

 with w^orld-mde economic conditions, and ex- 

 pecting them to draft a tariff bill which will 

 stand the test of constantly changing conditions 

 is wholly out of date. Add to this the compli- 

 cations of inherited ideas concerning the tariff 

 by the descendants of partisan leaders who re- 

 garded the tariff purely as a political foot-ball, 

 and you have a picture of the difficulties of 

 making a tariff in Congress as a whole. 



A great mass of contradictory testimony, ab- 

 solutely impossible to digest or reconcile, has 

 been assembled. Much of the testimony has 

 been presented by interested parties rather 

 than unbiased experts. Then, finally, the en- 

 tire bill is subjected to interminable and heated 

 debate and is passed as a result of compromise 

 largely to get rid of the nuisance. Since the 

 tariff bill was first written in 1921, conditions 



