70 PROTECTIVE DUTIES AND PRICES. 



$35.90.6. Under such circumstances, the seventy cents taken off 

 the duty was a pure contribution out of the Treasury for the benefit 

 of the foreign manufacturers. The reduction had no manner of 

 effect upon prices ; but the example exhibits the blundering ignor- 

 ance which Congress sometimes applies to tariff legislation. Had 

 the duty on pig iron been fixed at $12 per ton in i86i,and main- 

 tained at those figures, with corresponding rates on the metal in its 

 higher forms, our iron industries would not be in their present half 

 collapsed state, and thousands upon thousands of laborers, who 

 to-day are compulsorily idle, would not have been without employ 

 ment. 



The tariff on steel was far more protective than that on pig iron, 

 and there we find the cheapening effects of Protective duties. In the 

 Boston Journal of Commerce, which is the organ of the Sheffield 

 interest, English tool steel was quoted, January 30, at 17}^ cents, 

 gold, while American tool steel was quoted at 15 cents, currency y 

 per pound. On that day the lowest price of gold was 113. Re- 

 ducing 15 cents in paper money to its equivalent in coin at that 

 rate, we obtain 13.275 cents as the result. The average invoice 

 price of the highest grades of steel imported into this country in 

 the fiscal year 1874 was 12^ cents, gold. Here we see, reckoning 

 in specie, that American tool steel undersells the English article 

 by 4.225 cents per pound, and is placed on our markets at merely 

 a fraction of a cent higher than the average value charged in Eng- 

 land, by the Sheffield manufacturers, in the sworn invoices of im- 

 ports into the United States. 



Within a week past the Chicago Tribune has repeatedly asserted 

 that the duty is not only added to the price of the imported article, 

 but also to the price of all of the home-made. If that wild allega- 

 tion is true, why do not the American manufacturers of steel demand 

 17*^ cents, gold, or its equivalent in currency? Their tool steel 

 is quite as good as the English, and, for several purposes, far 

 superior. Throughout the oil regions of Pennsylvania not a pound 

 of foreign steel is used in boring wells; and there the resulting 

 cost of breaking a drill is so considerable, sometimes involving 

 the abandonment of the well itself, that price is nothing as com- 

 pared with quality; so that the universal use of American steel in 

 that broad area attests its supreme excellence. Then why do not 

 our producers charge as much per pound as their English rivals? 



