86 RAILROAD IRON THE TARIFF-TRANSPORTATION. 



A very high Free Trade authority, no less than David A. Wells 

 himself, is officially committed to the same general view we have 

 taken of the cheapening tendency and effects of Protective duties. 

 In his report for 1867, as Special Commissioner of the Revenue, 

 he said : 



On steel much higher rates of duty than those recommended upon iron are 

 submitted. Although these rates seem much higher, and are protested against by 

 not a few American consumers of steel, yet the evidence presented to the Com- 

 missioner tends to establish the fact that if any less are granted the development 

 of a most important and desirable branch of domestic industry will, owing to the 

 present currency derangement 'and the high price and scarcity of skilled labor, 

 be arrested, if not entirely prostrated. This is claimed to be more especially 

 true in regard to steel of the higher grades or qualities. It is also represented 

 to the Commissioner that, since the introduction of the manufacture of these 

 grades of steel in the United States, or since 1859, the price of foreign steel of 

 similar qualities has been very considerably reduced through the effect of the 

 American competition, and that the whole country in this way has gained more 

 than sufficient to counterbalance the tax levied as a protection for the American 

 steel manufacture, which has grown up under its influence. 



At the time Mr. Wells gave these deliberate utterances to the 

 world, as the result of his official investigations, he had not sent 

 himself to England at the public expense, and there received a 

 round of flattering entertainments that described the circle of 

 British Free Trade propagandism. When he had studied the needs 

 of our industrial condition from a patriotic standpoint, he was con- 

 vinced that the Protective policy had been a gain to the whole 

 country ; but when he studied the same subject from the British 

 point of observation, he discovered that the same policy had been a 

 loss and a snare to his countrymen. At a meeting of the American 

 Iron and Steel Association, held in Washington, January 16, 1867, 

 Mr. Wells had said : 



I desire here and now, unequivocally and unreservedly, to declare that, in the 

 British sense of the word, there is no Free Trade in me. From my earliest child- 

 hood I have been taught the value of the doctrines of Protection, and it has been 

 my fortune to sit at the feet of that great teacher of political economy, Henry C. 

 Carey, and learn from him the great principles on which these doctrines are 

 founded the complete and universal harmony between all the producing inter- 

 ests of the country. In that faith I am as strong to-day as I ever was. 



But it required only a visit to England, and audience given to 

 the Manchester school of political economists, to wipe all these 

 convictions from his mind as a sum sponged from a slate. He 



