632 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



fighting is a foolish waste of blood and time and money, espe- 

 cially money, and before long fighting will be abandoned, because 

 when men once are thoroughly convinced that a thing is foolish, 

 or that it costs more than it comes to, they stop doing it. The 

 few men who are now in favor of war are practical men who be- 

 lieve that war conduces in some way to national prosperity or 

 helps trade. They would like to see things torn down, if they 

 could have the opportunity of building them up. The theorists, 

 the philosophers, are all opposed to war; they know it does a 

 great deal more harm than good. 



War, then, which has so long been the chief form of protection 

 adopted by nations, is doomed. Men began some time ago, when 

 peaceful communities were fully established, to see that it was 

 doomed ; but the old idea of protection, growing out of the dis- 

 trust of humanity for humanity, had its hold upon them, and they 

 set themselves at work to devise some new method of protection 

 which would meet the new conditions and not destroy what we 

 may call the industrial type of society. The practical men of the 

 day put their heads together and said that the chief thing now 

 was trade, and that they must not permit any rivalry in trade. 

 The enemies of their special community were no longer the men 

 who were better armed or better fortified ; the enemies of their 

 community were the men who could make things they could not 

 make, or supply things they could make at a lower price. 



" Let us," they said, " keep trade to ourselves. Let us make 

 everything we want, be sufficient to ourselves, and be independent 

 of the rest of mankind. In that way we shall grow rich and 

 prosperous, and the rest of mankind may supply its wants the 

 best it can." 



How were they to do this ? The days of war were going by. 

 They could not establish guards and shoot every one of their 

 fellow-citizens who bought anything of a foreigner, or shoot every 

 foreigner who brought goods to sell within their borders. They 

 could not do this, because it would be ruinous and expensive, but 

 they could fine every person who engaged in trade with any per- 

 son outside their own nation, and this they proceeded to do. They 

 established a new form of protection, and called it very properly 

 a protective tariff. The word tariff comes, so some philologists 

 tell us, from Tarif a, a town in Spain at the entrance of the Strait 

 of Gibraltar, where passing vessels were detained by force and 

 obliged to pay tribute to the inhabitants. The citizens of Tarifa 

 were the first of the modern protectionists. When we speak of 

 protection nowadays, we mean a system of tribute imposed upon 

 a whole nation by a certain small but powerful class of its practi- 

 cal men. The system is so devised that it takes money out of the 

 pockets of the people and puts it into the pockets of the practical 



