THE ETHICAL VIEW OF PROTECTION. 635 



inhabitants depend on its relations with other towns and the 

 country at large. Our prosperity and comfort depend on the 

 number and quality of things we can make that the rest of the 

 world wants, and the facility with which we can exchange those 

 things for things that we want. The gentleman who has just 

 spoken proposes to tax the very relations upon which our material 

 welfare is founded ! We want corn and wheat and tea and coal 

 and sugar ; can we produce any of those things here ? Certainly 

 not. In order to get them we must make things wanted by the 

 people who can and do produce corn, wheat, tea, coal, and sugar, 

 and exchange our products for theirs. If we tax corn, wheat, tea, 

 coal, and sugar, the people who want our goods will take them 

 and pay for them in money, and we shall simply be paying out of 

 our own pockets the extra valuation put upon goods that we 

 want. We all of us who want and must have corn, wheat, tea, 

 coal, and sugar, will be paying extra for them, and the only peo- 

 ple who will be benefited will be the few among us who produce 

 the articles that outsiders want. They can put larger prices on 

 their goods on the strength of the extra valuation of corn, wheat, 

 tea, coal, and sugar, and so the greater portion of the taxes will 

 fall indirectly into their pockets. It will be cheaper for us in the 

 end to pay the money directly over to them in the form of sub- 

 sidies, which is a polite term for legalized charity/' 



Somewhat in this way, no doubt, the philosophical citizen 

 would speak, and it would be strange if a majority of his fellow- 

 citizens did not agree with him. If we enlarge our community, 

 and instead of a city have a state, would the conditions be any 

 different ? Not at all. Certain people in this state would be able 

 to do certain things well, and their prosperity would depend upon 

 the facility with which they could exchange their labor or the 

 products of their labor with the labor or the products of labor of 

 the citizens of other states. What would have been the condition 

 of this country, of the United States of America, if every State 

 had put up a barrier against its neighbors in the shape of a pro- 

 tective tariff ? Suppose that an inhabitant of Massachusetts 

 could not get anything from Pennsylvania or New York without 

 paying a duty, and suppose that an inhabitant of New York or 

 Pennsylvania could not buy of an inhabitant of Illinois without 

 being taxed by his own State from twenty-five to forty per cent 

 on his purchase, what would become of our national prosperity ? 

 To ask the question is to answer it. The prosperity of each 

 depends upon the utmost freedom of intercourse with all the 

 others. 



Let us now take a still wider outlook, and extend our reason- 

 ing a little further. Why, if a protective tariff is not conducive 

 to prosperity when established between families or towns or 



