JEFFERSON, THE GREAT PRACTICAL PROTECTIONIST. By Roland Ringwalt. It is safe to say that forty-nine students out of fifty regard Alexander Hamilton as the leader of American Protectionists. There is no doubt that he was the great lawyer on that side, and that his brief leaves little unsaid. But when we pass from the argumentative to the actual, from the library to legislation, Jefferson did even more for Protection than Hamilton. While Hamilton aided the cause by his facts and his logic, Jefferson's strength and weakness, his statesmanship and his folly, his consistencies and inconsistencies combined to make him a practical supporter and enforcer of Protection. The facts are not difficult to gather; they are scattered through biographies and hinted at in school histories, but many persons fail to gather them, and an attempt to place them in order is not unbefitting such columns as these. No one in our days of ever multiplying sciences can boast that he knows everything or even that he knows a little about everything. But in the eighteenth century it was still possible for a man of strong memory and intellectual hunger to know something about everything that was talked over in philosophical societies or written about in the magazines. Jefferson had perhaps the widest intellectual range of any American of his time. He was a good lawyer, he was well trained in Latin, he had a working knowledge of Greek, he was a planter, he delighted in natural history, he fol lowed the scientific experiments of his day, his private tastes were those of a student, his political tactics led him to flatter the multitude, he was an anti-slavery man in theory and a slaveholder in practice; he understood the aristocratic feelings of old Virginia cavaliers, and he fraternized with French Revolutionists. It is doubtful if there was in the eighteenth century one student, philosopher, inventor or man of letters with whom Jefferson had not much in common. He would have been at home in Buffon's scientific coterie or at Frederick the Great's little supper parties. The whole line of American Presidents fails to show another man of his varied knowledge. He had the mental qualities that can only be developed by long years of research, and with them he was still a gay fiddler in his youth, a fair sportsman in his prime, a lavish entertainer whose flowing tankards made him a bankrupt in his old age. While a college boy Jefferson's precocity made him a welcome guest at the table of Governor Fauquier, and before the Revolution was over he was himself Governor of Virginia. He had been in France before he became Washington's Secretary of State, and his entrance on Cabinet service was marked by a strong liking for Hamilton. The subsequent hostility between the two great leaders is incomparably the best known of all our political quarrels, but the friendship, short though it was, is too important to be forgot ten. Each rendered the other a great service. Jefferson brought to Hamilton's aid enough Southern votes to enable Hamilton to carry out his policy of inducing the United States to assume the war debts of the several States, and on that policy the entire financial system of the republic rests. Hamilton brought to Jefferson enough Northern votes to place the Capitol on the banks of the Potomac, and to that victory our long series of Southern administrations is largely due. Even a brief friendship with Alexander Hamilton counted for something, and Jefferson felt the spell of the young man who could with equal ease storm a redoubt, write a pamphlet, devise a banking system and lay plans for manufactures. Jefferson, who gathered useful hints from shrewd peddlers and halfcrazed adventurers, was not likely to forget or ignore the scattered thoughts of Hamilton. It is true that Jefferson was a landed gentleman with the old-fashioned prejudices against manufactures as unpicturesque, smoky, noisy, likely to spoil landscapes and to draw lads from the farm. These prejudices, not absent from Sir Walter Scott and John Ruskin, were strong in Jefferson, and indeed in many of the most thoughtful of his contempo raries. Yet the strong is overcome by the stronger, and Jefferson drifted toward a tariff, not because he wished to do so, but because no tariff system could be so harsh and oppressive as the excise systems of the Old World. He knew better than Franklin or Adams, better than any American of his time, how terribly the taxes of France had pressed upon the shoulders of the peasant and the artisan. The excise duties of England, though far less burdensome than those of France, were vexatious, and Jefferson thought them all the worse because they were English. He likened America to heaven, Europe to hell and England to earth. Revenue must be obtained from some source, and the great Democrat, because he was a Democrat, concluded that a tariff system yields more to the government and presses less severely on the people than a system which counts the windows in a house, demands of the farmer the tenth stack of hay, and wrangles with the farmer's wife over the number of eggs that are equivalent in value to a full-sized chicken. Men who remember our own internal revenue system during the war for the Union do not want to return to it; even the mild taxes of the Spanish war annoyed everybody who drew a cheque and bore heavily on the poor people who needed patent medicines. Thomas Jefferson knew what the excise systems of the eighteenth century were, and did not wish to see them transplanted to our shores. One of the best lessons he taught his party was to oppose in ternal revenue taxes unless they were absolutely necessary and this tradition was strong in the Democratic counsels until Cleveland's day. In 1791, the year that Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, wrote his memorable report on manufactures, Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State, issued his report on the fisheries, and that document set forth the needs of shipping. Without ships of our own, he said, we should be dependent on a foreign carrier, "and the history of the last hundred years shows that the nation which is our carrier has three years of war for every four years of peace." Could Hamilton himself have said anything better than these words of his great rival? "If particular nations grasp at undue shares of our commerce, and more especially if they seize on the means of the United States, to convert them into aliment for their own strength, and withdraw them entirely from the support of those to whom they belong, defensive and protective measures become necessary on the part of the nation whose marine resources are thus invaded, or it will be disarmed of its defence, its productions will be at the mercy of the nation which has possessed itself exclusively of the means of carrying them, and its politics may be influenced by those who command its commerce." For the enormous coast and lake tonnage the Union now enjoys gratitude is due in large measure to the influence of Jefferson, and his right hand man, James Madison. Dr. Johnson said that if the his tory of England was written as briefly as that of Israel it would be questioned as much as skeptical critics question the Old Testament narrative. One might say the same of our own history. To say that the first President's chief counselors were bitter enemies to each other, yet that Hamilton made Jefferson President, and that Jefferson did more to build up a strong federal system than Hamilton would be astounding, yet it is all plain fact. When the scales hung between Jefferson and Burr, it was Hamilton who threw the casting weight, and gave Jefferson the Chief Magistracy. Jefferson now felt the full responsibility of his great office. As President he had to sustain the government of which he was the head. As Secretary of State he had flattered Washington to his face and encouraged Freneau to libel him: how far he had secretly consorted with Callender will never be known, but he had undoubtedly been mixed up in transactions of questionable loyalty. Now as President it behooved him to drop some of the habits of earlier days. The pensive Jefferson of the study lamented that power is ever passing from the many to the few, but the actual Jefferson of American politics made himself President for eight years, secured two terms for his friend Madison and two terms for his friend Monroe. Doubtless he lamented that power should drift to the few, but if so it must be he proposed to get some of the flotsam and jetsam. Before he became President, Jefferson had feared the downfall of the Constitution; he saw monarchy in an old gentleman's wig and a young midshipman's coat; he had a midnight attack if some old Revolutionary soldiers dined together, or if a Federalist received a letter from an English gentleman. As President he swallowed all his theories. The purchase of Louisiana, involving a vast acreage, bringing into the Union a large foreign population, and enabling an American President for some time to exercise the powers of a Spanish king; was gulped down with the customary ease of those who by straining at gnats learn to swallow camels with facility. The Jefferson who was afraid that the Constitution would not permit us to establish a military school at West Point could write to Madison, "The less we say about the constitutional difficulties respecting Louisiana, the better, and what is necessary for surmounting them must be done sub silentio." It is true that he did mildly lament that he had gone beyond the Constitution, and say that he would like an amendment to justify his action, but this matters little. The facts are that he carried the authority of a President far beyond anything Washington had done or Hamilton had recommended. a No amount of reading or thought can teach us what an enormous change the Louisiana purchase effected. It transformed the republic from a strip by the sea to an undeveloped continent. This meant that new commonwealths would arise, that new industriees would come into being, that a great nation would insist upon such legislative action as was needed to guard its capital and develop its working powers. A few towns along the seacoast might have been contented to exist simply as seaports, but vast continental republic would not be bound to any ledger or counter. The strict constructionist who shuddered at Hamilton's bank and Washington's carriage did more to strengthen the authority of the Executive than all the Federalists combined fifty times multiplied. The reason the Democratic party admires Jefferson is not because he talked of Constitutional limitations but because he made the greatest land grab the modern world has known. Washington, Adams, Jackson, Lincoln and Grant together never carried Executive authority to such lengths as the mild spoken man who was always expressing his dread that a strong government might infringe on the liberties of the people. Without the least pretence that the Constitution authorized the purchase of this enormous area the area was bought; without the least regard for the wishes or rights of the French or Spanish people Jefferson sought to govern the new lands under a government of Jefferson, by Jefferson and for Jefferson. Benton, the greatest Democrat who ever sat in Congress, well said that Jefferson's plan was "a mere emanation of Spanish despotism in which all power, civil and military, legislative, executive and judicial, was in the intendente general representing the king, and in which the people, far from possessing political rights, were punishable arbitrarily for presuming to meddle with political subjects." Apart from the legal and moral bearings of the Louisiana purchase the facts are that the rivers and prairies, the mountains and mines, of so vast a region, had their local interests and that ultimately their voices had to be heard in Congress. The President who could reject a treaty without showing it to the Senate, who could multiply our dimensions without assigning any legal warrant for his action and who could grasp at powers of which no British sovereign since the Stuarts had dreamed, fancied that he could starve Great Britain into withdrawing her oppressive decrees. The Constitution empowers Congress to regulate commerce, hence Jefferson ordered his followers to pass an act destroying commerce altogether. Ruin might fall on the prosperous merchant, the sailor might wander hungry from wharf to wharf, misery might invade once happy households, but the mild-spoken philosopher cared for none of these things. Yet under the Embargo workshops sprang up to meet the simplest needs of daily life. The country learned as it had never learned before that foreign commerce could not supply all our needs, especially when we had no commerce. In the colonial days we had been restricted to just such trade as Great Britain permitted; in later years Algerine pirates, British press gangs and European wars cut down our commerce, while our own government forbade us all foreign trade whatever. Jefferson dealt out to New England in a time of peace the stern measure Lincoln could hardly bear to deal out to the insurgents in time of war. No such tyranny has ever been contemplated by any President of our day, and yet this was done by the man who had denounced King George the Third for "cutting off our trade with all the world. Is there in our annals a chapter more full of irony. Thomas Jefferson at his best framed an argument in favor of our shipping on which later statesmanship cannot improve, and Thomas Jefferson at his worst inflicted on our shipping far more damage than Paul Jones had inflicted on the commerce of England. Jefferson out of office shuddered at imaginary dangers to the Constitution, and Jefferson in office ignored that document. Jefferson on paper inveighed against the limited monarchy of England, and Jefferson in practice copied the tyrannical monarchy of Spain. But, take him for all in all, with his merits and demerits, he did more to teach America to protect herself than any Executive before or since his day. FALSE THEORIES IN ECONOMICS. BY C. L. LORRAINE. Is it not time to call a halt on teaching error in economics? The tenacity which is exhibited by educated men and others in clinging to a patchwork system, founded upon biased opinions and phenomena practically unanalyzed, true in actual test in few if any practical cases, would be ridiculous was it not so fraught with evil to the material interests of the people. To it is directly due nearly all legislative enactments that have brought business disaster in their train. The utter inadequacy of the economic "Science" as it is and has been taught is emphasized by the fact that although the professors in colleges and universities in the past century have expounded its features to millions of the brightest young men of their day; the ablest statesmen of their age threshed it over and over in the legislative bodies of this and other countries, and the ponderous intellects of the great editors have brought forth arguments or comments that went to hundreds of millions of people in acres of the printed space, disseminating the tenets of this so-called "science," and yet today if there is a single man in the public eye who can formulate an equitable, practical and effective system of taxation; can outline an adequate, safe and absolutely fair monetary system; or can point out a sure, practical and equitable plan by which the interests of the public can be secured in the case of strikes and socalled labor contests like that lately at Columbus, O., -if there is a single man who can do this he has kept remarkably quiet. |