share of what we use of the like article, sometimes the foreigner pays the duty and sometimes we pay a part, or supply and demand fluctuate, but our competition with the foreign maker always reduces prices. A protective duty on a new industry may sometimes keep the price up for a short time; sometimes the foreigner reduces his price to cripple our new industry, and we reap the benefit,—as in the case of steel rails, on which English prices were reduced some $20 per ton as soon as they were made here.

Whenever an article of home manufacture happens to be dearer than a like foreign article the difference is surely held up as a tax on the consumer, caused by the duty, but when home competition brings the price down, as it has done in many cases, that is ignored. To point back to higher prices under lower duties would greatly damage a free trade treatise. Home competition, home markets, better wages, varied employment and capital used at home are silently passed by; to exaggerate alleged injuries and ignore real benefits is the aim. The process by which manufacturers are shown to gain immense profits is equally incorrect and untrue. Sometimes a factory pays nothing to its owner for years and then come good dividends. The years without profit are ignored, but the good dividend is paraded and magnified to keep up prejudices against "the monopolists." Hon. W. A. Russell, M. C., gives the reports of fifty-one textile manufactories known in Boston, showing their dividends for ten years, from 1873 to 1882 inclusive, to be 6 per cent. yearly average on $55,000,000 capital. Approximately it would be safe to say that for thirty years our factories and mills in the whole country have not paid their owners

five per cent. yearly. Many cases can be given where a single crop has paid for the farmer's land and labor. Would it be fair to hold them up as proofs that those farmers are constantly getting rich at the cost of the consumers of food?

Start any new industry, with fair protection, and it gains and grows and these results follow:-better processes and machinery, economy of production, less cost of manufacture on a larger scale, ability sometimes to pay more for raw material and for wages, yet to sell the product lower, and a rise in the price of lands in the vicinity along with the growing cheapness of the product of the mill.

THE OLD STORE AND THE NEW.

Suppose there is a great store on some country road where all the people have been obliged to trade, and a new shop starts across the highway. Galled and fleeced by the monopoly of the old store they patronize the new one to get the benefits of a healthy competition.

Our fifteen hundred woolen mills are the new store on our side of the (ocean) highway. How competition with the old shop, kept by a solid Englishman on the other side, has worked may be shown by a word from Hon. W. S. Shallenberger, of Pennsylvania, who spoke on behalf of the National Association of Wool Growers at the New York Tariff Convention in November, 1881. He said: "On the subject of domestic clothing, I desire to add a word. While it is true that the price of fine broadcloth is cheaper in Europe than here, our staple cloth can be furnished to the workingman for less than such cloth costs abroad. I rely on the statement of no less a person than the Quartermaster-General of

the United States army for the information that the clothing of that army, when quality is considered, is cheaper than that of any army in the world. There is an intelligent gentleman sitting here by me who has traveled around the world in a suit of clothing (coat, vest and pants) costing $12, the quality of which has been commented on by foreigners all over the world as being remarkable.”

Reduce the product of these woolen mills, and it would be like the country merchant in the new store being obliged to lessen the quantity and variety of his stock. The old store across the road would get more trade and better profit at the cost of the people.

Our prices are not always as low as in Europe. Bring wages down from thirty to a hundred per cent., or to the British and European level, and we could undersell the world. Shall we brutalize our people to do that? To drag man down that iron may be cheap, would be a crime and a blunder.

But the great staples used by the people grow cheaper under protection. The British sometimes admit that the users of iron among us are the better off for our policy,and that means everybody, for iron is used in hut and palace, on the farm and in the shop. The woolens most used are as cheap as abroad, while finer goods, luxuries for those who buy them, are higher. Almost a third of our customs-duties comes from the tariff on textile fabrics, cottons and woolens pay a large part of it, and a good share of that the foreigner pays without affecting our prices. Even if a tariff is a tax, since we prosper more with protection than with revenue tariffs on the free trade plan, we had better pay it and take the good results as abundant compensation.

On the broad scale, however, there is no doubt that the growth of our protected manufactures gives us better goods at lower cost than we should pay without these useful home industries. Facts prove this, and that proof stamps the free trade assertion that a tariff is a tax on the consumer as an assumption without evidence. We must bear in mind that without protective tariffs our great industries could not have grown to their present magnitude, or our country have reached its present wealth. Our manufactures, by the last census, were $5,369,000 in 1880, mostly used at home. It is a vast attainment of these industries to reach the capacity of such large supplies for our home wants. Suppose they were reduced one-fourth. We should be compelled to pay foreigners, mostly British, $1,300,000,000 yearly; our balance of trade would turn against us; gold would flow out to Europe; bonds go abroad for market; farmers' home markets and prices languish; wages fall, and imported goods rise, and a period of panic and bankruptcy follow.

A PROTECTIVE TARIFF LIKE A LEVEE OR A FENCE.

Why need a tariff at all on articles in which we can compete with the world, and on which foreign importers pay the duty if they are brought here? There will always be imports of special styles of goods, and a duty on them will yield needed revenue to our government. We want a duty, also, as a barrier against possible importations made with a purpose and to our injury. When Prussia, in 1818, established some protective. duties, a member of the British Parliament advocated flooding that country with British goods, even at a sacrifice.

David Syme, an able English free trader, went to Australia and saw there the workings of a policy which led the people of that British colony to adopt a protective tariff. He frankly said:

"The manner in which English capital is used to maintain her manufacturing supremacy is well understood abroad. In any quarter of the globe where a competition shows itself as likely to interfere with her monopoly, immediately the capital of her manufacturers is massed in that particular quarter, and goods are exported in large quantities and sold at such prices that outside competition is effectually counted out. English manufacturers have been known to export goods to a distant market and sell them under cost for years, with a view to getting the market into their own hands again."

This is the British avowed policy, "to gain and keep foreign markets and step in for the whole trade when prices revive."

Sometimes it is good policy for foreign manufacturers, when their markets at home are glutted, to send goods here, even at a loss, and reap the benefit by relieving their nearer marts of a surplus. To this Hon. A. S. Hewitt, of New York, alluded in saying: "These duties have conferred one great benefit. In the late era of depression (1873, etc.), they have prevented this country from being the sink into which the surplus iron of other countries would be flung. Had the duties been low enough iron importations would have destroyed our business and closed our establishments."

Such closing would have raised prices by making us dependent on foreigners. Even the reduction of our duties sometimes raise prices abroad. In 1870, when the tariff on pig iron was reduced $2 per ton, the Scotch makers at once added that sum to the price.

In 1880 the mere proposal in Congress, by a bill which