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 HF1756 ,BM " """'^'■'"y '■'»*'-«'V 
 ^''^llM;fiiiiSJ,.SMi!SinaJ£m^^^ peace w 
 
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THE FOLLY OF BUILDING 
 TEMPLES OF PEACE WITH 
 UNTEMPERED MORTAR: 
 
 THE NECESSITY OF BUILDING 
 TEMPLES OF PEACE WITH TEM- 
 PERED MORTAR: ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ 
 
 By JOHN BIGELOW 
 
 B. W. HUEBSCH - NEW YORK 1910 
 
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f\.s%oshny 
 
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'berefore tbus saitb tbe Xor& (Bo5: 
 Because ^c have spoften vanitis, an& 
 seen lies, tberef ore, beboI&, "IT am against gou, 
 saitb tbe Xorb (Bob. Hn& mine ban& sball 
 be against tbe propbets tbat see vanity, an& 
 tbat &ivine lies: tbep sball not be in tbe 
 council of mg people. . . . JSecause, even be* 
 cause tbeg bave se&uce& mg people, saving, 
 peace; anb tbere is no peace; anb wben one 
 builbetb up a wall, bebolb, tbeg baub it witb 
 untempereb mortar: sas unto tbem wbicb 
 baub it witb untempereb mortar, tbat it sball 
 tall. ... IT will even renb it witb a storms 
 winb in m^ furs. ... So will H breaft bown 
 tbe wall tbat pe bave baubeb witb untempereb 
 mortar, anb bring it bown to tbe grounb, so 
 tbat tbe founbation tbereof sball be bis» 
 covereb: anb it sball fall, anb se sball be con* 
 sumeb in tbe mibst tbereof; anb ^c sball ftnow 
 tbat IF am tbe Xorb. TTbus will 11 accomplisb 
 ws furs upon tbe wall, anb upon tbem tbat 
 bave baubeb it witb untempereb mortar; anb 
 H will sas unto sou, Ube wall is no more, 
 neitber tbes tbat baubeb it; to wit, tbe 
 propbets of Hsrael wbicb propbess concern* 
 ing Jerusalem, anb wbicb see visions of 
 peace for ber, anb tbere is no peace, saitb 
 tbe Xorb <3ob. 
 
 Ube £ooli of tbe ficopbecs 
 of 3E3el!feI, Cbaptec xtii. 
 
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PART FIRST 
 
 « 
 
 THE FOLLY OF BUILDING TEMPLES 
 
 OF PEACE WITH 
 
 UNTEMPERED MORTAR 
 
 I HAVE received several invitations of late to associate 
 myself with as many different organizations instituted 
 for the ostensible purpose of "promoting peace among 
 the nations of the earth and for the reconciliation of in- 
 ternational differences, a substitute for war." Among 
 the officers of these organizations and their coadjutors 
 are some personal friends and many others whom I 
 greatly respect. 
 
 In the following pages I propose to give what I hope 
 will prove an adequate excuse for declining all these invi- 
 tations, not because I am not but because I am an ardent 
 friend of peace, and because of my conviction that all the 
 plans proposed by these organizations will prove prac- 
 tically abortive. 
 
 It is now scarcely a dozen years since Nicholas II of 
 Russia invited all the nations of the world to unite with 
 him in a general reduction of armaments as a prelimi- 
 
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nary to a universal peace. As Russia was at that time 
 the most formidable military power in the world, the 
 other great powers took this proposal of the Czar quite 
 seriously. But before the hurrahs which followed his 
 proclamation had subsided, the Czar had locked horns 
 with the Sultan of Turkey and with the Finns without 
 asking any of the other powers to assist him in keeping 
 the peace. Nor, indeed, had the other great powers for 
 many years previously shown the solicitude for peace 
 which their enthusiasm over the Czar's proclamation 
 might have led one to suppose had been slumbering in 
 their bosoms. Not two generations have passed away 
 since England was at war with the Dutch settlers in 
 eastern Africa; or since France was at war with Mexico, 
 to result incontinently in a war which established an 
 empire in Germany and substituted a republican for an 
 imperial government in France; yet in no one of these 
 cases did either of these belligerents — solicitous for 
 peace as all must be presumed to have been from the 
 warm reception they so soon after gave to the Czar's 
 overtures for disarmament — take counsel with any neu- 
 tral power in the interests of peace, except in some in- 
 stances asking them to purchase its bonds for the more 
 vigorous prosecution of its wars. Can anything be more 
 chimerical than the dream that any nation either in 
 Europe or America would subrhit any differences of 
 greater import than such as lawyers commonly submit 
 to a sheriff's jury— not for the proof of damage, but 
 merely for an assessment of the amount of it — to any 
 tribunal, and especially to one to be constituted mainly 
 by foreign states with all of which they have often been 
 at war (and are always beggaring their people with 
 
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costly preparations for future wars), even supposing the 
 possibility of getting them ever to agree to form such a 
 tribunal — about which our President, in his note to one 
 of the more recent peace organizations of which he is an 
 officer, admits less doubt than he obviously feels. And 
 besides, to what purpose do we keep a diplomatic force 
 at every court, if international differences can all be 
 settled by argument and on their merits ? 
 
 If the American people were of a breed of foxes that 
 would accept the suggestion of the lion to make him 
 king of the forest, such a policy might have a living 
 chance of securing the approval of the lion, at least. 
 But our people have not as yet proved to be of that breed 
 of foxes. Of this we have not to look far for the proofs. 
 Since we set up housekeeping for ourselves we have had 
 already two, nay, three wars with England, the country 
 of all others with which peace should most easily be 
 cultivated : 
 
 The first because we refused as colonists to be taxed 
 without representation; that resulted in our conversion 
 from a colony into an independent republic. 
 
 Our second war with her was because she impressed 
 our seamen into her navy. That resulted in securing to 
 us the freedom of the seas, of which we promptly availed 
 ourselves so successfully that before our Civil War, and 
 under the revenue tariff of 1844, we had a larger ocean 
 commercial tonnage afloat than England or any other 
 nation had ever had. That supremacy we deliberately 
 surrendered for McKinley and Dingley tariffs, which 
 have expelled our flag from every ocean, except when 
 floating at the masthead of ships of war. 
 
 The third was contemporaneous with our Civil War, 
 
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when England furnished our slaveholding States steam- 
 ers with which to help them in the extermination of our 
 maritime commerce. It was her collaboration with the 
 confederated insurgents that compelled us as a military 
 measure to enfranchise all of our bondmen— for which 
 we are in so far her debtors — and which later compelled 
 England to pay a round sum for at least a portion of the 
 damage which the piratical ships of her manufacture and 
 equipment had done to us. 
 
 Will any one pretend that either of these wars could 
 have been declined by us without national degradation ? 
 Nay, is there any one weak-minded enough to suppose 
 the people of the United States would have listened a 
 moment to a proposal to submit either of these issues to 
 any tribunal that the "great powers of the world" would 
 have constituted— no others could have constituted such 
 a tribunal— but every one of which then regarded our 
 republic as the greatest peril to which their respective 
 dynasties were exposed? 
 
 In fact, it would be difficult to name any war between 
 nations within historic times to prevent which a proposal 
 to settle their differences, except for an adjustment of the 
 amount of the pecuniary damage sustained from undis- 
 puted injuries, would not have been rejected as futile or 
 impertinent, with a single exception. That was the 
 peace concocted at Portsmouth in September, 1905, be- 
 tween Russia and Japan, after one of the bloodiest and 
 most costly wars ever waged, and after each belligerent 
 had become so entirely exhausted as to be physically and 
 financially unable to continue the fight. And what was 
 gained by the treaty of Portsmouth except the release of 
 the Cossacks from watching their enemy in Manchuria 
 
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that they might come home to deprive the proletariat of 
 Russia of the hope they were indulging that the war 
 would last long enough to insure an ultimate recognition 
 by the Czar of at least some of the rights of manhood 
 which had been withheld from them ? Yet this boasted 
 peace treaty of Portsmouth involved the prompt downfall 
 of the Japanese ministry that assented to it, thus proving 
 it to be a peace most fitly to be compared, so far as pro- 
 ducing harmony between the belligerents, to that pro- 
 duced by turning the hose upon a dog-fight. Both have 
 ever since been impoverishing their people by building 
 more vessels of war in an ill-disguised contemplation of 
 the necessity of renewing the fight. 
 
 Such is a specimen of the kind of peace which oblit- 
 erated the lessons in the process of being taught to two 
 of the most despotic governments in the world when our 
 government presumed to interfere with and suspend 
 those lessons which both belligerents were in the way of 
 receiving at the hands of a merciful Providence. 
 
 II 
 
 I TRUST the gentlemen who have invited me to become 
 one of their associates will pardon me for asking 
 whether, in plucking the mote out of others' eyes, they are 
 not overlooking the beam in their own. Perhaps they do 
 not realize that ever since our own Civil War there has 
 been a yet more flagrant war raging in our own country, 
 a war annually becoming more menacing and disastrous. 
 It is not a civil war only, but a foreign war as well; a 
 war not against one nation only, but against all commer- 
 
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cial nations. It is a domestic as well as a universal for- 
 eign war to enforce our preposterous claim to an average 
 half of what any foreign shipper brings to our ports for 
 sale, before permission is given him to land it on our 
 wharves or put it in our markets. It is civil war because 
 it impoverishes the ninety millions of consumers to just 
 the amount that the foreign shipper is compelled to add 
 to the price of what he brings. The machinery by which 
 this unrighteous policy is engineered is called in the law- 
 books, in which it has been clothed with a fictitious ap- 
 pearance of legality, a "tariff upon imports." 
 
 It is to this tariff that we owe the war between labor 
 and capital, in which we have more soldiers embattled at 
 the present moment than we ever had in action at any 
 period of our Civil War for the Union, while the cost to 
 the country has already been far greater than the cost of 
 our Civil War to either if not both of its belligerents. 
 That cost, too, is annually increasing. 
 
 Our war with foreign nations is proving even more 
 expensive to us, for the tariff compels us to pay : 
 
 ( 1 ) The price at which the foreign merchandise is of- 
 fered us ; 
 
 (2) The average 50 per cent, tariff; 
 
 (3) The cost of transporting such merchandise to us 
 in foreign ships instead of our own ; and 
 
 Finally, the cost of transporting in foreign ships the 
 products with which we pay for all such imports. 
 
 Now let me ask whether, instead of projecting a new 
 peace society and staging a new concert of peace orators, 
 it were not better to leave the mote in our neighbor's eye 
 until we have enabled ourselves to see the beam in our 
 own eye ; for it is only after removing the beam from one's 
 
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own eye that he is ever able to see the mote in a neigh- 
 bor's eye. No court of equity, human or divine, will 
 listen to an appeal for equity from any one who does not 
 first do equity. 
 
 To bring both of these wars, the domestic and foreign, 
 to a peaceful close, and to insure that the lion and the fox 
 lie down together in a peaceful embrace, we have to re- 
 peal all our tariff laws, turn our custom-houses into 
 warehouses, and make every harbor on our coasts free to 
 the commerce of all the world. 
 
 It is only this war of our own waging that keeps us at 
 odds, not only with each other, but with all other com- 
 mercial nations. Remove it, and in less than a genera- 
 tion we would have the largest commercial navy in the 
 world, as we had before the Civil War furnished a 
 treacherous pretext to the selfish counsellors of our gov- 
 ernment to enact what was euphemistically called a "war 
 tariff." It was indeed in its origin nominally a war 
 tariff, but never before so exclusively a war-breeding 
 tariff as it is to-day. Abolish it, and we would absorb the 
 best commerce of the whole world and, like England, 
 build Dreadnoughts to sell to nations that blindly dis- 
 courage commerce as we wantonly persist in doing. 
 
 Of course the million who profit by this tariff bonus, 
 disguised under the name of protection, live extrava- 
 gantly, spend profusely, waste wickedly of the country's 
 wealth, thereby creating delusive standards of domestic 
 life, all of which contribute to increase the cost of living 
 far more and faster than the tariff increases the wages 
 of ninety millions of the proletariat who do most of the 
 work that earns that wealth. Hence the chronic discon- 
 tent of the latter. If they strike successfully for an ad- 
 
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vance of wages to-day, the result is no guaranty that in 
 a few weeks at most they will not find their increased 
 wages fall as far short of their necessaries as before, and 
 a new strike follows. There is not a single railway or in- 
 dustrial corporation in the country that is sure for a 
 month at a time that it will not be compelled to submit 
 to new exactions from its workmen which threaten ruin 
 whether granted or denied. 
 
 During the last fiscal year we have imported precious 
 gems to the value of $45,000,000, a million and a half 
 more in amount than ever before. About 80 per cent, of 
 these imports .have been diamonds. Precious gems have 
 always been a favorite investment of people who distrust 
 the honesty of their government. There is no other form 
 in which so much wealth can be so easily concealed from 
 extortionate government exactions. 
 
 A curious object-lesson of the cost of this internecine 
 conflict between labor and capital in our country, which 
 has pretty uniformly resulted in the triumph of labor and 
 the defeat of capital, notwithstanding all the support it 
 could command from the government, has been recently 
 made conspicuous in a single department of industry. I 
 have before me the result of an actual adjustment of 
 wages that has occurred on over 55,000 miles of railroad 
 in the Eastern States alone, involving increases in the 
 pay-rolls aggregating $50,000,000 annually. When the 
 remaining lines, including the semi-Canadian lines which 
 are in this district, have been settled up, it is estimated 
 that the increases will add from thirty to forty millions 
 to the above total, or an approximate increase of wages 
 for all the Eastern lines of between eighty and ninety 
 millions annually. That is a perpetual expense which 
 
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this war has entailed upon only a fraction of our railway 
 system. When we consider the hundreds of other indus- 
 tries that have revolted or are now again in revolt for 
 higher wages to indemnify them for the increased cost of 
 living, it requires no statistician to show how insignifi- 
 cant was the expense of our Civil War when compared 
 with that of the war we have been waging with all the 
 commercial nations of the world for at least half a cen- 
 tury. Though much more expensive than the Civil War, 
 it has not been so bloody only because capital and the 
 government have pretty uniformly capitulated before a 
 resort to arms, though not always without bloodshed. 
 
 As was very wisely remarked recently by a writer in 
 the New York Evening Post: "The basis of taxation 
 cannot be otherwise than insecure when the tax-f ramers 
 undertake simultaneously to exclude foreign merchan- 
 dise from our markets and to support the government 
 through the taxes on foreign merchandise which comes 
 in. These mutually destructive purposes have been at 
 the root of all the violent and disastrous fluctuations of 
 the public finances. Expenditure, meantime, increases 
 regardless of any other consideration. For the fiscal 
 year to date, it has run $35,000,000 ahead of 1908, and 
 the full year 1908 ran $81,000,000 beyond 1907, and 
 $90,000,000 beyond 1906." 
 
 Ill 
 
 The loss of our maritime commerce and our dependence 
 upon foreign ships for the transport of our mails and our 
 exports are far from being the most grievous effects of 
 
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our tariff upon imports. It seems to be rapidly deaden- 
 ing the moral sensibilities of our people. The com- 
 binations of labor agitators for higher wages and less 
 work are no longer content with refusing to work for 
 what they think inadequate compensation, but they even 
 conspire to maltreat men who prefer to work rather than 
 let their families starve. The excuse for this interfer- 
 ence with individual liberty is furnished by the tariff. 
 We open our ports to foreign labor at the rate of over 
 one million heads per annum. Attracted by the higher 
 rates of wage-labor incidental to the tariff, people from 
 all parts of the world, accustomed to much lower stan- 
 dards of domestic life, flock hither and take the place of 
 the strikers. That is the American laborers' defence 
 for making it dangerous to these imported laborers not 
 to join them; still more dangerous to accept the place of 
 a striker, for that means civil war. 
 
 The Governor of Pennsylvania had ten thousand 
 troops in readiness to march only a short time since, to 
 quiet labor riots in Philadelphia. The troops did not 
 march to the seat of war only because the corporation in- 
 volved capitulated. During the strike last July on the 
 Grand Trunk Railway — it was called a tie-up — the loss 
 was $1 17,000 a day for the several weeks that it lasted. 
 
 In our own State of New York its Senate was for a 
 good part of its session of 1910 the theatre of the most 
 shameful spectacle that has ever occurred, I believe, in 
 the State's history. One of its Senators, who had just 
 been elected as the official leader of his party in that 
 body, was expelled by an almost unanimous vote for 
 barratry. His trial brought suspicion upon so many 
 more of the same body that a further investigation rec- 
 
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ommended by the governor is being prosecuted to protect 
 the characters of the honest Senators, if, as I hope, there 
 are some, while the Senator who made the charges against 
 his degraded colleague has resigned his seat in that body 
 to avoid the expense if not the shame of defending him- 
 self from a similar charge with which he had been 
 threatened. The legislative investigation is now in 
 progress, but that it will leave the character of any 
 member of that Senate worth protecting is daily grow- 
 ing more dubious. 
 
 When Mr. Taft entered into office as' President he 
 selected for his Secretary of State a member of the 
 United States Senate who had voted for a law increasing 
 the compensation of that among the other Cabinet offices, 
 upon the condition, however, that no Senator, during 
 his term as such, should accept any one of the offices 
 thus made financially more remunerative by his vote. 
 The Senator's term had yet one year to.run. He qualified 
 himself to accept the proffered seat in the Cabinet.of Mr. 
 Taft by promising, as the newspapers tell us, to take 
 none of the increase of salary, at least during the re- 
 mainder of his senatorial term— both the Senator and 
 the President having overlooked or closed their eyes to 
 the fact that it was the office, not the salary, that the law 
 forbade the former to accept. As the incidental salary 
 issue was "such a little one," and Pennsylvania being 
 the very coryphaeus and head centre of protectionism, the 
 Senate cheerfully confirmed the nomination. 
 
 When Philip II replied to the Duke of Alva, who ad- 
 vised the extermination of the house of Braganza, that 
 that would be at war with the principles of his religion, 
 the duke said proudly that kingdoms were governed by 
 
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maxims of state, not by scruples of conscience. Has our 
 republic been converted into a kingdom, or are we going 
 back to the sixteenth century for maxims of statesman- 
 ship? 
 
 The gentleman whom the new President put in charge 
 of the national treasury — quite the most influential 
 political engine under our Constitution — was Mr. Mac- 
 Veagh, a prominent merchant of Chicago. He had once 
 been an unsuccessful candidate of the Democratic party 
 for the United States Senate from Illinois. He was 
 therefore gazetted as a good enough Democrat for Mr. 
 Taft's Cabinet. His brother, a prominent citizen of 
 Philadelphia, was a devoted political and personal friend 
 of the late Samuel J. Tilden, which gave color to the 
 rumor that Mr. Taft was trying to make terms with the 
 Democratic Mammon of Unrighteousness. 
 
 Mr. MacVeagh appointed as Collector of the Port of 
 New York the fidus Achates of President Roosevelt, who 
 has been irreverently styled the Vermiform Appendix of 
 President Taft. Mr. Loeb had hardly got warm in his 
 seat before a list of a hundred or more inspectors and 
 weighers, who had been in the habit of taking pourhoires 
 for their convenient blindness when searching the trunks 
 and boxes of smuggling travellers and importers, was 
 gazetted for punishment. This new sensationalism Mr. 
 Loeb characterized as "house-cleaning." Secretary 
 MacVeagh backed up his Collector with the remark that 
 he did not expect that "such a nest of rattlesnakes" as 
 had been stirred up in New York would be discovered 
 anywhere else, but he was determined to "clean house" 
 everywhere until the perpetration of undervaluation 
 frauds had been stopped. These were brave words and 
 
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no doubt meant all they implied, though thus far none of 
 Loeb's snakes have been heard to "squeal." 
 
 When Colbert was disciplining one of the tax-assessors 
 or intendants, as they were called in his day, he told him, 
 "You may pluck the goose's feathers, but you must 
 never make it squawk." I have thus far heard none of 
 these rattlesnakes asking for sympathy or complaining 
 of their lot. Perhaps, as is the serpents' wont, they only 
 shed their political skins for a season. 
 
 But assuming that this snake-hunt is not a mere wind- 
 storm, the like of which our people have been periodically 
 honored with since our confiscating tariffs began to grind 
 us, nor a mere dodge to disguise the disparity of the 
 promises made by the Republicans in their Presidential 
 campaign and platform of 1908 and their failure of 
 fulfilment in 1909, and allowing for the Democratic 
 blood which we presume beats still in the heart of the 
 Secretary, we will not doubt that he means to make 
 snakes as scarce, nay, scarcer, in our country at least, 
 than they were in the Garden of Eden. And this prompts 
 me to ask, Where will he begin his house-cleaning and 
 where will he stop it? As Loeb had reported already 
 hundreds of suspects ready for trial, the Secretary's 
 snake-hunt, when, if ever, it does begin, will naturally 
 begin with them. But suppose the snakes at their trial 
 turn upon him and say— may they not have already 
 said? — "We have done nothing that our superiors have 
 not taught us ; they take half of nearly everything that is 
 imported to give to their special friends and supporters, 
 the manufacturers, who furnish the money required for 
 the reelection of their friends to Congress, or enrich 
 themselves by the confiscation of half the property be- 
 
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longing to the whole nation. What we at the custom- 
 house take is 'not a flea-bite' to what they take. Why 
 don't you discipline our masters the snakes in Congress, 
 who originated and constantly are increasing these tariff 
 laws by which they get the money and jobs for their 
 constituents, secure their own reflections to Congress, 
 and peddle diplomatic and other lucrative appointments ? 
 They take more dollars in a winter's session than we take 
 pennies in a year. If your lawmakers did not plunder, we 
 would never steal ; but if they make us help them plunder, 
 why should we not take a share in some proportion to the 
 perilous and ignominious service we render them ?" 
 
 It is difficult to see what answer the Secretary can make 
 to his snakes that would not disqualify him fatally for a 
 public service which is officially prostituted to the sordid 
 lusts of the protectionists. But will the snakes stop 
 there? 
 
 Serpens nisi serpentem commederit non fit draco. 
 
 In other words, unless a serpent is fed on serpents he 
 cannot become a dragon, nor can a mere Secretary of 
 War become the President of a party organized to im- 
 poverish the multitude for the creation of a plutocracy. 
 
 It has been reported in the public press that Mr. Mac- 
 Veagh talked of withdrawing from the Cabinet before 
 Congress meets again. Nothing is more probable than 
 that he has found himself confronted by too many conun- 
 drums that neither he nor any other sound Democrat 
 could successfully solve and yet retain a position in the 
 Cabinet of a President who signed the Payne, Aldrich, 
 and Lodge Tariff Bill. 
 
 And speaking of Presidents, the Rev. Lyman Abbott, 
 
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senior editor of the Outlook— whose loyalty to the 
 administration is no more to be sniffed at than the 
 Marchioness's lemonade made out of orange-peel, 
 "though," as she admitted, "one has to make believe a 
 good deal" — told us the other day, when speaking of the 
 late disappointing tariff concoction, what not only puts 
 the President himself in the snakes' nest, but makes him 
 about as venomous as any of the Secretary's rattlesnakes : 
 
 When he [the President] commended the bill [of 
 Aldrich and Payne] as satisfying the country's ideals, 
 and when he commended the men who had put the bill 
 through Congress as leaders to be followed, and when 
 he condemned as anti-Republican the men who had 
 fought for legislation more fully in accord with the 
 Republican platform, it was impossible for him to 
 carry the country with him. The people began to 
 think that he was working with the machine, not the 
 machine with him. They did not doubt his honesty. 
 [Not anybody?] The continuing faith in Mr. Taft is 
 a fine testimony to his character. [Fine testimony 
 certainly, but what court will allow it to go to the 
 jury?] But when they see Mr. Aldrich, whom they 
 believe to be the representative of special interests, 
 and Mr. Taft, whom they believe to be the representa- 
 • tive of the public welfare, standing on the same plat- 
 form, cooperating to the same end, and sponsors for 
 the same legislation, they cannot but wonder which 
 one is leading, which one is following. [Does any 
 one wonder but Dr. Abbott?] 
 
 IV 
 
 Whether the very reverend editor or his more or less 
 reverend associates wonder who is the head or who are 
 
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the bicephalate of the federal government, is not the 
 practical question which the public has now to deal with ; 
 still less future wars, if, as I hope, when that practical 
 question has been properly dealt with, there will be few 
 if any future wars with or by the United States. It is 
 the actual war that we have been waging for nearly a 
 century, and are now waging with more violence than 
 ever, not only with our own people, but with all the world, 
 that first requires our attention. A wise man who pro- 
 poses to build a house does not commence with its roof, 
 nor does the builder of a kitchen chimney begin at the 
 end provided for the escape of the smoke. 
 
 The cause of the unholy war we are now waging is the 
 tariff on imports. Our philanthropists may cry peace, 
 they may orate peace, they may print, write, and even 
 pray for peace, but while fire burns and water runs we 
 will have, nay, we can have, no peace, nor deserve any. 
 General Sherman, who knew what he was speaking of, 
 said, without a shade of profanity, "War is hell." But a 
 tariff war is many times more Satanic than any war of 
 which the general had ever any professional ex- 
 perience, for it is essentially a fratricidal war, conceived 
 of the most degenerate attributes of our human nature. 
 Our prayers for peace, while, like Cain, we are delib- 
 erately threatening our brothers all over the world with 
 our flagitious tariffs, will be justly treated by the Prince 
 of Peace as blasphemy. There is no attribute of war 
 that does not infect, nay, that does not incriminate, any 
 tariff upon imports. It is the taking of property to which 
 we have no shadow of right, in violation of the most 
 natural of all rights, and giving what we feloniously 
 take, to a class whose rights to it deserve no more respect 
 
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morally than their rights to the prey of the burglar or 
 the shop-lifter. It has increased the cost of the neces- 
 saries of life to famine prices, leading to the underfeed- 
 ing of ever-increasing millions. 
 
 Unhappily very many people are, or affect to be, unable 
 to understand how the tariff is responsible for raising 
 the prices with us in America and elsewhere so enor- 
 mously. It is easily explained, but most briefly by an 
 illustration. Mr. Franklin Pierce, in his admirable work 
 on "The Tariffs and Trusts," tells us that at the close of 
 the year ending July i, 1905, we imported $570,000,000 
 of goods, upon which an average duty of 45.24 per cent, 
 was levied. During the same period our domestic com- 
 merce, consisting largely of products of our mines, soil, 
 and factories, was about $20,000,000,000, or thirty-five 
 times the amount of stuff imported. The purchasers of 
 the $570,000,000 of imports paid into the federal treasury 
 what averaged 45.24 per cent, of that. 
 
 The domestic manufacturer, by reason of this tariff 
 restriction, naturally raises the price of his like com- 
 modities, though usually— I hate to say, as the truth 
 prompts me to say, uniformly— of an inferior quality, 
 up to or near the duty line ; his New Jersey champagne 
 to two dollars a bottle ; and actually sells no inconsider- 
 able proportion of our thousands of millions of domestic 
 products at the price thus enhanced by the tariff. So 
 that the American consumer not only pays the 45.24 per 
 cent, tariff on the $570,000,000 that he imports, but on a 
 very considerable share of the $20,000,000,000 of com- 
 modities' worth which he produces himself, or nearly 
 half as much again for what his own country produces 
 as he should be required to pay, in order to protect and 
 
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benefit the trade of those who handle only one thirty-fifth 
 
 of it. 
 
 Dr. Abbott, though still an apologist for custom-house 
 slave-pens, admits in the following table that the prices 
 of the food for the wage-earning classes in this country 
 have increased on an average more than 150 per cent, in 
 the last fifteen years. 
 
 ADVANCE IN PRICES, 1896-1910 
 
 CRUDE FARM 
 PRODUCTS 
 
 Per cent, of 
 increase 
 
 Wheat 100 
 
 Corn 106 
 
 Oats 119 
 
 Barley 133 
 
 Rye 127 
 
 Beans 148 
 
 Peas 114 
 
 Potatoes 100 
 
 Eggs 216 
 
 Milk 66 
 
 Cotton 113 
 
 Wool . . 
 Cottonseed 
 Live beeves 
 Live sheep 
 Live hogs 
 
 118 
 
 250 
 
 72 
 
 50 
 
 152 
 
 MANUFACTURED 
 FARM PRODUCTS 
 
 Per cent, of 
 increase 
 
 Flour 66 
 
 Beef carcasses ... 50 
 
 Hogs 196 
 
 Mutton 109 
 
 Pork, barrelled . . .196 
 
 Bacon 202 
 
 Hams 45 
 
 Lard 201 
 
 Butter 140 
 
 Cheese 164 
 
 Cottonseed-oil . . .163 
 
 Hides 105 
 
 Leather 50 
 
 Linseed-oil .... 97 
 
 The pretext with which the late Horace Greeley 
 wheedled most of our Western States through his 
 Weekly Tribune was that the tariff is necessary to a new 
 country like ours to develop infant industries, etc., until 
 they are strong enough to take care of themselves. Yet 
 nearly if not every one of the articles on Dr. Abbott's 
 
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list is produced in greater abundance by nature in the 
 United States than in any other part of the world. 
 
 But a more remarkable commentary upon Horace 
 Greeley's infant industry delusion is revealed by a recent 
 report from the Bureau of Statistics in Washington. It 
 informs us that among our imports of finished prod- 
 ucts — that is, "manufactures ready for consumption" 
 — we will find $47,000,000 worth of manufactured 
 cotton goods, $23,500,000 worth of silk manufactures, 
 $16,500,000 of the manufactures of wool, and a gain of 
 100,000,000 pounds of imported hides and skins. 
 
 Yet, mature as all these infant industries now are, 
 every American will find it better economy to buy all his 
 cotton and silk garments in France, all his shoes or boots 
 and woollen garments in England, and pay all the duty 
 besides upon them, than to buy commodities of the same 
 name and "pretension anywhere in the United States. 
 The reason is that, thanks to the coddling of these indus- 
 tries by the government, they have retained all the least 
 desirable attributes of infancy and have acquired none 
 of those that are due from maturity. 
 
 And why is it that no American gentleman wears a 
 Yankee woollen coat, trousers, or shirt, no American 
 lady wears a silk dress from New Jersey, and why do 
 both sexes fit themselves out with European shoes and 
 boots and shirts whenever they are where such can be 
 conveniently bought? 
 
 The answer to this question is very simple. The tariff 
 puts a high price upon the foreign article here. It is one 
 of the plainest principles of economics that there is no 
 room in any market for two prices for the same com- 
 modity. Therefore the Yankee manufacturer has but 
 
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to produce a commodity having an external resemblance 
 to the European article and offer it on the market as 
 genuine, but at a price just enough lower to attract the 
 poor and the ignorant consumer and the knavish shop- 
 keeper. Reason enough why the shopkeeper likes the 
 tariff, for it enables him to put off his shoddy staples of 
 New England and New Jersey as genuine commodities 
 at a far higher price than they could have been marketed, 
 if at all, without the tariff. And Canal Street haber- 
 dashers call that "good business." 
 
 In this way a system and practice of knavery which 
 originated in Washington percolates through every city, 
 town, village, and hamlet in the United States, until the 
 conscience of the whole nation is becoming atrophied. 
 We have established an international reputation for the 
 manufacture of rubbish. 
 
 There is no more firmly established principle of politi- 
 cal economy or ethics than that no workman can delib- 
 erately produce poor work or take any part in its pro- 
 duction without moral deterioration; neither can any 
 government prostitute its power by legislation that not 
 only tempts but practically compels workmen to produce 
 poor — that is, fraudulent — work without not only becom- 
 ing primarily responsible for it, but sharing in moral 
 deterioration. 
 
 Myron T. Herrick, the former Republican Governor 
 of Ohio, whose reelection President Taft is reported to 
 have defeated by putting one of his feet into the scales 
 in favor of another candidate, in a speech made last 
 spring before the National Metal Trades' Association 
 in New York City, had the courage to give the following 
 statements, which could not be suspected of partisan 
 
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prejudice, unless from his silence about the fact that the 
 waste and extravagance he refers to have all occurred 
 not only subsequent to the time our governrnent was en- 
 tirely out of debt under the administration of General 
 Jackson, but since the revenue tariff of 1844 was dis- 
 placed by the war tariff of i860 and its more virulent 
 successors. As the governor was addressing a corporate 
 body which consisted largely if not exclusively of the 
 beneficiaries of our confiscatory tariff, he had some ex- 
 cuse for not closing the ears of his audience to the facts 
 here detailed by referring to the cause of which all those 
 facts are the inevitable results, to which, of course, they 
 would have been as deaf as adders. 
 
 In many branches of the government service there 
 has been little or no progress in half a century, except 
 in the size of the appropriations required to operate 
 them. In iii years government expenses have in- 
 creased five times as fast as population. Some of the 
 bureaus are now spending more than the entire gov- 
 ernment service in 1853. Since 1897 the cost of all 
 government has increased 32 per cent, for each person. 
 
 Senator Carter is authority for the statement that 
 the methods of the post-office have not changed since 
 1835. The Postmaster-General asserts that 8 cents a 
 pound, or $64,000,000 a year, is being lost on one class 
 of mail matter alone. ... It is now proposed that this 
 department, which can lose $64,000,000 on one branch 
 of its business without exciting more than a passing 
 comment, and which has not changed its methods since 
 1835, shall become the custodian of the people's sav- 
 ings. 
 
 In the Navy Department the Secretary's report 
 shows that although the German and United States 
 navies are practically equal in number of ships and 
 
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tonnage, the naval expenses, exclusive of new con- 
 structions, are only $47,000,000 annually in Germany 
 against $100,000,000 in this country. 
 
 Senator Aldrich gives it as his opinion that the 
 national government could save $300,000,000 a year 
 if it were conducted on a business basis and managed 
 as cleverly and efficiently as a large corporation. 
 
 The country has been shaken from ocean to ocean 
 by the disclosures of graft and dishonesty in connec- 
 tion with the life-insurance companies and the sugar 
 companies. The total amount involved was ridicu- 
 lously small as compared with one year's waste from 
 inefficiency and extravagance in conducting the public 
 business ; yet these conditions have obtained for gener- 
 ations, and it is only when they have grown into such 
 proportions that they affect the public credit and the 
 taxes of the country become burdensome that we rec- 
 ognize their appalling purport. 
 
 V 
 
 The reckless and stupid way in which we are using up 
 our national capital to pay our debts to foreign nations, 
 contracted for things we could have had at half the price 
 if our ports were open to them as freely as to their 
 emigrants, can only be fitly compared to the folly of 
 the man who feeds himself through his nose instead of 
 his mouth, or on what he smells rather than on what he 
 chews. Both must, of course, grow poorer every day, 
 and rattlesnakes proportionately more abundant. 
 
 Though endowed by Providence with a greater abun- 
 dance of every commodity required for the construction 
 of vessels for ocean navigation and for sailing them than 
 
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any other nation in the world, the tariff has swept our 
 commercial navy from the ocean, while our imports are 
 paid for largely, not out of our surplus earnings, but out 
 of our capital — our forests, our mines, and the products 
 of our agriculture, which resources are in turn being 
 rapidly exhausted to indulge the reckless extravagance 
 of this generation to the criminal prejudice of its pos- 
 terity. Our product of agriculture, except on our limited 
 remaining patches of virgin soil, is scarcely half the 
 product per acre of the farm lands in any other part of 
 the world, except perhaps in Africa and Greenland. Our 
 "wheat yield per acre for the past forty years," says 
 J. J. Hill (there is no better authority), "has averaged 
 12.7 bushels to the acre. In Germany they import fer- 
 tilizers from the United States and yet sell wheat as 
 cheap as we can. If we got the same yield per acre as 
 Germany, we would have enough wheat for home con- 
 sumption and 800,000,000 bushels for export." 
 
 The cost of working our farms is becoming so enor- 
 mous, and labor so dear, that the young men who inherit 
 them are swarming to Wall Street or to other places with 
 congener outfits, where they live upon the crumbs which 
 fall from the tarifHy enriched men's tables, honestly if 
 they can, and otherwise when they think they must. 
 Gambling, which once used to be regarded in the United 
 States, as it justly deserved to be, one of the most de- 
 grading as it is one of the rriost purely satanic of vices, 
 has recently become so fashionable for both sexes that 
 there is no day in the week, not even the first, in which it 
 is treated by the majority as a violation of the fourth or 
 any other commandment. 
 
 How, then, too, can the clergy longer denounce gam- 
 
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bling as a vice, when the government of the United 
 States spits upon both the two great commandments, on 
 which hang all the Law and the Prophets, and instead of 
 doing to others as we would have them do to us, instead 
 of loving our neighbor as ourselves, treats him with as 
 little respect as the Apache Indians used to treat our 
 prairie travellers before railroads and the telegraph 
 ofiFered their protection ? 
 
 The silence of the American clergy in their pulpits 
 about the wickedness of the tariff would be incredible if 
 their bread and butter were not so largely dependent 
 upon it. There is no class so lavish with their bounties 
 to the churches as those whose wealth has been amassed 
 with a more or less scandalous indifference about the 
 means by which it has been acquired. No Italian high- 
 wayman was ever known to pass a cross at the roadside 
 without stopping to make the sign of the cross upon his 
 forehead. 
 
 Nevertheless the great Head of the Church is never 
 forgetting his Church. He is never more present than 
 when he seems to have turned his back upon it. At a 
 meeting of the Presbyterian General Assembly in May 
 last, the Board of Ministerial Relief in its report "re- 
 ferred to the constantly increasing number of families of 
 ministers that need aid, and asked the General Assembly 
 to call the attention of the churches to the urgent needs 
 of the board." It was stated that the increase in the 
 cost of food, clothing, and other necessaries had made it 
 imperative for the church to increase its payments to dis- 
 abled clergymen and widows of clergymen from $300 to 
 $500 for the former and from $250 to $300 for the latter. 
 It was also stated in the report that there were 4480 
 
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churches which had not contributed a cent to the cause 
 during the last year. This brought out a resolution, 
 which was passed, ordering that such churches as failed 
 in future to make proper contributions should be reported 
 to the Assembly and publicly censured. 
 
 But reporting these churches to the Assembly will not 
 bring down the cost of food or clothing. Nor will a 
 censure of them make the 4480 churches whose udders 
 have dried up feel any more disposed to give down their 
 milk. These recalcitrants may be the mysterious instru- 
 ments of Providence to let the shepherds know that their 
 flocks are not properly fed and that, while tithing their 
 mint and cummin, their ministry is not lifting a finger 
 to correct the cause of their destitution. Jesus is never 
 accidentally or without a purpose sleeping in the bottom 
 of the boat while his disciples are struggling with the 
 waves. It is when they feel the need of aid and clamor 
 for it that he awakes and the sea becomes calm. 
 
 VI 
 
 As the most vicious enemy of commerce that has ever 
 been devised, the tariff upon imports is, ex vi terminis, 
 the most uncompromising of all the enemies of civiliza- 
 tion. 
 
 "Thank you," wrote to me our common friend the late 
 Samuel L. Clemens, whose gentle humor made his wis- 
 dom the currency of the nations, "thank you for any 
 hard word you may say about the tariff. I guess the 
 government that robs its own people earns the future it 
 is preparing for itself." 
 
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In the year 1839 a speech was made in the Senate of 
 the United States by John C. Calhoun, one of the most 
 consummate logicians that ever had a seat in that forum, 
 in which, speaking of an amendment to a tariff bill that 
 had been introduced by Senator Benton, he said that at 
 its very basis lay the assumption of a power which if 
 established would have assumed that duties and taxes 
 might be laid for revenue, but might be perverted to the 
 purpose of encouraging one pursuit and discouraging 
 another; that is, that the revenue power might be con- 
 verted into a penal or stipendiary power. 
 
 Acting upon this false and dangerous presumption 
 [he continued] , the protective system had been intro- 
 duced, and pushed to the most extravagant extent, 
 under the act of 1828. By its baneful influence the 
 great staple interest of the South and that of the navi- 
 gation of the East were paralyzed, while certain others 
 were made to flourish. To effect this, millions and 
 millions were taken from the people and poured into 
 the treasury — where it constituted a vast sum for ex- 
 travagance and unconstitutional expenditures — cor- 
 rupting the community, and extending the patronage 
 and power of the government beyond the limits con- 
 sistent with our free institutions. This vast patron- 
 age, concentrated in the hands of the Executive, had 
 rendered that department all-powerful: and was 
 thereby rapidly leading the way to the consolidation, 
 not only of the powers of the legislative, but the whole 
 powers of the entire government, in that department. 
 It was against such a system, producing such effects, 
 that the blow was struck — bravely and magnanimously 
 struck— that led to the Compromise Act, which this 
 motion is intended to disturb. It was successful. It 
 was directed at the root of the evil. It has stopped the 
 excessive flow into the treasury; and, followed up by 
 
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the Deposit Act of 1836, it has emptied it of its cor- 
 rupting mass. He saw clearly that reform with an 
 overflowing treasury was impossible, especially when 
 that overflow consisted of bank-notes. It was impos- 
 sible to arrest waste or limit patronage until the means 
 which sustained them was exhausted. This great 
 object is now effected; and retrenchment, economy, 
 and reform must follow, or woe to those in power! 
 And when these shall gain the ascendancy, then will 
 the blow which was dealt against consolidation, and 
 for the Union and our free institutions, have effected 
 the great and patriotic purpose intended by those who 
 directed it, and of whom I shall ever be proud of hav- 
 ing been one. The protective system, which has been 
 the cause of all the mischief, has fallen prostrate be- 
 fore it in the dust. He who undertakes to revive its 
 putrid carcass will perish in the attempt. 
 
 How fitly and grandly would these words ring through 
 the halls of Congress to-day if, alas ! if — 
 
 It was as one of the echoes of those prophetic words, 
 and under the very administration which this prophet 
 commended, that our republic came to enjoy the distinc- 
 tion of being the only government then in the whole 
 world that was free from debt. 
 
 The relief of those evils by the Compromise measures, 
 like all compromises, was of transient endurance, sim- 
 ply because the tariff root was left alive in the soil. 
 There is no such thing as a peaceful or durable com- 
 promise with vice in any form, as there is no such thing 
 as a small sin. Will our people realize this before it 
 "earns the future it is preparing for itself" ? 
 
 In further support of my contention that the tariff "is 
 evil and for evil only good," I will now invoke the manes 
 
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of another American statesman whose shoe-latchets no 
 President of the United States, since Lincoln at least, 
 would be worthy to unloose, and this I say without dero- 
 gating from the merits of any of President Lincoln's 
 successors. On the 22d of July, 1778, Benjamin Frank- 
 lin addressed from Paris the following letter to James 
 Lovell : 
 
 Commerce among nations, as between private per- 
 sons, should be fair and equitable, by equivalent ex- 
 changes and mutual supplies. The taking unfair ad- 
 vantages of a neighbor's necessities, though attended 
 with temporary success, always breeds bad blood. To 
 lay duties on a commodity exported, which our neigh- 
 bors want, is a knavish attempt to get something for 
 nothing. The statesman who first invented it had the 
 genius of a pickpocket, and would have been a pick- 
 pocket if fortune had suitably placed him. The nations 
 who have practised it have suffered fourfold, as pick- 
 pockets ought to suffer. Savoy, by a duty on exported 
 wines, lost the trade of Switzerland, which thence- 
 forth raised its own wine; and (to waive other in- 
 stances) Britain, by her duty on exported tea, has lost 
 the trade of her colonies. But, as we produce no com- 
 modity that is peculiar to our country, and which may 
 not be obtained elsewhere, the discouraging the con- 
 sumption of ours by duties on exportation, and thereby 
 encouraging a rivalship from other nations in the 
 ports we trade to, is absolute folly, which indeed is 
 mixed more or less with all knavery. For my own 
 part, if my protest were of any consequence, I should 
 protest against our ever doing it, even by way of re- 
 prisal. It is a meanness with which I would not dirty 
 the conscience or character of my country. 
 
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VII 
 
 Of one at least of several peace organizations to whose 
 courtesy I am indebted for invitations to associate myself 
 therewith, Colonel Theodore Roosevelt is the honorary 
 president. On his return from his African hunt he 
 touched at Christiania, in Norway, to deliver an address 
 on "International Peace" before the Nobel Prize Com- 
 mittee. In the course of his remarks he made the best 
 possible use of the occasion to address the following 
 counsel to the peace apostles assembled there : 
 
 We must ever bear in mind that the great end in 
 view is righteousness, justice as between man and 
 man, nation and nation, the chance to lead our lives 
 on a somewhat higher level, with a broader spirit of 
 brotherly good will one for another. Peace is gen- 
 erally good in itself, but it is never the highest good 
 unless it comes as the handmaid of righteousness. . . . 
 
 Moreover, and above all, let us remember that words 
 count only when they give expression to deeds or are 
 to be translated into them. . . . Our words must be 
 judged by our deeds ; and in striving for a lofty ideal 
 we must use practical methods. 
 
 To my great regret, though scarcely to my surprise, 
 the colonel made no allusion whatever to the tariff upon 
 imports, manifestly the most powerful centrifugal force 
 to which civilized nations have ever been subjected, ex- 
 cepting, of course, the natural depravity of the human 
 heart. 
 
 It is reported that the colonel has promised to break 
 the silence he so obstinately maintains since his return 
 
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to his native land in order to take part in the fall con- 
 gressional campaign in behalf of his nephew, should the 
 latter be nominated as a candidate for the House of Rep- 
 resentatives. Nothing would be more opportune or 
 interesting than for him to profit by this occasion to 
 answer four or five questions which the foregoing ex- 
 tracts suggest to the "plain people," to whom this 
 monograph is addressed : 
 
 1. If righteousness is the great end of nations, what 
 is the great end of governments that impose tariffs upon 
 imports ? 
 
 2. If their ends differ, please explain their points of 
 difference. If, on the other hand, their ends are the 
 same, please define righteousness, and also unrighteous- 
 ness, its opposite. 
 
 3. In the Bible, of which I believe the colonel is a 
 faithful reader, the prophet Isaiah says: "Thou shalt 
 know that I the Lord am thy Saviour and thy Redeemer, 
 the Mighty One of Jacob. For brass I will bring gold, 
 and for iron I will bring silver, and for wood brass, and 
 for stones iron : I will also make thy officers peace, and 
 thine exactors righteousness. Violence shall no more be 
 heard in thy land, desolation nor destruction within thy 
 borders." Are the functions of the "officers" and "ex- 
 actors" here referred to the same as those of Mr. Loeb's 
 rattlesnakes at the custom-houses of our country, and if 
 not, in what do they differ ? 
 
 4. Does the peace prevail in our land that our Lord 
 promised, or is ours only the peace that man giveth? 
 And when shall the violence no more be heard, nor the 
 desolation and destruction within our borders, especially 
 
 34 
 
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those with which our railway and industrial organiza- 
 tions are batthng for their very lives ? 
 
 5. Does the tariff bring gold for brass, and silver for 
 iron, to us, and if so, to what class or proportion of our 
 people does it deliver them ? 
 
 In his discourse at Christiania as an apostle emeritus 
 of peace, the colonel puts his own valor conspicuously in 
 evidence in the following comprehensive indictment of 
 "cowards" : 
 
 No man is worth calling a man who will not fight 
 rather than submit to infamy or see those who are near 
 to him suffer wrong. 
 
 Jesus of Nazareth submitted to both, to an extent 
 never experienced by any other human being, and yet 
 no one has ever doubted his courage except the scoffers 
 at his crucifixion. 
 
 But as the rest of us, at least, are prepared to admit 
 that Jesus was born with some advantages shared fully 
 by no other person, the colonel may content himself with 
 embracing such an eligible opportunity of telling us how 
 much he has done as Legislator, President, Peace-Maker, 
 Hunter, or Prophesier to relieve the millions of his 
 country-people, whether near or far off, so many of 
 whom are suffering — many to starvation and not a few 
 to suicide — in consequence of that monument of unright- 
 eousness, our tariff upon imports. And also while on the 
 subject he may be kind enough to tell us why, in a dis- 
 course in no respect conspicuous for brevity, in com- 
 mendation of peace, he never once referred to the war 
 which, while President, he and the government over 
 
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which he presided were constantly waging against every 
 country which conferred upon him its honors and of 
 which he was a privileged g^est. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Travelling some thirty years ago through the cane- 
 sugar country of Louisiana, I casually fell into conversa- 
 tion in the cars with a large sugar-planter of that region. 
 From him I learned that the sugar plantations of 
 Louisiana, for the protection of which the sugar tariff 
 was originally imposed, yielded a crop on an average 
 only once in three years. Upon further inquiries about 
 the cost of growing, harvesting, grinding, and market- 
 ing the crop, he admitted that, with all the aid of the 
 tariff, the entire sugar crop of the State netted to its 
 producers only about $450,000. The value of the sugar 
 imported into the United States during the current fiscal 
 year 1910 was $101,435,108. The tariff to which it was 
 subjected ad valorem was 56.22 per cent., that is, $57,- 
 024,675, in other words a wanton burden annually of 
 over fifty-seven millions of dollars upon the consumers 
 of sugar alone. I then suggested to the planter the advan- 
 tage it would be if, instead of a tariff, which was a serious 
 burden to every family in the nation, the government 
 were to give Louisiana a bounty of $450,000 every three 
 years and let the land be devoted to some other more 
 productive use. He replied that the negroes did not 
 know how to grow anything else, and it was important to 
 give them the employment. This was an intelligent, edu- 
 cated man, apparently the equal of the average legislator 
 
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or Congressman, but he seemed to have no idea of what 
 a set of Issachars he was making out the Louisiana 
 sugar-planters to be. 
 
 Had our Congress wished in 1907 to adjust the late 
 tariff exclusively with a view of securing the most rev- 
 enue with the least burden to the people, it had only to re- 
 duce it to one half of its present rate. That would not 
 only have greatly increased its present revenue, but it 
 would have involved a corresponding diminution of the 
 rattlesnake brood with which our country seems to 
 swarm. It was not reduced because the tariff on sugar 
 is purely a protective tax maintained to compel the people 
 to pay $57,024,675 more than the sugar is really worth, 
 in addition to the same amount that goes into the public 
 treasury and to the official rattlesnakes. 
 
 One of the reasons now urged by some feeble-minded 
 enthusiasts for an income tax is that it would distribute 
 the burdens of taxation more proportionately to the 
 strength of the backs upon which they would fall. This 
 is a delusion not unlike those which lubricated the orig- 
 inal introduction of the tariff rattlesnake: a temporary 
 encouragement of infant industries ; later, under the pre- 
 text of saving the Union, it was baptized a "war tariff" ; 
 and now it is avowedly protection for the sake of protec- 
 tion — that and nothing less. Whoever supposes that the 
 Republican party, which is now the synonym for a party 
 of "protection for the sake of protection," would reduce 
 the tariff a single penny because of what an income tax, 
 however oppressive, might yield, would make as egre- 
 gious a blunder as the silly man who plunged into a lake 
 to lay hold of the full moon which he saw reflected in its 
 water, mistaking it for a green cheese. Had Congress 
 
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possessed the power in 1909 to raise $57,000,000 by an in- 
 come tax, the sugar tax would have been retained just the 
 same, unless increased, and appropriations would have 
 been increased to absorb it. The tariff rattlesnakes are 
 just as sacred and as devoutly worshipped on Capitol 
 Hill as snakes ever were in Africa or Hayti. Congress- 
 men may come and Congressmen may go, but the tariff 
 extortions will go on so long obviously as a Republican 
 administration controls in Washington. 
 
 We have paid in pensions since the month of June, 
 1863, $3,551,025,651 — nearly or quite the amount of 
 extraordinary expenses of our government during the 
 Civil War. The number on the pension roll in 1907 
 was 985,971— a larger number than we ever had of 
 soldiers at one time in the field during that war, or 
 either before or since we became an independent nation. 
 These pensioners are now drawing $138,030,894 an- 
 nually; and though we have had no war since 1865, 
 except the three or four months' scrap with Spain, the 
 pension roll has been annually increasing for the last 
 forty-five years. It would be interesting and instructive 
 to know how small a room it would take to hold all the 
 surviving soldiers of the Mexican and the Civil War, and 
 the widows of those deceased. No other country has or 
 ever had such a pension list. Would we ever have had 
 such a burden to carry had not a shameful proportion 
 of it been appropriated by Congress to secure the reelec- 
 tion of its members pledged to protection ? Would that 
 species of graft have been practicable had it not been 
 for the delusion of a majority of our people that it is the 
 foreigner, not ourselves, that pays the duty on foreign 
 imports ? Nay, in spite of such delusion, would it have 
 
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been practicable were there no special inducements to 
 guard the treasury against a surplus, and the administra- 
 tion against a clamor from the people for a reduction of 
 their burdens ? 
 
 IX 
 
 Were there ever many, if any, wars more just than 
 would ensue if a man brought into our town a load of 
 potatoes to sell and a publican and sinner were to tell 
 him that half or even a peck out of each bushel must be 
 set apart for him and his associate hotel-keepers before 
 the other three pecks of every bushel could be put on sale 
 in the markets ? 
 
 In what respect morally or financially would this differ 
 from the publicans' going in person or sending their 
 servants to their neighbors' potato patches and carrying 
 away the potatoes from every third or fourth hill ? Nay, 
 in what important respect would this tariff upon our 
 neighbor's potato patch differ from the provocation of at 
 least ninety out of every hundred wars recorded in his- 
 tory? Yet, morally as well as economically, we, as a 
 nation, have been for a century or more acting upon 
 precisely the same principle as these sinful publicans. 
 
 A tariff upon foreign imports provokes reprisals as 
 naturally as predatory encroachment upon foreign terri- 
 tory, for it is equally a wanton appropriation of another 
 nation's property. Indeed, most wars in modern times, 
 and all with which the world seems now to be threatened, 
 have been waged to secure new or retain old markets. 
 For this reason and no other is so much of the wealth of 
 nations absorbed in constantly increasing armies and 
 
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navies. It simply means that each nation does not wish 
 another's capacity for depredation to exceed its own, and 
 assumes that depredation will follow if it does. No 
 tariflfed nation gives any other nation the credit of re- 
 specting its territorial rights any longer than it thinks 
 that nation is the weaker. The most renowned if not the 
 most capable military chieftains in human history were 
 simply highwaymen writ large. What biographical dic- 
 tionary would ever have given more than a paragraph to 
 the names of Alexander, Hannibal, Charlemagne, or the 
 Bonapartes, but for the wars they waged for what they 
 had no semblance of a right to? The paeans to their 
 glory in last analysis are but the war-whoops of the 
 savage vaunting his belt of scalps. The clamor for 
 peace, of which we hear so much of late, is only a clamor 
 for "the peace that man giveth." It means, to those 
 making most noise and professions about it, little more 
 than a change of weapons with which to fight. The 
 predatory class nowadays make war by securing the pro- 
 tection of a tariff for their own industries, of which the 
 unprotected millions have to bear all the burden. It is 
 the sham coat of arms of Vanity Fair, assumed from the 
 peerage, with Pace in hello for its motto. 
 
 X 
 
 Before the Civil War of 1861-1865 we knew nothing of 
 the recent conflicts between labor and capital, nor was 
 such a financial phenomenon as a Debs or a Gompers 
 known in the land. The idea that any man should not 
 
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sell his labor for what it would bring in any market he 
 chose to offer it in was a craze which was only to be en- 
 countered, if anywhere, in lunatic asylums. Patriotism 
 and the preservation of the Union were made the excuses 
 for increasing the tariff in order to obtain money to carry 
 on the war, excuses justified neither by sound statesman- 
 ship nor intelligent patriotism, but hastily and inconsid- 
 erately imposed upon the country for the sake of a higher 
 tariff on imports and more protection under the specious 
 guise of a war tariff, and therefore professedly a tem- 
 porary one. 
 
 Though the mode adopted for providing means for 
 prosecuting our war cost the country more than double 
 what it would have cost had we relied upon our wealth 
 and credit, as a few years later was done by the two pow- 
 erful nations engaged in the prosecution of the Franco- 
 German War, yet that unnecessary cost was far from 
 being the greatest calamity which has resulted from that 
 ill-omened mistake. It so whetted the appetite of the 
 protected class by what they had fed on, that at the 
 conclusion of the war there was not a word uttered about 
 infant industries or of a war tariff, nor any serious 
 thought given by the administration to any reduction of 
 any kind of tariff. By its aid — by the retirement from 
 Congress during the war of the Southern representa- 
 tives, who were pretty unanimously in favor of low 
 duties if any, and who, when returned to Congress, were 
 admitted as hostiles and regarded with so much suspi- 
 cion by the Republican majority as to have little influence 
 there — the tariff was steadily increasing, until it soon 
 had a plenty of champions of the principle of protection 
 for the sake of protection. In fact, it has now no other. 
 
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No tarifif can remain stationary long without impov- 
 erishing somebody. It attracts capital and, of course, 
 in the same degree increases competition against which 
 there is no relief possible except by increase of the duties. 
 Fifty years have elapsed since the tariff for revenue 
 adopted in 1844 gave place to the war tariff of i860. 
 That tariff under various pretexts has been altered— or 
 "revised," as seems now the phrase most in fashion — 
 some half-dozen or more times in the interval, and in 
 every instance increased. 
 
 Of our last three Presidents, Roosevelt and Cleveland 
 were birthright free-traders, and though McKinley gave 
 his name and vote for the vilest tariff bill the country 
 had ever been afflicted with up to his time, his four years' 
 experience as our chief magistrate converted him into a 
 tariff reformer. The last public utterance that came from 
 his lips was an urgent appeal in that sense. Yet all three 
 of these statesmen learned by more or less humiliating 
 experiences that neither the Republican nor the Demo- 
 cratic party could be led to a victory under a free trade 
 or even a tariff reduction banner. All succumbed and 
 acted in the spirit, if they never used the words, of the 
 similarly humiliated King of France, "Paris is well 
 worth a mass." 
 
 Industries stimulated by protection are like the victims 
 of delirium tremens — both clamor madly for more, and 
 the protected class has become so powerful by its num- 
 bers and unjustly begotten wealth that, as in the case 
 of the whiskied lunatic, "because protection is such a 
 good thing, of course we cannot have too much of it." 
 Mr. Roosevelt's candidate for the Presidency two years 
 ago, in response to the public clamor for a revision of the 
 
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tariff, said that he would call an extra session of Con- 
 gress for that purpose immediately after his inaugura- 
 tion, and that a committee should be appointed to reduce 
 the schedules that are too high and raise such as are too 
 low. The result of such a revision was, as I at the time 
 predicted, much like our early fur traffic with the Indians 
 — one of the buyer's feet always in the scale that weighed 
 the pelt. "The cockroach never wins its cause," says a 
 Haytian proverb, "when the chicken is judge." 
 
 About every eight years since the Republican party 
 was founded, now fifty-six years, we have had what was 
 called a revision of the tariff, or an attempt of that name, 
 and in every instance it was increased. What has been 
 shall be, saith the Preacher. In every one of those fifty- 
 six years the appetite for more protection has increased, 
 and the power to resist it has proportionately diminished. 
 
 Protection is a poisonous stimulant that provokes ap- 
 petites which it can never satisfy even temporarily but 
 by increased indulgences, and must ultimately result in 
 disaster to those who continue to confide in it. 
 
 I may pertinently cite here a letter of very recent date 
 from the president of the Massachusetts Historical Soci- 
 ety, Mr. Charles Francis Adams, to a friend who bears 
 an historic name, in which he says, speaking of the recent 
 International Free Trade Conference in London : 
 
 I suppose that it is our duty to keep the sacred 
 flame alive, and have faith in its future. Neverthe- 
 less, I am obliged to say that, so far as the cause of 
 free trade in this country is concerned, the outlook 
 never seemed to me less encouraging than now. 
 
 You know perfectly well the class of men with 
 whom we have to deal. They are tricksters, infinitely 
 
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skilled in their work, and little better in any respect 
 than the thimble-rigger at the country fair. 
 
 I have no doubt that there will be a revision of the 
 tariff next year, no matter which of the two candi- 
 dates, Taft or Bryan, occupies the Presidential chair. 
 Both candidates, as well as both parties, are pledged 
 to it. Meanwhile, you know just as well as I, how the 
 game will be worked. 
 
 I state what is of common knowledge when I say 
 it is perfectly feasible to make an ostensible average 
 reduction of 25 per cent, in the present tariff sched- 
 ules, and yet in reality increase the actual protective 
 burden by at least 5 per cent. It is only necessary to 
 strike off that excess of duty which was imposed 
 through the different schedules when the Dingley Tariff 
 was framed, with a view to trading thereon upon the 
 passage of the reciprocity treaties then in negotiation. 
 Those treaties have not been confirmed ; and now this 
 excess duty, judiciously applied in way of ostensible 
 reduction, would in no way lower the actual protective 
 system. Meanwhile, on the other hand, a neatly ar- 
 ranged increase of certain schedules, as suggested by 
 Mr. Taft, would fill out and complete the protected 
 abominations. Here is "the little joker" ; and yet, as 
 a result of the whole, it might publicly, and most 
 plausibly, be proclaimed that a net tariff reduction of 
 20 per cent, had been effected. 
 
 That the whole thing was a thimble-rigging fraud 
 would be only too manifest to the well-informed. To 
 the unthinking, however, a campaign pledge would 
 have been faithfully redeemed. 
 
 Mark you, I do not for a moment suggest that this 
 scheme is in the mind of either Mr. Taft or Mr. 
 Bryan. That, however, it will be the game of the 
 tariff manipulators of Congress I have little, if any, 
 doubt. 
 
 As an all-round illustration in point, I send you a 
 
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clipping from this morning's Boston Herald, entitled 
 "Puck in the Campaign." 
 
 Mr. Taft I believe to be a perfectly honest man, 
 but you will there see that he has "been advised by 
 men who know" that a certain schedule could be 
 raised to advantage. The facts in the case are clearly 
 set forth in the clipping. The duty on the commodity 
 referred to (pottery) is already fixed in the Dingley 
 Bill of Abominations at from 55 per cent, to 60 per 
 cent, or "practically twice the total cost of produc- 
 tion" ; and yet, as a measure of tariff reform, Mr. Taft 
 unconsciously advises such further protection as shall 
 practically be prohibitive. 
 
 It was Macbeth, I believe, who, on a certain occa- 
 sion, energetically exclaimed : 
 
 " And be these jugg^lingf fiends no more believed, 
 That palter with us in a double sense ; 
 That keep the word of promise to our ear. 
 And break it to our hope.", 
 
 I am confirmed in the above view by information 
 which reaches me from well-informed quarters, that 
 the steel men, the wool men, and the sugar men all 
 say, privately but with confidence, that they do not 
 apprehend that their several schedules will be affected 
 adversely. You know their persuasiveness and their 
 power ! 
 
 XI 
 
 Protection gives a very substantial pecuniary advan- 
 tage to a limited class of industrialists at the expense of 
 all outside of that class, and thus has laid the foundation 
 of our American plutocracy, just as our forefathers in 
 America gave to the slave States a larger per capita rep- 
 resentation in the Congress than was enjoyed by the 
 
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non-slaveholding States, and thus founded a plutocratic 
 aristocracy in those States to which its members, in 1861, 
 attached more value than to the Union. 
 
 After more than half a century's discontent of the 
 North with the dictatorial supremacy which the South 
 acquired through this inequality, the census of i860 re- 
 vealed the fact that the political supremacy of the coun- 
 try had crossed the Potomac River and that cotton was 
 no longer king. As a consequence of the trifling conces- 
 sion, as it was regarded by our forefathers, to secure the 
 assent of two or three refractory slave States to the 
 constitutional organization of their government in 1792, 
 that concession had swelled and festered in the nation 
 until it could only be eliminated by the most expensive 
 and bloody war up to its time. 
 
 That war was purely a labor war, at least so far as the 
 South, which brought it on, was concerned. So soon as 
 the census revealed that its supremacy at Washington 
 had terminated, the planters in that section were deter- 
 mined to perpetuate the system by which they had ob- 
 tained all the labor they required for little more than the 
 pork and hominy necessary to feed the negroes whose 
 labor supplied both. An appeal to arms by the South had 
 no other rational purpose than to retain, or secure at a 
 trifling price, an abundance of involuntary labor. 
 
 In what did the situation which furnished the purpose 
 and provocation of that war differ from the situation 
 confronting us to-day ? Must we tolerate it until obliged 
 to rid ourselves of it in the same way? 
 
 The tariff has built up an aristocracy already more 
 numerous than were the refractory slave-owners in the 
 South. It has built it up, too, by privileges quite as un- 
 
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just, and as exclusively for money's worth, but a thou- 
 sand times more lucrative to its beneficiaries than slavery 
 ever was. The consequences are that it has divided our 
 people again into two classes — one, of those who have 
 more wealth than they know what to do with or how to 
 give away, and another, of breadwinners who, if they 
 lose a day's wages, even by illness, have to go in debt for 
 their next day's expenses. The increased cost of living 
 compels an increase of wages from time to time, but al- 
 ways the cost of living increases faster, until now the 
 food of the proletariat has reached famine prices in most 
 of our large cities and is daily increasing. With food 
 enough produced in the United States to nourish twice 
 its population, the average wage-earner can lay up 
 nothing, can provide few privileges for his family, and 
 practically no recreations. 
 
 "Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will a man 
 give for his life." Is it strange that there is friction be- 
 tween labor and capital with us ? The mass of our own 
 people are not political economists and know little, if any- 
 thing, about tariffs, except what is their fatal delusion: 
 that the tariff promises to protect them from the compe- 
 tition of foreign labor. Is it strange, therefore, that our 
 breadwinners combine for higher wages to meet the con- 
 stantly increasing cost of the necessaries of life? When 
 capital takes advantage of unemployed labor to avoid 
 such increase, is it strange that the wage-earners dis- 
 missed, treat those who at lower rates supply their places 
 as enemies, as traitors who betray the rights of the class 
 to which they in common belong? Hence the labor war 
 which has cost us in America many millions of dollars 
 through the industries it has suspended, interrupted, or 
 
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impoverished, and by such interruptions filled the coun- 
 try with idle, starving, and desperate men. Is not such 
 the natural and inevitable fruit of all tariffs upon im- 
 ports ? While the tariff lasts can we ever again be free 
 from serious apprehensions that any day no inconsider- 
 able part of all the machinery upon which our civilization 
 is hourly dependent shall be blocked by refractory labor 
 combinations ? 
 
 The following language recently used at a Republican 
 convention by the senior United States Senator from 
 Massachusetts is unhappily too true, and it is a pleasure 
 to hear or read it from the lips or pen of so prominent a 
 member of the Republican party as Henry Cabot Lodge : 
 
 It is the huge size of private fortunes, the vast ex- 
 tent and power of modern combinations of capital 
 made possible by present conditions, which have 
 brought upon us in these later years problems porten- 
 tous in their possibilities and threatening not only our 
 social and political welfare, but even our personal free- 
 dom, if they are not boldly met and wisely solved. 
 
 Mr. Lodge forbears or at least neglects to state what 
 the ''present conditions" really are which have brought 
 upon us these portentous problems, for, like Br'er Rabbit, 
 with only a racial distinction, he, too, was born and bred 
 in the brier-bush tangle of New England protectionism. 
 He therefore very respectfully refers only to present 
 conditions, but forbears to say a word of the patho- 
 genesis of those conditions. 
 
 Mr. Lodge's solicitude for personal freedom reminds 
 one of a story Thomas Jefferson used to relate of an 
 incident occurring on one of his journeys through Vir- 
 ginia. He chanced to stop at an inn the landlady of 
 
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which had just returned from the funeral of one whom 
 she lamented with much feeling. "But, Mr. Jefferson," 
 she said, "we have the consolation of knowing that every- 
 thing was done for him that could be done. He was bled 
 no less than twenty-six times." 
 
 XII 
 
 To give some idea of the cost and prevailing results of 
 the war waging in our country at present between the 
 tariff-skinned wage-earners and the government, it may 
 be instructive to note that on over 55,000 miles of rail- 
 roads in the Eastern States alone the concessions to the 
 strikers involve increases in the annual pay-rolls aggre- 
 gating $50,000,000. When the other Eastern and the 
 Western lines shall have settled up with the strikers, the 
 amount to be paid will be more than doubled. Yet the 
 railways are but one of the hundreds of industrial armies 
 that the tariff has put into the field to war against the 
 protected capitalists and their rattlesnakes. 
 
 Another illuminating illustration of the discouraging 
 influence upon national prosperity wrought by restric- 
 tions upon foreign commerce and of the advantages 
 secured by their removal is given in a table of the last 
 century .of Great Britain's exports. A nation's exports 
 are the most reliable if not the only available test of its 
 prosperity. 
 
 Prior to the free trade budget of 1842 the exports of 
 Great Britain amounted to $175,000,000; after the 
 budget of 1842, to $200,000,000; after the repeal of the 
 Corn Laws in 1846 and the Navigation Laws in 1847 
 
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they rose promptly to $275,000,000. From that time on 
 her exports increased pretty regularly every seven years 
 at the rate of about $125,000,000, so that her exports in 
 1901 amounted to $1,375,000,000; in 1907 to $2,000,- 
 000,000; and for the last year are authoritatively esti- 
 mated as $2,200,000,000. 
 
 The slaveholders took the desperate risks of a civil 
 war to avoid paying a fair price for the culture of their 
 cotton, sugar, and tobacco fields. Is the time very dis- 
 tant when the protectionists will be ready to risk another 
 civil war for precisely similar economical reasons and 
 with even more disastrous results? Such a revolution 
 might, and probably would, leave a tariff upon imports 
 behind it, as its predecessor did, though shorn of a por- 
 tion of its claws and teeth, if still remaining our main 
 reliance for revenue. That would be like surgery for a 
 cancer. The disease would soon reappear with increas- 
 ing vigor if a single root or fibre of it were permitted to 
 survive; and what can so surely, so quietly, so genially 
 supply its place as the opening of our harbors freely to 
 the commerce of all the world, and for the purposes of 
 revenue reserving a quota of what it would thus directly 
 contribute to the new industries and national resources 
 created by its new-born commerce ? 
 
 XIII 
 
 In dealing with its foreign commerce our government 
 seems to have been bewitched with the Calvinistic notion 
 that the more commerce has to suffer and struggle, the 
 more it will thrive. It not only taxes the foreign mer- 
 
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chant for what he sends one half of its home cost, but it 
 further discourages his coming to us at all by charging 
 for our harbor hospitalities two or three times as much 
 as he would be charged in the harbors of any other 
 maritime nation in the world. 
 
 The Savoie of the Compagnie Transatlantique has to 
 pay for the privilege of landing her passengers and 
 cargo in New York over $4000. She pays $1000 for 
 wharfage; $214 for her tonnage tax; for her custom- 
 house expenses, $26.20 ; health officer and board of war- 
 dens, $35 ; transfer of immigrants and baggage, $85.25 ; 
 pilotage, entering and leaving, $32; hospital expenses 
 and surveillance, etc., at Ellis Island, $138.63; head tax 
 for 592 aliens, $2368 ; besides many other expenses which 
 vary with each voyage. The Savoie is now a relatively 
 small ship, though not an old one. The vessels since 
 built for the transatlantic service in England and Ger- 
 many are of nearly twice her tonnage, and those which 
 harbor in New York City naturally incur fully twice the 
 harbor expenses. The Kaiser Wilhelm of a German 
 line pays on her net registered tonnage, for five trips, 
 $1900, or six cents per registered ton for each of her 
 five trips; a head tax of $4 a head on an average of 
 1000 passengers; pilotage for entrance and departure, 
 $242; for transferring immigrants, on an average, $120. 
 New Jersey, with a sagacious liberality, makes no munic- 
 ipal charges for docking in Hoboken, except the $10 for 
 the port warden. The German company owns its 
 wharves. A proper return for the investment made by 
 the company on these wharves, however, is estimated for 
 each trip of one of its large steamers at about $300 a 
 day, or about $2000 a year. 
 
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The harbor expenses of the Savoie in Havre are about 
 half what they; are in New York. Those of the German 
 Hnes in home ports are less than a quarter of New York's 
 charges. 
 
 For any vessel of between 6800 and 9000 cubic metres 
 capacity the total charges from sea to Bremerhaven, and 
 out from Bremerhaven to the first buoys, are less than 
 $400. $97.08 for port charges cover all the cost for the 
 use of the quays and dock accommodations at Bremer- 
 haven, while at Hoboken they cost about $2000 a year. 
 
 What should be said or thought of a government, or 
 of the fitness of its people for self-government, who, 
 with a country abounding in greater natural resources 
 for the creation of a commercial marine than any other 
 in the world, so far as is yet known, not only discourages 
 commerce with any foreign nation, and even with some 
 of its own colonies, with the nearest to a prohibitive tariff 
 that is imposed by any nation in the world, but which 
 in addition handicaps its commerce by taxing the ships 
 that come to bring it supplies at a cheaper rate than it 
 can itself produce them, as if they were importing the 
 cholera or the sleeping-sickness ? 
 
 Any people having a proper appreciation of the privi- 
 leges and uses of self-government should hail the arrival 
 of a foreign merchantman with only less enthusiasm 
 than it would have been welcomed by Robinson Crusoe 
 or Alexander Selkirk. 
 
 Mindful that every penny spent by such a visitor in 
 entering or occupying its harbor must be added to the 
 price of the cargo he brings and must ultimately be paid 
 by the people who purchase it, common sense would 
 
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dictate that all the privileges of the port should be made 
 as free as possible. 
 
 What is the matter with the man's head who cannot 
 see that every merchant ship entering our harbors is so 
 much money by how much less we pay for its commodi- 
 ties than we can produce them for, and in addition 
 furnishes a profitable market for so much of our own 
 surplus as will give a return cargo to its skipper, who 
 therefore should be welcomed as a special providence, 
 not as a beast of prey ! 
 
 XIV 
 
 By nature the United States was constituted to become 
 the Mistress of the Seas. It was this conviction that 
 gave to Napoleon the prophetic wisdom of ceding the 
 Territory of Louisiana to us for a nominal sum. 'We 
 ought already to be Mistress of the Commerce of the 
 Seas, and who can reasonably doubt we would be but 
 for the disorganizing and demoralizing influence of the 
 tariff? We have over 19,000 miles of continuous ocean, 
 gulf, and lake coast lines, which is considerably more 
 than is possessed by any other nation in the world. We 
 have already some 200 ports of entry with custom-houses 
 to match. Yet we would soon have many more but for 
 our tariff and navigation laws, which have practically 
 given our immensely profitable ocean transportation 
 service over to foreign nations. 
 
 We have a more abundant supply than any other 
 nation in the world of the principal materials required 
 for the construction of a commercial marine, such as 
 
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coal, iron, copper, lead, zinc, and wood, besides dozens o£ 
 other articles of secondary importance, without speaking 
 of our numberless gold and silver mines. 
 
 Why is it, then, that whenever we wish to visit a for- 
 eign country or send it a bale of cotton or tobacco, we 
 have to pay for our passage or for the transport of our 
 freight to a foreign ship-owner? Simply, first, because 
 of our absurd navigation laws, and secondly, because 
 everything required in the construction of a ship, even, 
 nails and hammers, is weighted by such a tariff that it 
 adds fully 40 per cent, to the cost of a ship built in an 
 American yard. The price of whatever we contribute 
 to the structure of a ship therefore rises to the level of 
 the tariffed foreign products. Hence it is that Great 
 Britain, with a population of 40,000,000, exports more 
 than five times as much manufactured products for every 
 man, woman, and child in that country as the United 
 States does with a population of more than 90,000,000. 
 
 To make a striking exposure of the paralyzing and 
 destructive influence of the tariff, both on commerce and 
 on the ship-building industry, let me cite a table recently 
 presented by the treasurer of the Cobden Club, the Hon. 
 H. Russell Rea, to the British Parliament, to show the 
 relations between the tariffs of maritime countries and 
 the amount of their steam shipping tonnage as compared 
 with their average ad valorem duties : 
 
 AVERAGE AD VALOREM DUTIES STEAM SHIPPING TONNAGE 
 
 Per cent. ^^^ INHABITANT 
 
 Russia 131 Russia . I ton to every 330 
 
 United States ... 73 United States " 166 
 
 Austria-Hungary . . 35 Austria-Hungary " no 
 
 France 34 France " 71 
 
 Italy 27 Italy " 72 
 
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AVERAGE AD VALOREM DUTIES STEAM SHIPPING TONNAGE 
 
 Percent PER INHABITANT 
 
 Germany 25 Germany i ton to every 34 
 
 24 
 12 
 
 9 
 
 4 
 
 15 
 4.6 
 
 Sweden 23 Sweden 
 
 Greece 19 Greece 
 
 Denmark 18 Denmark 
 
 Norway 12 Norway 
 
 Holland 3 Holland 
 
 United Kingdom (no pro- United Kingdom 
 tectionist tarifif) 
 
 Here we find that with an average ad valorem import 
 duty of y2) per cent, the United States has but one ton of 
 shipping for every 166 of population, while the United 
 Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, without, strictly, 
 any protective tariff, has a ton of shipping to every 4.6 
 of its population. 
 
 This was not always so. Far from it. In 1861, when 
 we began to protect the country by a war tariff, our total 
 tonnage, oceanic and domestic, was over five and a half 
 million, and only three and a half thousand tons less 
 than that of the whole British Empire in that day. 
 We actually owned at that time one third of the entire 
 maritime tonnage of the world. Even five years earlier 
 the value of our imports and exports carried in Ameri- 
 can bottoms was more than three times all that was car- 
 ried in foreign bottoms. This shows what the American 
 people were and still are capable of doing in free com- 
 petition with the rest of the world for its commerce, 
 when, if ever, they can disengage themselves from the 
 tariff octopus. 
 
 Why is it, then, that the United States flag is now 
 rarely or never seen upon the oceans except on vessels of 
 war? Why is it that, of the millions upon millions of 
 
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bushels of grain shipped by us to Europe every year, 
 not a soHtary bushel finds transportation in an American 
 bottom ? Why are our shipyards deserted and the build- 
 ing of merchant ships in America become practically 
 another of the lost arts ? And why are we building new 
 vessels of war under the pretext of protecting our com- 
 merce, when we have no commerce, nor the least pros- 
 pect of any that we can call our own, to protect ? 
 
 Our chambers of commerce and exchanges are trying 
 every year to mend matters by appeals to the federal 
 government to develop a commercial navy by subsidies 
 or bounties, thus taking out of the people's pocket by the 
 tariff, which kills our commerce, money enough to renew 
 artificially that commerce which we enjoyed before the 
 Civil War. I never hear of these appeals, nor of the 
 tedious debates in Congress to which they give rise, 
 without thinking of a story told by Lucian, the Rigdum- 
 funnidos of Samosata, about a simpleton who busied 
 himself in milking a he-goat into a sieve. 
 
 And yet our position appears even more ridiculous 
 when we reflect that we are waging a war against every 
 commercial nation in the world as well as our own, and 
 do not blush to send missionaries to The Hague to rec- 
 ommend a universal peace, without any of them saying 
 or being expected to say a word about the unholy war 
 we are waging with increasing fury against every nation 
 that is represented there. 
 
 XV 
 
 There is one other objection to the tariflF upon imports 
 which has not figured in the various tariff debates in 
 
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Congress or elsewhere, that I have observed, since the 
 administration of President Jackson. I refer to its un- 
 constitutionality. 
 
 There is no authority in our federal Constitution for 
 levying any impost of any kind upon foreign commerce. 
 The Eighth Section of the First Article of that instru- 
 ment, the one which relates expressly to the subject of 
 revenues, says : 
 
 The Congress shall have the power to lay and col- 
 lect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises to pay the debts 
 and provide for the common defence and general wel- 
 fare of the United States, but all duties, imposts, and 
 excises shall be uniform throughout the United 
 States. 
 
 The word "tariff" was manifestly excluded, for the 
 Third Section of the same article alone deals with foreign 
 commerce. It confers the power to regulate commerce 
 with foreign nations, and among the several States, and 
 with the Indian tribes. The power in the First Article to 
 lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises clearly 
 does not apply to the regulation of commerce with for- 
 eign nations, for the simple reason that that is provided 
 for in another and distinct article. To regulate com- 
 merce means to provide for its orderly protection and 
 cultivation and encouragement. It cannot be tortured 
 into meaning that Congress shall have power to ob- 
 struct, embarrass, harass, and still less prohibit it; and 
 an unqualified right to tax is a right to prohibit, and has 
 been practically exercised in some cases. Certainly the 
 framers of our Constitution never could have intended 
 by the words "regulating commerce" to confer the possi- 
 bility of destroying it. Besides, the Constitution pro- 
 
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vides that "all duties, imposts, and excises shall be uni- 
 form throughout the United States." It is needless to 
 say that any impost for the protection of any special 
 industry is in flat contradiction to this provision. 
 
 There was no thought of a tariff among the f ramers of 
 our Constitution, nor among the members of the govern- 
 ment which it established, until the difficulties of raising 
 the necessary revenue for the government prompted 
 Hamilton to ask Congress to supplement the other 
 national resources by a small tax upon imports. Hamil- 
 ton was never partial to our system of popular govern- 
 ment, and naturally his instincts did not discourage the 
 creation of a privileged class; but even with the reluc- 
 tant assistance of Washington he had great difficulty in 
 securing the adoption of his policy by the Congress, to 
 most of whom it was a new and by no means an attrac- 
 tive policy. Therefore I may say without hesitation that 
 we have never in the last hundred years levied a toll of a 
 single dollar upon foreign commerce without violating 
 the Constitution of the United States. 
 
 So strong was the conviction of the planters of the 
 Southern States that a tariff of any kind was unconsti- 
 tutional that during the administration of President 
 Jackson one of those States openly resisted the revenue 
 officers in the discharge of their functions in the harbor 
 of Charleston. But for the fact that the executive power 
 was in the hands of a Southern man, a slaveholder, and 
 withal a successful military chieftain who was too wise 
 and patriotic to tolerate a correction of unwise legisla- 
 tion by revolutionary measures, the war of the planters 
 for a separation from the Union might have been fought 
 thirty years earlier than it finally was. And yet that 
 
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President himself was in sympathy with as strict a con- 
 struction of the Constitution as South Carolina was ; nor 
 am I aware of any evidence of his believing that the im- 
 position of a tariff upon imports was comprehended in 
 the constitutional power to regulate commerce. 
 
 There are many other vicious results of tariffs upon 
 foreign commerce, scarcely less reprehensible than any 
 here referred to, such as : 
 
 Interference with the natural and equitable distribu- 
 tion of the nation's wealth by turning it into unnatural 
 channels. 
 
 Discouraging enterprise and ingenuity outside of the 
 protected industries. 
 
 Impoverishing all the professions by the greater 
 pecuniary inducements in money-making pursuits. 
 
 Seriously degrading the standards of the public ser- 
 vice to such an extent that it is becoming difficult to find 
 first-class men willing to accept any public position, how- 
 ever exalted, and still more difficult, if found, to elect 
 them. Our legislators, of whatever grade, are they not 
 to an alarming extent degenerating into hired men, into 
 proxies of constituents ? 
 
 Then follows the shocking and cruel discouragement 
 of the poor, the unlettered, the less mentally endowed 
 tradesmen or mechanics, whose stores and shops are 
 gradually disappearing from the rural regions of the 
 country and their proprietors becoming enslaved as 
 wage-earners to the department- store keepers and pro- 
 tected capitalists ; these involving the substitution of for- 
 eign for native expert labor of all kinds, partly from the 
 inability of our own young men to get the training of an 
 expert which the imported expert has enjoyed. 
 
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Then follows the timidity of the officers of justice in 
 enforcing the laws against overpowering classes of peo- 
 ple without means or employment, with which the tariff 
 has punished us as with whips and scorpions, until 
 human life and property are quite as unsafe in the streets 
 of New York as ever they were in the highways of 
 Sicily. 
 
 What guilt is theirs who, in their greed or spite, 
 Undo Thy holy work with violent hands, 
 And post their squadrons, nursed in war's grim trade. 
 To bar the ways for mutual succor made ! 
 
 Such was the heartbreaking sigh of William CuUen 
 Bryant, the first conspicuous man in the free-labor 
 States to denounce tariffs upon imports, and who, in the 
 columns of the Evening Post and outside of them, proba- 
 bly wrote more than any other person in the United 
 States has ever written to discredit the protection policy 
 and the international as well as civil wars it wages. 
 
 XVI 
 
 Grave as are the objections to a tariff upon imports al- 
 ready enumerated, they are not to be compared in gravity 
 with another to which I have only referred. Our tariff 
 policy incarnates the spirit and nationalizes the homicidal 
 jealousy of Cain. Who but the apostles of protection 
 have ever officially restricted the application of the divine 
 law of neighborly love to geographical or territorial 
 limits ? 
 
 There is no duty of such supreme importance, imposed 
 
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both by the instincts of nature and by divine revelation, 
 as to love our neighbor as ourselves, and to do unto 
 others as we v^^ould have others do unto us. In the eyes 
 of our Father in heaven a Chinese or an Abyssinian is 
 as much our neighbor as the offspring of our own earthly 
 parents. If either wishes to bring us any fruits of his 
 industry calculated to satisfy our needs, it is not fra- 
 ternal kindness but brutal selfishness to obstruct him or 
 subject him to any expense whatever for, I will not say 
 the privilege, but the favor, he is doing us. In such 
 obstruction it is Cain's fruits of the earth, not Abel's fat 
 of his flocks, we are getting. Such gifts will not be ac- 
 ceptable to the Lord, whatever man in his degeneracy 
 may think of them. 
 
 Though there are many forms of religious faith some 
 or all of whose professors act upon the same predatory 
 principle as that which barbarizes our revenue system, I 
 am unable to name one, whether indited by saint or 
 savage, which has ever formally recognized it in its 
 credo. 
 
 "Am I a God at hand, saith the Lord, and not a God 
 afar off?" 
 
 I read not without astonishment, in a recent article 
 signed by the contributing editor of the Outlook, the 
 following extraordinary statement: "The tariff ought 
 to be a material, not a moral, issue." As these attributes 
 are here put in opposition to each other, are we to under- 
 stand that what is material is not moral and that what is 
 moral is not material? And what of the Decalogue or 
 the Lord's Prayer ? Are they moral and immaterial, or 
 are they material and immoral ? I doubt if this sentence 
 could have passed under the eyes of the senior editor of 
 
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the Outlook. Though he might have left unchallenged 
 the obscurity of the statement, and although he is him- 
 self reputed by some of his profession rather latitudina- 
 rian in his theology, yet I am sure he would never 
 authorize any one to say in his name that raiding a 
 nation is a less heinous offence than robbing a hen-roost. 
 It is not conceivable that the successor to the pulpit made 
 famous throughout the world by Henry Ward Beecher 
 would prey more readily upon a brother sojourner in 
 Paris or Berlin than he would upon a brother sojourner 
 in New Jersey or Connecticut. He who can see no moral 
 issue in the tariff must himself be morally blinder than 
 was Bartimeus of old, for he knew at least that he was 
 blind, and he did the very best he could have done to be 
 enabled to see, instead of dogmatizing about whether he 
 knew enough to know that he was too blind to see. 
 
 The excuse which the more rational apologists of pro- 
 tection advance is that, while other commercial nations 
 protect their industries by tariffs, we must protect ours 
 in the like manner, or the market for our own labor will 
 be destroyed by the cheaper labor of theirs. The sophis- 
 try of this argument has been so frequently exposed, and 
 indeed seems now so preposterous when the enormous 
 amounts of our own exports are considered, and protec- 
 tion for the sake of protection is the panoply of the com- 
 merce militant, that as an economical proposition it is no 
 longer worthy of consideration. But as a vindictive and 
 retaliatory policy there is need of more light among the 
 people of all nations, and especially among those pro- 
 fessing to be Christians. The best of them not infre- 
 quently quiet a recalcitrant conscience by quoting the 
 following among the instructions given by Moses to the 
 
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children of Israel for their conduct in the Promised 
 Land : "And if harm is done them, thou shalt give soul 
 for soul, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot 
 for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, blow 
 for blow" (Exodus xxi. 23-25). 
 
 How grievously the genuine spiritual significance of 
 these instructions is perverted when construed to justify 
 the Christian's retaliation against a wrong done to him 
 is admirably exposed in the following extract from the 
 "Arcana Coelestia" of Swedenborg. He is commenting 
 upon chapter xiv of Exodus, that gives the account of 
 Pharaoh and his army, chariots and horsemen, being 
 swallowed up in the Red Sea (to which Swedenborg 
 gives the Hebrew name of Suph) after the Israelites 
 had crossed on the dry land, and, speaking of the words, 
 "Stretch out thy hand over the sea and let the waters 
 return upon the Egyptians," he says : 
 
 This signifies that the falsities from evil of the 
 Egyptians would flow back to and environ those who 
 are in falsities from evil; that the evil which is in- 
 tended to others returns upon themselves, and that 
 this arises from the divine order, "Do not to another 
 save only what thou wouldst others should do to thee" 
 (Matthew vii. 12). From this law, which in the spir- 
 itual world is constant and perpetual, the laws of re- 
 taliation delivered in the representative church derived 
 their origin, namely, the following : 
 
 "If a man hath caused a blemish in his neighbor ; as 
 he hath done, so shall it be done to him ; fracture for 
 fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth: as he hath 
 caused a blemish in a man, so shall it be caused in him" 
 (Leviticus xxiv. 19, 20). 
 
 From these passages it is clearly evident that these 
 
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laws originate from that universal law which in the 
 spiritual world is constant and perpetual, namely, that 
 thou art not to do to others except as thou wouldst 
 that others should do to thee. Thus it is clear how it 
 is to be understood that the falsities from evil which 
 are intended to be inflicted on others flow back or re- 
 turn upon the persons themselves. . . . 
 
 It frequently happens in the other life that when 
 evil spirits wish to inflict evil on the good, they are 
 grievously punished, and that the evil which they in- 
 tend to others returns upon themselves. At the time 
 this appears as if it were revenge sought by the good ; 
 but it is not revenge, neither is it from the good, but 
 from the evil, to whom an opportunity is then given 
 from the law of order. Nay, the good do not wish evil 
 to them, but still they cannot take away the evil of 
 punishment, because they are then kept in the inten- 
 tion of good — just like a judge when he sees a male- 
 factor being punished, or like a father when he sees 
 his son punished by his master. The evil who punish 
 do it from the cupidity of doing evil; but the good 
 from the affection of doing good. From all this it 
 can be seen what is meant by the Lord's words con- 
 cerning love for an enemy, in Matthew, as above ; and 
 concerning the law of retaliation, which was not abro- 
 gated by the Lord, but explained; namely, that they 
 who are in heavenly love ought not to have delight in 
 retaliation or revenge, but in imparting benefits ; and 
 that the very law of order, which protects what is 
 good, performs it from itself, through the evil ones. 
 
 In brief, therefore, it appears, upon this ample author- 
 ity, that the wrongs we do to others in this world we 
 expiate in a future life by suffering the same from our 
 companions there. Retaliation is not the function of 
 good men, and the punishment of evil in the future world 
 
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as well as often in the present life is administered by- 
 spirits obsessed with corresponding evils. Such a pros- 
 pect makes but a bad show for Payne, Aldrich, and 
 Lodge, and should they ever in the future come to need 
 a cup of cold water, leaves a painful doubt whether they 
 will find the signer of their revised tariff reposing in 
 Abraham's bosom. 
 
 Some twenty-five years ago the late Henry Ward 
 Beecher delivered before a free trade club in New York 
 an address which I was fortunate enough to hear. The 
 late Professor Sumner of Yale University, who was also 
 one of the orators of the occasion, said of that speech 
 that it was in his judgment the best address Mr. Beecher 
 ever delivered. He left the economic aspects of the tariff 
 question to the other speakers and devoted himself ex- 
 clusively to its moral aspects. I give here his conclu- 
 sion: 
 
 But while others will to-night talk with you about 
 figures, and tell you what are the results of protec- 
 tion upon the business of the country, I plead for the 
 principle of liberty. There have always been plenty 
 of people in this free country to doubt the expediency 
 of freedom. Liberty of conscience was thought dan- 
 gerous, but our forefathers fought battles for that, 
 and gained it for us. Liberty for the slave was thought 
 to be full of peril, and predictions abounded on every 
 side that emancipation would bring ruin and bloodshed 
 upon the country. But we liberated the slaves, and it 
 has been found by the South itself that liberty was 
 better than slavery, and that the South has prospered 
 under liberty as it never did prosper or could have 
 prospered before. The Republican party has hitherto 
 stood for liberty, and therefore I have stood with it. 
 But now I take my stand on liberty of commerce, as 
 
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just as essential and just as sound as liberty of con- 
 science, liberty of speech, liberty of the press, and 
 liberty of the person. I believe that liberty is just as 
 safe and just as necessary in commerce as in anything 
 else, and I look upon this battle for freedom of com- 
 merce as only one part of the great battle for freedom 
 which we have been fighting for many years. 
 
 I reject the doctrine of "protection," as opposed not 
 only to the principles of liberty hut to the essential 
 principles of Christianity. I regard it as in its very 
 essence anti-Christian and immoral. And the fact 
 that such theories as have been advanced by the high 
 protectionists have found so much favor in this coun- 
 try is not creditable to its Christian character. The 
 fundamental doctrine of Christianity is that all men 
 are brethren. The fundamental doctrine of protec- 
 tionism is that all men are NOT brethren. Christian- 
 ity teaches that all men, in all parts of the world, 
 should love each other. Protectionism teaches that 
 all men on one side of an imaginary line should hate, 
 or at least disregard, all who live on the other side of 
 that line. Not only so, but protectionism teaches 
 Christians to hate their fellow-Christians MORE than 
 they do pagans. We do not build up our tariff against 
 heathen countries. Our Congressmen are not spe- 
 cially concerned to keep out the products of Africa. 
 It is against Christian countries that all the energy of 
 protectionism is directed. And England, the country 
 which is most like our own in matters of religion, be- 
 ing all Christian and mainly Protestant, is the very 
 country which our protectionist Protestant Christians 
 in America hate the most and strive to injure the most. 
 We send missionaries abroad to convert pagans into 
 Christians and teach them the arts of civilized life. 
 And then, the moment the missionaries have, with 
 infinite pains, taught the converted pagan to make 
 
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anything fit to send to this market, we hasten to build 
 up a high tariff wall to keep it out. Our country was 
 a large exporter of religion, sent millions of dollars to 
 heathen countries to instil the principles of Chris- 
 tianity into the minds of unbelievers while the article 
 went a-begging at home. 
 
 A more condign indictment of our revenue system, a 
 more just impeachment of it as the poHcy of any body 
 poHtic claiming the right to be regarded as a Christian 
 nation, was probably never before uttered in so few 
 words. Yet, strangely enough, I have heard of but one 
 other American clergyman from whose lips this sin has 
 been denounced as "a reproach to any people." I would 
 not mean to intimate that all the clergy are protectionists 
 or that no one of them has denounced the protective sys- 
 tem as vigorously as Mr. Beecher did; but I never heard 
 of any other American clergyman but Mr. Birckhead of 
 St. George's Church in New York doing it, nor did I 
 ever hear of any of the apostles of the selfish principles 
 of protection being disciplined by any ecclesiastical or- 
 ganization whatever. 
 
 It is a melancholy fact that our "hireling clergy," as 
 the Society of Friends are wont to call the salaried Prot- 
 estant ministers of the Gospel, are so dependent for their 
 daily bread upon the rich beneficiaries of the tariff that 
 their mouths are as effectually closed to the iniquity in 
 which it originates and to the depravity which it gene- 
 rates as the ears of the Syrian Pharisees were closed to 
 the spiritual ethics of the Sermon on the Mount. 
 
 With what emotion can any pastor who has delib- 
 erately winked at this national iniquity read these words 
 
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of the prophet Isaiah, which are addressed as directly 
 to professing Christians to-day as ever to the children of 
 Israel : 
 
 Hear the word of the Lord, ye rulers of Sodom. 
 . . . To what purpose is the multitude of your sac- 
 rifices unto me? saith the Lord. . . . Bring no more 
 vain oblations ; incense is an abomination unto me. . . . 
 I cannot away with iniquity and the solemn meeting. 
 Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul 
 hateth: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to 
 bear them. And when ye spread forth your hands, I 
 will hide mine eyes from you; yea, when ye make many 
 prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood. 
 . . . How is the faithful city become an harlot! she 
 that was full of judgment! righteousness lodged in 
 her, but now murderers. Thy silver is become dross, 
 thy wine mixed with water. Thy princes are rebel- 
 lious, and the companions of thieves; every one loveth 
 gifts, and followeth after rewards: they judge not the 
 fatherless, neither doth the cause of the widow come 
 unto them. 
 
 XVII 
 
 I HAVE thus given what I conceive to be pretty conclu- 
 sive reasons against building temples of peace with 
 untempered mortar; against the concoction of peace 
 organizations with the left hand while deliberately and 
 persistently waging a flagrant tariff war against every 
 commercial nation, not excepting our own, by striving 
 simultaneously to support our government by duties 
 levied upon foreign merchandise which we are persist- 
 ently striving to exclude from our markets. 
 
 I will now invite the reader's attention to a substitute 
 
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for this suicidal revenue system which, if in operation, 
 would within a single generation render custom-houses 
 in this country as demode and obsolete as the fashion of 
 the plough held by Cincinnatus or the ship Argo in which 
 Jason sailed to Colchis for the Golden Fleece. 
 
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PART SECOND 
 
 ¥ 
 
 THE NECESSITY OF BUILDING TEMPLES 
 
 OF PEACE WITH 
 
 TEMPERED MORTAR 
 
 The system of providing for national expenses by tariffs 
 upon imports has been practised so long by maritime 
 nations that it has come to be regarded as not only the 
 best but practically the indispensable way to be consid- 
 ered for such purposes. 
 
 It had its origin and continues to be maintained be- 
 cause of the facilities it offers for concealing from the 
 public the cost of its government, by creating the popular 
 impression that it is the foreigner who pays the duties 
 levied on his consignment instead of the people who 
 purchase it. The number who know better is lim- 
 ited pretty much to the class whose industries are 
 specially protected by the tariff. They may be numbered 
 by the hundreds or perhaps thousands, while the millions 
 imagine that it is the foreigner who pays what the tariff 
 contributes toward the expenses of their government, 
 and thus proportionately lightens their own burdens. 
 This was scarcely a more gigantic delusion than the 
 Ptolemaic theory of astronomy, for the tariff has proved 
 itself, wherever in vogue, the most wasteful, extrava- 
 
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gant, and demoralizing system of taxation for revenue 
 ever adopted by civilized nations. 
 
 There is no law of political economy less open to dis- 
 pute than our common right to buy in the market where 
 we can buy cheapest and to sell where we can sell to 
 most profit. This common-law right of every seller or 
 buyer throughout the world is violated every time a 
 package of imported merchandise is ordered to the cus- 
 tom-house. 
 
 Here, of course, I may naturally be interrupted by the 
 inquiry: "If we do not tax our imports, what easier or 
 less objectionable substitute for the support of our gov- 
 ernment can be suggested ?" 
 
 In answer to this question I venture to submit a sub- 
 stitute which contemplates not onty the entire elimina- 
 tion of custom-houses from the science of architecture, 
 but the opening of every port and harbor of the United 
 States freely to the commerce of every nation of the 
 world, without any tax or burden other than such only 
 as the vessels sailing under our own flag should be sub- 
 jected to; a substitute also which would not only yield 
 ample revenue, but would give to all protected interests 
 ample time to prepare for the change that would ensue, 
 without seriously infringing upon any one's rights; 
 without any serious disturbance of values except to in- 
 crease them, and all so gradually as to be as little noticed 
 in financial circles as the changes of the seasons. 
 
 The substance of what follows was written two years 
 ago in a privately printed letter to Governor Hughes, in 
 the hope that he might think the substitute for raising 
 revenue here proposed to displace the tariff upon imports 
 worthy of trial in New York. Its merits, if it has any, 
 
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could be more promptly tried in any State than in Wash- 
 ington, where it would have to confront the embattled 
 phalanx of protectionism, while if successful in our own 
 or in any other State it could fail nowhere for long, I 
 believe. 
 
 Unhappily, the governor had as good an excuse for 
 not trying the experiment as King David had for not 
 building a temple at Jerusalem— "the wars that were 
 about him on every side" in which he was engaged 
 throughout his gubernatorial term. If his successor 
 shall prove to be the wise man that the State requires 
 and for whom Governor Hughes has furnished the 
 model, he will have an opportunity of signalizing his 
 administration by giving to our State the glory of being 
 the first organized commonwealth in the world to pro- 
 vide an eligible substitute for a revenue tariff, and one 
 which will also ensure an equitable distribution of the 
 wealth of the nations that adopt it. 
 
 I 
 
 The wealth of the United States consists principally, if 
 not entirely, in its land, its water, and the sun with its 
 atmospheres. Without either of these it would be unin- 
 habitable. By man's aid this land, since its settlement 
 under an organized government, has always produced a 
 large surplus of merchantable commodities, and is capa- 
 ble of doubling that amount many times. 
 
 To make such surplus convertible into wealth for the 
 inhabitants, it requires markets, and because it has a 
 
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surplus it depends, of course, more for its markets upon 
 foreign than upon home purchasers. 
 
 Every inducement should therefore be given to the 
 foreigner to buy of our surplus, that we may have money 
 with which to buy of his. The greatest inducement we 
 can offer him is to take our pay in the products of his 
 industry, of which he may be presumed to have a surplus 
 for which he has no longer so profitable a market at 
 home. Of course, the more we take of his surplus the 
 more will he be in a condition to take of ours, and thus 
 both will prosper. 
 
 These principles, so elementary, are the basic prin- 
 ciples of all honest commerce, and, in the long run, of 
 the most productive commerce. The land, water, and 
 sun with its atmospheres are the capital of the whole 
 nation. Their productivity can only be diminished by 
 abuse or neglect. But the surplus is the available 
 product of the industry and frugality of the inhabitants. 
 
 In this capital and surplus the people, that is, the 
 State, has a joint interest. 
 
 Whenever the State, therefore, parts with the ex- 
 clusive usufruct of any portion of its capital to indi- 
 viduals or corporations, it deprives itself and its people 
 of their respective shares of what is thus expropriated. 
 For those shares the State, that is, the people it repre- 
 sents, are entitled to a compensation in some proportion 
 to the value of what they part with, and also in a certain 
 proportion to the value of such part to their grantees. 
 
 If a promoter of railways asks the exclusive use of a 
 tract of land one hundred feet wide from the Atlantic to 
 the Pacific Ocean for the construction of a transconti- 
 nental road, there is no good reason why those he repre- 
 
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sents should enjoy such exclusive privilege without an 
 engagement in their charter to share with the State in 
 the usufruct of this exclusive right of way. The propor- 
 tion, of course, should be assessed at so moderate an 
 amount, at such times and in such modes, as not to dis- 
 courage enterprise, and with due recognition of the pub- 
 lic advantage which may result directly or indirectly 
 from such a highway, and the risks to be run by those 
 who finance it. In other words, the share claimed by 
 the State should never to any practical extent increase 
 the risk to be assumed by the incorporators. 
 
 But as it is difficult in all cases, and impossible in very 
 many, to estimate the earning power of any new enter- 
 prise, obviously the most equitable way of determining 
 the State's proper share of a privilege it is asked to 
 confer is to take it as a partner does in any commercial 
 enterprise— nothing until a surplus is earned, and then, 
 be it sooner or later, what would represent a due propor- 
 tion of its contribution to that made by the other capi- 
 talists. In other words, more as the enterprise prospers, 
 less or nothing while it struggles. 
 
 As a convenient illustration let me invite the reader's 
 attention for a few minutes to the latest report of the 
 American Telephone and Telegraph Company, com- 
 monly referred to as the "Bell system." The origi- 
 nal corporation of this system went into operation in 
 Boston as a business corporation on January i, 1876, 
 only thirty- five years ago next January. It was capi- 
 talized with 4500 shares at $100 a share, or, say, 
 $450,000. 
 
 At its start it required of the State, of course, the 
 privilege of planting its poles; of connecting them by 
 
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electrical wires on the shortest lines between the differ- 
 ent points where its service was most likely to be in 
 demand, with little reference to the value of the property- 
 it must overrun ; real estate for all its stations and offices, 
 which, as well as the .poles and wires, the State has to 
 guarantee the exclusive use of to the company — privi- 
 leges all of no inconsiderable value. 
 
 But Bell's patent was a new device, one which no 
 one perhaps besides the inventor and his few confidential 
 assistants knew much about. The majority of people 
 shook their heads at the idea of shortening the distance 
 between New York and Washington practically to the 
 range of the human voice. 
 
 Of course, for an enterprise which to most business 
 men appeared so precarious, if not chimerical, the State 
 could not have begun to claim more than a nominal 
 share of its doubtful earnings, nor anything like what 
 was destined to prove its real value. 
 
 The early results of the company's operations would 
 not have discredited this timidity of the average capi- 
 talist. Eight years elapsed before the number of the 
 company's subscribers' stations reached a trifle over 
 100,000. Even twenty years elapsed before their num- 
 ber had reached 400,000. From that.time on the number 
 increased more rapidly, so that in January, 1908, almost 
 three years ago, the number of subscribers' stations 
 had increased to 3,900,000, and by this time, no doubt, 
 is considerably in excess of 4,000,000. 
 
 The dividends declared for the year 1907 by this com- 
 pany were $10,943,642, besides $3,500,000 carried to 
 reserve and $1,825,743 carried to surplus. 
 
 From its origin the company has been constantly ex- 
 
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tending its lines, multiplying its poles, wires, and station- 
 houses, while its construction works alone during the 
 last twelve years have cost over $400,000,000, and its 
 present authorized capital is $500,000,000. 
 
 Of course, for every additional mile of wire, this com- 
 pany comes under new obligations to the State for the 
 right of way, structural accommodations, protection, etc. 
 By the partnership system I have suggested, the State 
 or States which it serves would get their pay for these 
 always increasing accommodations as the company does, 
 by the increase of its property value, that is, by its divi- 
 dends on its shares of stock, than which nothing could 
 be more just or more simple. 
 
 It is needless to say that the trifling compensation 
 which the founders of the Bell Company would have 
 cheerfully engaged to pay any State for its charter 
 would have proved no mean contribution to the State 
 chest for at least two thirds of the company's existence, 
 during which it has paid an annual dividend of 7 per 
 cent., and in exchange for such compensation would prob- 
 ably have been spared an equal or even greater amount 
 which it had to expend in resisting legislative and other 
 predatory interferences with its patents and chartered 
 rights. And yet besides the Bell there are thousands of 
 independent telephone lines in the country, all of which, 
 like the Bell, are annually and as rapidly as possible ex- 
 tending their several lines. 
 
 Now let us suppose that all charters conferring lucra- 
 tive as distinguished from purely eleemosynary privi- 
 leges, and which to an appreciable extent limit or extin- 
 guish any of the common-law rights of the general pub- 
 lic, were dealt with, as I propose, by the State as one of 
 
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the silent partners of the grantees and thus entitled to 
 share in their profits in proportion to its contribution to 
 the joint capital, less the direct advantages to the State 
 itself which the other shareholders may not share 
 equally, if at all. 
 
 The number of such corporations in the whole United 
 States increases by the hundreds of thousands annually. 
 
 Let us consider a few of the most familiar of these, 
 beginning with the 236,000 miles of railways, whose 
 net earnings in this fiscal year 1910 are $926,650,000, 
 and which have issued not less than $300,000,000 new 
 stock, paying on all of it an average of over 6 per cent, 
 annual dividends. Then there are the thousands of 
 miles of trolleys ; the subways, on which the city of New 
 York alone in September, 1909, had spent already 
 $54,862,944; the tunnels under rivers and the bridges 
 over them; water-power for the thousands of milling 
 companies and factories; the turnpikes and mill-dams; 
 water, gas, and electrical companies for the supply of 
 hundreds of cities, towns, and villages; building, stock- 
 raising, and vehicle-manufacturing companies ; factories 
 for all kinds of textiles, chemicals, drugs, and alimentary 
 articles; shoe-manufacturing companies; sewing and 
 typewriting machine companies; gun, pistol, ammuni- 
 tion, and paper manufactories ; ship, sailboat, and steam- 
 boat companies; bank, trust, insurance, mining, dredg- 
 ing, and explosives-manufacturing companies, etc. 
 
 These are, to use the rhetoric of Lord Beaconsfield, 
 but "a flea-bite" compared with the actual number of 
 corporations that would be fairly assessable, and with 
 no serious opposition, for the exclusive privileges they 
 require. Had my native State of New York, fifty or 
 
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even twenty-five years ago, attached the proposed condi- 
 tions to the charters to which they would have been ap- 
 plicable, it is safe to say she would to-day have no taxes 
 to levy for the legitimate purposes either of her State, 
 county, or municipal governments. Her revenue would 
 not come from the sweat and toil of her people, tagged 
 with the opprobrious title and character of a tax, but 
 would -be an increment as fairly earned by her people as 
 by the other shareholders, her partners. 
 
 For the federal government thi§ provision would be 
 equally applicable and ample. 
 
 Had Congress tied such a string, however short, to 
 every farm it has sold for $1.25 an acre — scarcely 
 enough to pay for the stationery used in its transference 
 — instead of giving a perfect title to it in scecula scbcu- 
 lorum, Congress would have to build two or three 
 Dreadnoughts every year, or do some other equally 
 wasteful thing, to get rid of our surplus revenue. 
 
 We are reputed to have still some 406,055,794 acres 
 of public lands — not counting Alaska's 300-odd million 
 — which, by virtue of the increase of population and of 
 market values resulting from the rapidly increasing 
 facilities, of transportation, may prove to be worth more 
 than we have received from all we have parted with, if, 
 instead of parting with the fee of it at a nominal price, 
 as we have been doing, we would simply take our just 
 proportion of its net income. 
 
 So recently as the 25th of August, 1908, the President 
 signed a proclamation throwing open to settlement cer- 
 tain lands located on the southern line of the State of 
 South Dakota, aggregating in all about 800,000 acres— 
 virgin soil which in another generation will be checkered 
 
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with thriving cities, towns, and villages. Our govern- 
 ment parted with it as cheerfully as if our treasury were 
 a Pactolian river. 
 
 Why should not the nation have retained the fair 
 share of its interest in those lands, to meet at least the 
 inevitable expenses of the public improvements which 
 they will forever subject us to? 
 
 Our lumber and timber industry was represented in 
 1905 by 19,127 establishments, with an aggregate capi- 
 tal of $517,224,128, and selling manufactured products 
 worth $580,022,290. Had we reserved for the State the 
 moderate share of 10 per cent, on this product, it would 
 yield annually to the nation now something over 
 $58,000,000 to indemnify us at least for the expense of 
 protecting it from depredations, fires, and sordid specu- 
 lators. 
 
 II 
 
 President Roosevelt, in a message read to the Senate 
 February 26, 1908, speaking of the bills introduced dur- 
 ing the then session of Congress to enable corporations 
 to take possession in perpetuity of national forest lands 
 for the purpose of their business where and as they 
 please, without adequate compensation to the public, 
 said: 
 
 Through lack of foresight we have formed the 
 habit of granting, without compensation, extremely 
 valuable rights, amounting to monopolies, on naviga- 
 ble streams and on the public domain. The re-pur- 
 chase at great expense of the water rights thus care- 
 lessly given away without return has already begun 
 in the East, and before long will be necessary in the 
 
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West also. No rights involving water-power should 
 be granted to any corporation in perpetuity, but only 
 for a length of time sufficient to allow them to conduct 
 their business profitably. A reasonable charge should 
 of course he made for valuable rights and privileges 
 which they obtain from the national government. The 
 values for which this charge is made will ultimately, 
 through the natural growth and orderly development 
 of our population and industries, reach enormous 
 amounts. A fair share of the increase should be safe- 
 guarded for the benefit of the people from whose 
 labors it springs. 
 
 If a fair share of the increase in the value of water- 
 powers should be safeguarded for the benefit of the peo- 
 ple from whose labor it springs, why should not the 
 people's interest in all other franchises which it confers 
 upon corporations be equally safeguarded ? Upon what 
 principle can any discrimination be made against the 
 people's share of an interest in all franchises? What 
 becomes of Article IX of our Constitution, which pro- 
 vides that "the enumeration in the Constitution of cer- 
 tain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage 
 others retained by the people" f And what becomes of 
 the clause in the First Article of the Constitution which 
 provides that all duties, imposts, and excises shall be 
 uniform throughout the United States ? 
 
 The disastrous results of neglecting to control the 
 water-power of the country from the greed of private 
 corporations have been even more explicitly stated by the 
 recent head of the Forestry Department, Mr. Gilford 
 Pinchot, before the National Geographic Society in 
 Washington, January 21, 1908 : 
 
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When the national government builds dams for 
 navigation on streams, it has often disregarded the 
 possible use, for power, of the water that flows over 
 those dams. Engineers say that many hundred thou- 
 sand horse-power are going to waste over government 
 dams in this way. Since a fair price for power, where 
 it is in demand, is from $20 to $80 per horse-power 
 annually, it will be seen that the government has here, 
 developed, yet lying idle, a resource capable, under the 
 right conditions, of adding enormously to the national 
 wealth. 
 
 If the public does not see to it that the control of 
 water-power is kept in the hands of the public, we are 
 certain in the near future to find ourselves in the grip 
 of those who will be able to control, with a monopoly 
 absolutely without parallel in the past, the daily life 
 of our people. Let us suppose a man in a Western 
 town, in a region without coal, rising on a cold morn- 
 ing, a few years hence, when invention and enterprise 
 have brought to pass the things which we can already 
 foresee as coming in the application of electricity. He 
 turns on the electric light made from water-power; 
 his breakfast is cooked on an electric stove heated by 
 the power of the streams; his morning newspaper is 
 printed on a press moved by electricity from the 
 streams; he goes to his office in a trolley-car moved 
 by electricity from the same source. The desk upon 
 which he writes his letters, the merchandise which he 
 sells, the crops which he raises, will have been brought 
 to him or will be taken to market from him in a 
 freight-car moved by electricity. His wife will run 
 her sewing-machine or her churn, and factories will 
 turn their shafts and wheels, by the same power. In 
 every activity of his life that man and his family and 
 his neighbors will have to pay toll to those who have 
 been able to monopolize the great motive power of 
 electricity made from water-power, if that monopoly 
 
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is allowed to become established. Never before in the 
 history of this or any other free country has there ex- 
 isted the possibility of such intimate daily friction be- 
 tween a monopoly and the life of the average citizen. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Then there are the patents and the copyrights for 
 books, pictures, etc. 
 
 Since the patent system of the United States was es- 
 tablished in 1790, there had been issued prior to January 
 I, 1900, 650,123 patents, more by 30,000 than were 
 issued during the same time by Great Britain, Belgium, 
 Germany, and Austria-Hungary combined. 
 
 These patents, for which our federal government 
 maintains a large and expensively equipped force of 
 officers and clerks at Washington, are issued to the 
 patentee for a trifling sum — fifteen dollars on filing a 
 claim, twenty dollars more on issuing the patent— for 
 which the government engages that no one shall use in 
 any way, or copy, that patent for a certain period. It thus 
 places the necessary force of the judicial department of 
 the federal government under an engagement to protect 
 that patent from violation at any and all the time of its 
 term. 
 
 We have seen what the government lost by not retain- 
 ing its fair share of interest in the Bell patents, but that 
 is a trifle compared with what is sacrificed in failing to 
 secure its share of the usufruct of all its other patents. 
 
 Patent improvements have displaced fully 50 per cent, 
 of the manual labor that used to be employed in agri- 
 culture. The same may be said of the compressed-air 
 
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drill excavators for mining or submarine dredging, elec- 
 tric cranes, etc. The increase of horse-power made 
 available by patents was shown by the census to have 
 been 90 per cent, in the ten years between 1890 and 
 1900. That the adult operative force of the United 
 States has been increased many times its per capita by 
 its patented machinery, any one may easily satisfy him- 
 self by an inspection of its patent and census reports for 
 the last two decades. Estimating the population of the 
 United States by their productive power, it is many times 
 the present ninety millions. Had our government taken 
 the most trifling compensation for its service in guaran- 
 teeing and protecting its patents even for the last twenty 
 years, the treasury would have such a surplus that it 
 would have been constrained, but for the Panama Canal, 
 to give it back to the States as it once did under the ad- 
 ministration of President Jackson. In those days we 
 had but a nominal tariff on imports, and we had so large 
 a surplus that the Secretary of the Treasury would not 
 be bothered with it. Now we have a 50 per cent, tariff 
 on our most profitable self-sustaining industries and a 
 fluctuating deficit in the treasury of from fifty to one 
 hundred millions of dollars yawning for an increase of 
 duties. 
 
 Our government receives one dollar and two copies of 
 each volume copyrighted, and a corresponding compen- 
 sation for other works from the press, for which it guar- 
 antees the author or publishers the exclusive right to 
 print and pubHsh it for a few years— fourteen, I believe. 
 Why not take a small fee upon every copy sold after the 
 costs of the publishers have been met, and make the 
 copyright last as long as the author or publisher desires 
 
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to avail himself of the government's protection on those 
 terms, or until it ceases to be reasonably productive ? 
 
 We are the principal producers of gold, silver, iron, 
 copper, coal, lead, petroleum, and many other of the 
 minerals less known to commerce. Our products of iron 
 ore alone in 1907 amounted to 52.7 per cent, of all the 
 iron produced in the world. 
 
 Our minerals are mostly owned and dealt in by cor- 
 porations. Unlike most European nations, our govern- 
 ment has never, so far as I am at present advised, as- 
 serted the right of eminent domain over any of the 
 minerals by which it is enriched, when it parted with the 
 land in which they were cradled. 
 
 The Great Northern Railway of Minnesota, thanks to 
 the sagacity and magnanimity of its former president, 
 Mr. J. J. Hill, secured a tract of iron-ore deposits in the 
 Lake Superior region of our country a few years ago, 
 which Mr. Charles Schwab, a qualified expert, testified 
 before the Industrial Commission to amount to 500,000,- 
 000 tons, and ought to sell at two dollars a ton ; the ulti- 
 mate value of which, therefore, would be the enormous 
 sum of one thousand millions of dollars. Presuming 
 Mr. Schwab's estimate of the amount of these deposits 
 to be substantially correct, as the United States Steel 
 Company took a lease of 80 per cent, of this deposit at 
 about that price per ton, the reservation of a royalty of 
 only five cents a ton would eventually yield the State 
 $25,000,000, without allowing for any increase in its 
 market value likely to result from the inevitably increas- 
 ing demand and diminishing supply. Mr. Hill is re- 
 ported as saying that the ore in sight could supply 12,- 
 000,000 tons a year for fifty years. 
 
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The mineral wealth still latent in our public lands is 
 probably of a value far exceeding all that has been taken 
 from them. 
 
 As recently as October 29, 1908, the Geological Survey 
 reported the grand total of mineral products of the 
 United States for the calendar year 1907 as $2,069,289,- 
 196. Of this $1,166,165,191 were non-metallic. The 
 aggregate for the year previous, 1906, was $1,904,000,- 
 000. With a proportionate royalty reserved from our 
 gold, silver, copper, iron, lead, petroleum, coal, lime, 
 cement, borax, not to speak of numberless other mining 
 properties, known and unknown, with which our national 
 and colonial territory abounds, thus far only partially 
 developed, the States would in all human probability re- 
 ceive from the bowels of the earth alone, not only all the 
 wealth the inhabitants of its surface now need, but all 
 they will ever require or be able to profit by. 
 
 The Automobile as a conveyance is scarcely as old as 
 the present century. The first licenses issued in this 
 State, Numbers i to 4, were issued April 29, 1901. Mr. 
 Koenig, our Secretary of State, has kindly informed me 
 that the number of registrations in his office up to 
 August I, 1910, was 108,399, an average of over 10,000 
 a year for this State alone. These vehicles are all manu- 
 factured by chartered companies. Their average price is 
 probably about $3000 each. At that rate the aggregate 
 value of these vehicles would be $325,197,000, or an 
 average annual investment by somebody of $32,519,700 a 
 year. The total investment of the plants for the manu- 
 facture of the automobile is estimated already as 
 amounting to $400,000,000, and for the production of 
 accessories, $175,000,000. 
 
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One automobile proves to be more wearing to 
 the roads it uses than twenty horse-propelled vehicles 
 would be, irrespective- of their pollution of the air by 
 their power-generatives and the clouds of dust with 
 which they befoul all others using the road at- the same 
 time, or living or conducting any business on either side 
 of it. By a law enacted May 31, 1910, "the registration 
 fee [of from $10 to $25, according to their power rate] 
 imposed upon motor vehicles, other than those of manu- 
 facturers and dealers and those used solely for com- 
 mercial purposes, shall be in lieu of all taxes, general or 
 local, to which motor vehicles may be subject." Without 
 discussing or even pretending to understand the policy 
 of this provision, I cannot help thinking how much more 
 simple, inexpensive, and just it would have been for the 
 State to take simply a fair partner's share of the stock of 
 these companies and of their dividends, in which case 
 there would be no need' of any classification or distri- 
 bution of rates for the purposes indicated, and, if 
 honestly managed, no possibility of either partner get- 
 ting less or more than his proper proportion. Neither 
 would there be an interest created tempting the com- 
 panies to vary the rating of their vehicles to diminish the 
 registration tax, except simply to meet the legitimate 
 demands of the market. 
 
 The Citizens' Union of New York City has filed a 
 brief with the New York Board of Estimate and Appor- 
 tionment in favor of an assessment plan of financing the 
 outlying branches of the Interborough Subway in South 
 Brooklyn and the Bronx, distinguishing what they call a 
 development subway, which accommodates mainly traffic 
 supplied by residents of the section through which it 
 
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runs, from the trunk-line subway, which accommodates a 
 traffic not suppHed by residents of the section through 
 which it runs. 
 
 How much more simple and natural for the city to take 
 for its contribution to these subways a fair proportion of 
 its stock! That done, the question whether the subway 
 is- a development or a trunkrline subway disappears, so 
 far, af least, as the city and its interests are concerned. 
 The relief to the financiers is equally notable,, and no one 
 can question or would dream of complaining of such an 
 equitable distribution of the common financial burdens. 
 
 IV 
 
 Alaska was purchased from Russia by Mr. 'Seward in 
 1867 for $7,200,000. It has an area of from 599,000 to 
 600,000 square miles, more than ten times that of the 
 State of Illinois. Its northernmost and southernmost 
 points are as widely separated as Canada and Mexico. 
 Its range of temperature is greater than that between 
 Florida and Maine. One third of its immense territory 
 is thus far but little explored. The permanent popu- 
 lation at the present time is estimated at some 40,000 
 whites and 25,000 natives. Its most important product 
 is gold, of which the output in 1908 was valued at more 
 than $19,000,000. Fisheries rank second, and the- sal- 
 mon packed in 1908 had a value in excess of $10,000,000. 
 The value of all the products of Alaska since its acquisi- 
 tion has been already more than $350,000,000. Most of 
 the internal improvements of Alaska have been made by 
 the War Department. Railroads, except short lines run- 
 
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ning out to a few mining-camps, are almost utterly lack- 
 ing thus far, the total railway mileage not exceeding 350. 
 Alaska has 4000 miles of navigable rivers, without which 
 most of the present development would have been im- 
 possible. These navigable rivers are equivalent to a little 
 more than twenty-six rivers as long as the "majestic 
 Hudson." 
 
 During the last session of Congress Senator Beveridge 
 of Indiana is reported to have said : 
 
 "I am convinced the coal in the Bering River and Cook 
 districts alone will aggregate in value $2,000,000,000. 
 If it cost $1,400,000,000 to develop the two districts, 
 there would remain a profit of $600,000,000. Geological 
 surveys," he added, "show more than 15,000,000,000 
 tons of coal in Alaska." 
 
 If the government of the United States had been wise 
 enough or even if it were now wise enough to take a 
 partnership interest in any of the Alaskan Territory 
 improvements and reserve to itself an interest in the pro- 
 portion which its contribution bears to the contribution 
 of the corporations that undertake its development, the 
 government receipts from Alaska alone would in a very 
 few years unquestionably pay no inconsiderable portion 
 of the legitimate current expenses of the federal gov- 
 ernment, while giving to the other corporators all the 
 profits they would be fairly entitled to. 
 
 The Bering River and Cook districts coal-mines in 
 Alaska constitute the property of the now famous Cun- 
 ningham claims, upon which it is reported that Mr. 
 Daniel Guggenheim, J. P. Morgan, and their associates 
 have an option for a comparatively inconsiderable sum 
 of money, and which have led to an inglorious contro- 
 
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versy between a member of President Taft's Cabinet 
 and the head of his Forestry Department. 
 
 Mr. Guggenheim has said logically enough through 
 the public prints that "the government should either 
 undertake the development of these coal lands or leave it 
 to the organized enterprise of private capital through 
 corporate agencies" to do it. 
 
 What a simple, just, and perfectly satisfactory solu- 
 tion of this unhappy and, for the government, inglorious 
 controversy it would have been from the first, and it is 
 to be hoped may be still, to have the ascertainable value 
 of these mines appraised, at their mouth or at their most 
 available markets, and, upon the bases of these valua- 
 tions, to divide the stock between the government and 
 the operating corporation ! 
 
 In that case, whether the mines turn out more or less 
 valuable, each of the partners would get his share with 
 the least possible risk from rattlesnakes to either. 
 
 Mr. Pinchot could be gracefully and gratefully re- 
 stored to his position at the head of the Forestry Depart- 
 ment, where obviously he is still greatly needed. 
 
 The government would need to incur no expense for 
 the development of the Territory, and yet be sure of get- 
 ting its fair share of its product. 
 
 Private capital in the greatest abundance would be 
 only too happy to -accept all the risk of developing it. 
 
 The present dog-in-the-manger policy of the govern- 
 ment, which cannot continue long without leading to 
 shameless and inordinate corruption from the effects of 
 which neither the executive nor the legislative depart- 
 ments can expect to remain immune, would be brought 
 to a wise and patriotic termination. 
 
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Senator Beveridge's estimates of the coal property, as 
 I have already stated, represent an aggregate value of 
 $2,000,000,000, and the cost of developing it, $1,400,- 
 000,000. At that rate Guggenheim & Co. would con- 
 tribute as their portion of the capital $14 to every $20 
 given by the federal government. The profit when real- 
 ized according to Senator Beveridge's estimate would be 
 the difference between $1,400,000,000 and $2,000,000,- 
 000, that is, $600,000,000. Divided into $100 shares, 
 that would yield to the corporation about two and a half 
 millions of shares, and about three and a half millions of 
 shares to the federal government. 
 
 In view of the expenses which the corporation would 
 have to incur in providing transportation to market, and 
 the competition with electrical power and heat with 
 which coal will have to contend, neither the sums nor the 
 proportions here given seem to be improvident on the 
 part of the government, nor illiberal toward any cor- 
 poration which would undertake the development of 
 those coal-mines. 
 
 The reader may be surprised to know how largely the 
 proposed substitute for the tariff has been in principle 
 adopted already in the city of New York. President W. 
 G. McAdoo, who is the originator of the Hudson River 
 subfluvial railway system, in reply to a note of mine, 
 says: 
 
 You are quite correct in assuming that the city has 
 in effect a partnership interest in the tunnels; that is 
 to say, it is paid a definite sum per linear foot of track, 
 etc., and in addition a percentage on gross earnings. 
 A definite sum for gross earnings has been fixed, upon 
 which the percentage applies, but there is a provision 
 
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for a readjustment of these rentals at recurring 
 periods. 
 
 The lines of railway belonging to the Hudson River 
 Tunnel System, under the presidency of Mr. McAdoo, 
 are capitalized in stock and bonds to the amount of 
 $109,500,000 of property, practically created within 
 three or four years, and in which the State is a partner 
 and stockholder. 
 
 In this system [Mr. McAdoo continues], you will 
 observe, upon reading the charter, "the lines under 
 Ninth Street between Sixth and Fourth Avenues, and 
 under Sixth Avenue and Forty-second Street, between 
 Ninth Street and Sixth Avenue and Forty-sec- 
 ond Street and Lexington Avenue, may be acquired 
 by the city at the end of twenty-five years, upon a 
 valuation to be made, such valuation to be in no case 
 in excess of the cost of construction. It is also pro- 
 vided that cost shall be definitely determined by the 
 submission of vouchers, etc., upon completion of these 
 lines, and by submission of the facts to the city's rep- 
 resentatives, so that there may be no controversy 
 hereafter on this point." 
 
 This reversion of the property to the city is probably 
 in deference to the example of France in holding a part- 
 nership relation to her own system of railways subject 
 to a reversion to the state at the end of a hundred years. 
 The plan I have proposed and prefer, contemplates no 
 reversion of that kind, nor is such reversion to be recom- 
 mended. 
 
 An illustration of this quasi-partnership system may 
 now be seen in Chicago, where, I am assured, a gas or a 
 
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city railway corporation— I have forgotten which— is 
 required to pay to the city of Chicago 54 per cent, of its 
 net earnings, and yet pays to its stockholders an annual 
 dividend of 8 per cent. 
 
 V 
 
 But the most conspicuous and most encouraging evi- 
 dences of the trend of public opinion toward the more 
 enlightened principle of taxation which is here proposed 
 may be found in the evolution of the rapid transit legis- 
 lation for the city of New York. The basic law on this 
 subject was for many years an act passed in 1891 which 
 created a Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commission- 
 ers. After many, almost annual amendments and guber- 
 natorial vetoes the plan finally perfected was based on 
 the principle that, in all future franchises or operating 
 contracts under the perfected law, the city of New York 
 "will have the right to terminate the grant or contract at 
 any time after ten years and to take over whatever the 
 company may have provided in the way of road or equip- 
 ment, upon paying an amount to be provided for in the 
 contract, which shall not exceed the investment made by 
 the company plus 15 per cent., and which amount shall 
 decrease from year to year as the grant continues, until 
 finally all the property in the street shall revert to the 
 city free and clear without payment, upon some date 
 fixed in the grant." 
 
 This, said Mr. Milo R. Maltbie, one of the Public Ser- 
 vice Commissioners, in a recent communication to the 
 public, he "believes, judging from the experience of 
 other countries and States, will adequately protect what- 
 
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ever investment may be made by private companies and 
 will furnish sufficient inducement to attract such private 
 capital as may be needed. . . . This principle, for which 
 the Public Service Commission stands, means that the 
 city shall always and continuously be in a position to 
 control transit development." 
 
 The second important principle of the new law [Mr. 
 Maltbie goes on to say] is the sharing of profits above 
 a certain fixed minimum between the operating com- 
 pany and the city. Under the old law, an operator 
 might make 6, 8, lo, 15, or 20 per cent, profit, and the 
 city would receive no more in the last than in the first 
 case. It was also true that if the rental was too small 
 there was no way by which the city would receive a 
 share of the unexpected profits. Yet it is practically 
 impossible to determine in advance what the profits 
 will be and to fix a rental which will be adequate from 
 the viewpoint of the city and still fair to the operating 
 company. Further, it is usually true that the profits 
 vary from year to year and are normally much larger 
 during the later years than at the beginning. 
 
 Attempting to meet these various conditions and 
 difficulties, the Commission worked out a profit-shar- 
 ing plan. It provides that there will be deducted from 
 income all operating expenses, taxes, payments to re- 
 serve and amortization funds, and a return upon the 
 investment not to exceed in any case 6 per cent. The 
 remainder is to be divided equally between the com- 
 pany and the city. . . . 
 
 The theory upon which this plan is based is that the 
 city, by permitting a company to lease its property or 
 to use its streets, has become a partner in the enter- 
 prise and that as such it ought to have a share of the 
 profits above a fair return to capital. Further, when 
 the city and the company are partners and share 
 
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profits, each is more likely to consider the rights and 
 interests of the other. 
 
 This is unquestionably a substantial and encouraging 
 improvement upon any legislation affecting public util- 
 ities which preceded it ; but and because it is so much of 
 an improvement, why not go further in the same sensible 
 direction? Why not make a partnership between the 
 State and the operating company a legal and practical 
 fact? By so doing, the difficulties which have embar- 
 rassed all the rapid transit policies of the city for the past 
 half-century would disappear. There would be no debt 
 contracted by the city, and therefore no trespass upon 
 the constitutional limitations of municipal indebtedness. 
 There would be no difficulty, as experience has proved, 
 about finding financiers ready to provide the money for 
 the work when they knew that they were to have no 
 other but simply the lawful partnership limitations upon 
 their enterprise. 
 
 Mr. Maltbie tells us : 
 
 It has been customary to turn over to the general 
 city treasury all receipts from public utilities. As a 
 result, the users of such services as water, gas, elec- 
 tricity, and transportation have paid an indirect tax, 
 a sort of tax upon consumption. The Commission 
 considered this improper and unjust; that rapid transit 
 should be furnished at cost as nearly as possible, and 
 that all receipts from the travelling public over and 
 above cost should be used to improve, extend, or mul- 
 tiply transportation facilities. 
 
 Under a genuine system of partnership between the 
 State and the corporation, the travelling public should of 
 
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course be entitled to receive a deduction from their other 
 taxes, proportioned to the revenue which the State shall 
 be receiving from the rapid transit facilities. There 
 would then be no occasion to make any such distinction 
 between the use to be made of the revenues of the State 
 and those of the incorporators. 
 Mr. Maltbie says : 
 
 Yet it is practically impossible to determine in ad- 
 vance what the profits will be and to fix a rental which 
 will be adequate from the viewpoint of the city and 
 still fair to the operating company. 
 
 Not a particle more difficult, Mr. Maltbie, on the part- 
 nership principle than it is to determine to a penny the 
 exact dividends due to every stockholder in Mr. Mc- 
 Adoo's tunnels, or for J. P. Morgan & Co. to divide the 
 proportions of their earnings due to their several part- 
 ners. And how much less complicated, more inexpen- 
 sive and inexorably just the system of partnership I have 
 proposed ! 
 
 In 1909 the Laclede Gas Light Company paid the city 
 of St. Louis $273,253 in taxes, of which $188,700 repre- 
 sented the franchise tax, and $14,487 for a merchant's 
 and manufacturer's license, or a total tax amount of 
 $287,740. The tax paid into the city treasury represents 
 approximately 7 per cent, upon its gross earnings, which 
 for 1909 were approximately $3,903,615, or about 35.5 
 per cent, on the capital stock of $11,000,000. 
 
 How much more simple, economical, and fair it would 
 be if the State had taken a partnership interest in the 
 company, with no trouble about franchise taxes, mer- 
 chants' and manufacturers' licenses, with all the clerical 
 
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work and political engineering they involved, but simply- 
 receiving from the company its dividend, like the other 
 stockholders ! 
 
 Mr. Homer T. Bickel, in a letter to the Kansas City 
 Star quoted in the Wall Street Journal, wrote : 
 
 In more than a thousand cities of Germany and 
 Austria not a cent of taxes is levied. The revenues 
 are raised from those utilities which we in America 
 give over to a few to make the money out of and to 
 buy up our politicians with a part of the proceeds. 
 This does not mean that the taxpayers get all the 
 benefits. They don't. The service is rendered in most 
 places at the lowest cost that will make the city safe in 
 its investment. The average street railway fare on 
 these municipal street railway lines of Germany is 
 about two cents. The service is better on the cheap 
 municipal lines than on the few which are still in the 
 hands of private companies. . . . 
 
 Berlin owns 39,000 acres of land within and around 
 its own limits. Frankfort owns 12,000 acres. The 
 cities will sell this land to any one or any syndicate that 
 will buy subject to the city's regulations as to build- 
 ing, open spaces, sanitation, etc. The result is that the 
 working people have cheap and wholesome and at- 
 tractive places in which to live. 
 
 The full partnership plan is simplicity itself. It dis- 
 poses entirely of all the questions still embarrassing the 
 city about private or municipal ownership of its rapid 
 transit franchises. 
 
 It disposes also and finally of a burning question yet 
 to be settled about raising funds for the work by the 
 assessment of its cost, in part or in whole, upon the prop- 
 erty benefited. The stockholders will get their fair share 
 
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of profit from their increase of business, which is the 
 most reliable evidence of its benefit to the property and 
 the fairest division of its earnings. 
 
 It would dispose also of any conflict between municipal 
 rights and the stockholders' rights over lines, the State 
 by its charter and the common law having the power to 
 enforce all its rights ; and more power than that is only a 
 temptation to abuse it. 
 
 Upon the proposed partnership system there is no 
 occasion for any increase of the city's power to contract 
 debt, nor for further delay in providing the city with 
 abundant rapid transit facilities, for there is abundance 
 of capital ready to furnish them faster even than they 
 will be required and without adding a farthing to the 
 debt of the city. 
 
 Finally, and perhaps of more serious importance than 
 any of the considerations yet named, it will give a new 
 and already much-needed security for the constitutional 
 sovereignty of the several States, which cannot much 
 longer maintain its unequal contest with the disintegrat- 
 ing influences of a tariff upon imports. Even Mr. Root, 
 the Secretary of State of the last administration, in one 
 of his published speeches did not hesitate to avow that 
 State Sovereignty was no longer compatible with Fed- 
 eral Unity, and so it will surely prove, for State Rights 
 and a tariff upon imports are perfectly incompatible, and 
 one or the other must succumb. By a substitution of 
 partnership relations between the people, represented by 
 their governments, and the corporations, the sovereign 
 States will have no claims to make, nor will they be con- 
 fronted by any problems which the proposed substitute 
 will not harmoniously and automatically solve. The 
 
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railroads, the telegraphs, the telephones, and all the other 
 present or future transcontinental utilities, will cheer- 
 fully give from thenceforth to each State its propor- 
 tional share of interest in those utilities, and each State 
 will, in its turn, welcome them with alacrity as new bonds 
 of union, as a new security for their sovereignty, and as 
 a much-needed guaranty against corrupt and meddle- 
 some legislation, under which for the last three or more 
 years the industrial interests of our country have been 
 steadily collapsing. It would, besides, constitute a new 
 guaranty of peace and harmony between the States, in 
 contradistinction to the tariff, which is the most danger- 
 ous centrifugal force, since the abolition of slavery, with 
 which our government has had to contend, a truth for 
 which any one may find abundant confirmation in the 
 columns of any daily newspaper. 
 
 VI 
 
 Among my readers there may be some, perhaps many, 
 who may object : 
 
 1. That all the industrial sources of income to which 
 I have referred are vested interests now, and their prod- 
 uct, however large, cannot be diverted from the course 
 given them by their charters. 
 
 2. That the owners of protected property have bought 
 it in the market as investment with no responsibility or 
 perhaps without any intelligent comprehension of the 
 legislation which has given it its real or fictitious value ;. 
 very many, perhaps most, may have bought it at its 
 highest market prices, relying upon its value being per- 
 manently sustained by the government, under the 
 
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auspices of which it was created. With what heart, 
 then, can we think of such a change of our revenue sys- 
 tem as would strike such a severe, sometimes such a fatal 
 blow at the property of so many thousands of innocent 
 sufferers ? 
 
 To the first objection my reply is that the more rail- 
 roads we have the more need we have for more; the 
 more submarine tunnels we have the more sure are we to 
 need and build more : the more electric power is used the 
 more as yet unsuspected fields will be disclosed for the 
 extension of its use ; the more water-power we impound 
 the more will we find worth impounding. In fact, every 
 conquest which science or experience achieves over the 
 hidden resources of nature is the parent of a scarcely 
 less numerous progeny than was promised to Abraham, 
 Isaac, and Jacob. Science has as yet got only a suspicion 
 of the inexhaustible electrical forces in store for our use. 
 Every day new ones are discovered and harnessed to the 
 cars of productive industry. Consider the few years, I 
 might almost say the few months, since electricity began 
 to light our streets, houses, and public buildings ; since it 
 furnished the power to propel our carriages, railway 
 cars, and ocean steamers, to do most of the work for- 
 merly required of the seaman; since its use in archi- 
 tecture, which makes the construction of the pyramid a 
 mystery of our former ignorance, but no longer a mys- 
 tery of science. 
 
 I cannot learn of any street or interurban railway 
 operated by electricity in all the United States twenty 
 years ago. Now as a force it is displacing steam almost 
 as rapidly as the sun displaces a September fog. 
 
 Within ten years the number of cars used on so-called 
 
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street-car lines in New York City has increased to nearly- 
 double the total number of passenger, baggage, and mail 
 cars used on all the steam railways of the United States. 
 
 The capital stock of the street systems already exceeds 
 two thousand millions of dollars, or more than double 
 the capital of all the street and suburban lines ten years 
 ago. 
 
 A year or two ago I applied to the Secretary of State 
 at Albany for a list of the corporations chartered in the 
 State of New York during the preceding ten years. He 
 replied that if I would send a man to copy them he would 
 cheerfully give him the opportunity, but that with his 
 office force he could not send me such a list in less than 
 four months. 
 
 During December, 1909, there were incorporated with 
 the Secretary of State at Albany 715 stock companies, 
 whose aggregate capital stock was $36,216,000, as com- 
 pared with 618 companies chartered in November, with 
 a total capital of $37,130,000. 
 
 The American Manufacturers' Association at a recent 
 meeting called attention to the doubling of the number 
 of cotton spindles in the East and similar increases of 
 other manufactures that may be fairly estimated at 
 $15,000,000,000— a rate of increase from 1900 to 1910 
 of 50 per cent, of the capitalization of the census of 
 1900. 
 
 The automobile is an invention but of yesterday, yet, 
 as already stated, represents a manufacturing capital 
 of over $400,000,000. 
 
 Even in Canada during the past fiscal year the char- 
 ters issued by the Dominion government totalled a capi- 
 talization of over $1 12,000,000. 
 
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Below are given the number in the United States of 
 manufacturing establishments alone, their total capital- 
 ization, and the rate of their increase in capitalization 
 by decades, from 1870 to 1900. They show an average 
 decimal increase of 80.8 per cent. 
 
 
 ESTABLISHMENTS 
 
 i CAPITAL 
 
 PER CENT. 
 
 INCREASE 
 
 1870 . 
 
 . . 252,148 
 
 $2,118,208,769 
 
 109.8 
 
 1880 . 
 
 • . 253,852 
 
 2,790,272,606 
 
 317 
 
 1890 . 
 
 • • 355.405 
 
 6,525,050,759 
 
 133-8 
 
 1900 . 
 
 • • 512,276 
 
 9,831,486,500 
 
 50.7 
 
 "The actual command over capital, whereby the basis 
 of manufacturing credit was enormously improved, will 
 stand out as one of the greatest features of the first 
 decade of the new century. Manufacturing has become 
 identified with new resources which were hardly touched 
 when the last century closed." And let it be remembered 
 that every new invention or new application of power 
 begets swarms of applications for new capital, and that 
 means new incorporations. 
 
 VII 
 
 Now as to the second objection, the condition in which 
 the substitute would leave the innocent holder of stocks 
 or other property, tariff-bloated, as it usually is, to a 
 fictitious value. The operation of the substitute pro- 
 posed would be so gradual as to allow protected interests 
 ample time to prepare for the change that would ensue, 
 and to transfer their investments if they chose, for the 
 substitute could be expected only gradually to supply the 
 
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place of the revenue from imports. Congress could, if it 
 chose, provide for a reduction of its tariff only so far 
 and so fast as the corporations yielded an equivalent of 
 revenue, except in cases where the present tariff shall be 
 confessed to be oppressive and unprofitable. In this 
 way the change may be made as rapidly as the people 
 wish, without any serious infringement on anybody's 
 rights or any serious disturbance of values, except, as 
 I confidently think, to improve them. The conversion 
 would be effected so gradually as to be scarcely more 
 noticed in financial circles than the changes of vegeta- 
 tion. It is indeed the special merit of the proposed sub- 
 stitute that it provides for the innocent investors a 
 comparatively innocuous deliverance. 
 
 So much for the only objections to the substitute 
 which have occurred to me. Now a few words further 
 about such of its advantages as have not been ad- 
 verted to. 
 
 1 . The proposed substitute secures to the State a fair, 
 and only a fair, proportion of the property it helps to 
 create, instead of allowing that share to go to people 
 who, while being enriched themselves, give neither to 
 the State nor to the unprotected majority any corre- 
 sponding equivalent. 
 
 2. It diminishes the temptations for some to seek and 
 others to confer these privileges either by illegitimate 
 methods or because of corrupt inducements. 
 
 3. It would inspire the public with an unwonted con- 
 fidence in the administration of its public affairs and a 
 corresponding respect for their administrators. For the 
 whole power of government lies in the respect and con- 
 fidence of the people for and in their rulers. 
 
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4- It will give the people the friendly interest of co- 
 partners in the prosperity of their industrial corpora- 
 tions, for the more they prosper the more they lighten 
 the public burdens. As a logical consequence, it would 
 diminish, and tend finally to put an end to, the expensive 
 litigation and the corrupt or factious opposition with 
 which all prosperous, protected industrial corporations 
 have to contend. Such hostility renders such properties 
 precarious, and devotes no inconsiderable proportion of 
 their earnings to the costs of self-defence. 
 
 5. The spirit which prompts such hostility contributes 
 more to the corruption of our legislators and to the 
 breeding of rattlesnakes than all other interests com- 
 bined. There is no easier way of raising money for 
 partisan ends, or for other and even baser purposes, than 
 for any, however obscure, member of a legislative body 
 to introduce a bill to reduce the rates which a corpora- 
 tion or class of corporations shall charge for its service. 
 Our gas, telephone, railway, banking, insurance, and 
 trust companies — in fact, all large corporations to which 
 credit is of vital importance — have for years been, or 
 supposed themselves to be, under the necessity of spend- 
 ing millions of dollars to prevent the initiation or the 
 successful prosecution of such predatory schemes. Un- 
 happily the criminality of such operations is not con- 
 fined — at least it cannot be for a long time confined — to 
 the legislative bandit who introduces such bills with no 
 intention of pressing them longer than is necessary to 
 bring the company to his terms. One successful menace 
 of this kind is followed the next year by another; the 
 following year it becomes sporadic, and the nefarious 
 game finds its way into pretty much every legislative 
 
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body in the nation. It finally proves so profitable, andas 
 a business so established, that the legislative bandits 
 find it worth their while to take into their confidence 
 the employees of the corporations on which they prey. 
 Unfaithful or corrupted agents of these companies are 
 induced to confederate with the corrupt legislators. 
 They suggest the propitious time for a raid, and the 
 hush-money is divided between them. Some disclosures 
 of this infamous nature were the match which, only three 
 years ago, precipitated a financial explosion in the 
 United States that shook the whole financial world to 
 its centre. Had the State been secure of its fair interest 
 in these industrial corporations, or had they been re- 
 quired to contribute to the State their just share of what 
 they received from it, would it have been possible for 
 such depravity to have poisoned, the consciences not only 
 of our legislators, but of the not inconsiderable number 
 of our heads of finance who winked at it ? 
 
 VIII 
 
 Prodigious, therefore, as would be the economy of the 
 proposed revenue system, that would be insignificant in 
 comparison with the advantages to be realized from it 
 by the perfect reconciliation between labor and capital 
 which would inevitably ensue. The wage-earner would 
 no longer feel any of the expenses of government, for 
 they would all be paid into the treasury out of the sur- 
 plus profits of the employers ; he would be able to supply 
 himself with the products of every nation at practically 
 
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the same price as they are suppUed to the nation pro- 
 ducing them, plus the trifling cost of transportation, 
 which would every, year diminish. This system would 
 have all the equity and fairness of the theoretical in- 
 come tax, at an insignificant expense, and be absolutely 
 free from- the temptations to fraud and perjury which 
 have hitherto proved fatal to that kind of tax in our 
 country, and so demoralizing wherever tried. People 
 could make contracts for work without any more of the 
 conditions now constantly made against the contingency 
 of labor strikes, for there would be none, nor would we 
 hear any more about restrictions upon the hiring of men 
 or upon the purchasing of material of every kind where 
 and of whom we please, except to secure both on the 
 most favorable terms possible to the two interested 
 parties. 
 
 De Tocqueville commences the preface to his remark- 
 able treatise on "Democracy in America" with the fol- 
 lowing avowal : 
 
 Among the novel objects which attracted my atten- 
 tion during my stay in the United States, nothing 
 struck me more forcibly than the general equality of 
 conditions. I readily discovered the prodigious in- 
 fluence which this primary fact exercises on the whole 
 course of society by giving a certain direction to pub- 
 lic opinion and a certain tenor to the laws ; by impart- 
 ing new maxims to the governing powers and peculiar 
 habits to the governed. I speedily perceived that the 
 influence of this fact extends far beyond the political 
 character and the laws of the country and that it has 
 no less empire over civil society than over the govern- 
 ment; it creates opinions, engenders sentiments, sug- 
 gests the ordinary practices of life, and modifies 
 
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whatever it does not produce. The more I advanced 
 in the study of American society the more I perceived 
 that the equaHty of conditions is the fundamental fact 
 from which all others seem to be derived and the cen- 
 tral point at which all my observations constantly ter- 
 minated. 
 
 I then turned my thoughts to our own hemisphere, 
 where I imagine that I discerned something analogous 
 to the spectacle which the New World presented to 
 me. I observed that the equality of conditions is daily 
 progressing toward those extreme limits which it 
 seemed to have reached in the United States, and that 
 the democracy which governs the American commun- 
 ities appears to be rapidly rising into power in Europe. 
 I hence conceived the idea of the book which is now 
 before the reader. 
 
 These observations were made in 183 1, almost eighty 
 years ago. 
 
 If De Tocqueville were permitted to revisit us, what 
 would he find to-day ? How dififerent a report he would 
 have to make! He would find our ninety millions of 
 people divided by demoralizing legislation into two great 
 classes, the less numerous— the plutocratic class— roll- 
 ing in wealth and discrediting the country by its Baby- 
 lonian extravagance; while he would find the more 
 numerous— the proletariat or wage-earners, constituting 
 from ten to fifteen times the larger class— struggling as 
 best they can with a constantly increasing cost of the 
 means of living, and annually making larger and larger 
 contributions to a class reduced to the alternatives of 
 starvation, crime, or suicide. 
 
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IX 
 
 The process I have here ventured to suggest for the 
 provision of the public revenue is simplicity itself. Every 
 corporation of any account keeps books showing in suffi- 
 cient detail its receipts and its expenses. In most cases 
 these reports are printed annually or quarterly, if not 
 oftener, for their stockholders. Their charters should 
 require such reports of all in any case. The State as 
 a stockholder would then receive them, of course. Every 
 chartered corporation can and should have its accounts 
 and operations subject to inspection at all reasonable 
 times by its stockholders. The State should, besides, 
 have its official inspectors to be satisfied about the cor- 
 rectness of the returns and management, as the federal 
 government has for the army, navy, consulates, custom- 
 houses, etc. This surveillance would be as profitable for 
 the corporation as for the State shareholder, on the prin- 
 ciple that the best manure for the farm is the master's 
 footsteps. 
 
 The Secretary of the Treasury would be the proper 
 person to be not only invested with the authority, but 
 required imperatively to reduce the tariff upon imports 
 as fast as a corresponding revenue is received from the 
 substitute. This reduction might perhaps wisely begin 
 with raw materials as most contributory to the relief of 
 established industries and giving most impulse to new 
 ones. Such a power, substantially, has long been en- 
 joyed by the Minister of Finance in France — by the 
 Home Secretary in England, I believe— and always with 
 satisfactory results. 
 
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Under such a revenue system it is inconceivable that 
 the cost of collecting our federal, State, county, and 
 municipal taxes should be more than a negligible frac- 
 tion of what their collection costs under our present 
 vexatious system. It would be as different in cost, labor, 
 and other desirable results as to the farmer seasonable 
 rains differ in expense from irrigation by an elaborate 
 system of pumps and pipes. It would be, about as nearly 
 as anything of human device can be, automatic. 
 
 With such a reform, and the grace of God, the greater 
 part of the rotten and corrupting share of executive 
 patronage, which is now the most serious reproach to 
 popular sovereignty, would follow the divine right of 
 kings into the shades of oblivion. 
 
 The processes required to put this substitute into oper- 
 ation are in familiar use by every nation, while the num- 
 ber of such processes with which it would happily 
 dispense, in the judgment of experienced statesmen, 
 would prove to be far from the least of its merits. 
 
 The first impression the unbiassed reader is likely to 
 receive from the proposed method of dispensing with the 
 tariff is that it might cause a convulsive disturbance of 
 invested capital. He could hardly make a greater mis- 
 take. It would not disturb invested capital as much as 
 the substitution of the iron rail in place of the gravelled 
 road for transportation ; as much as the steam power for 
 traction to do the work of horses, oxen, mules, and dogs ; 
 nor as much as electricity as a power instead of steam, 
 and as a heat and light instead of coal-gas; nor as the 
 telephone, which has so largely supplemented the tele- 
 graphic service. And yet all these evolutions have oc- 
 curred without the least financial commotion, but with 
 
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demonstrations of welcome, and all within times that are 
 still fresh in my memory. So this substitution could be 
 put into operation, like the first Hebrew temple, "with- 
 out the noise of hammer or of ax," and in less than fifty 
 years war by or with the United States would become as 
 obsolete and unthinkable as a serious proposition from 
 the Secretary of War to arm our soldiers with tom- 
 ahawks. 
 
 Let us then combine to lay the foundations of an en- 
 during peace by exterminating our tariff upon imports 
 and its nests of rattlesnakes, the custom-houses ; and let 
 us unite in prayer for "peace not as man giveth," but a 
 peace which shall make the whole civilized world ex- 
 claim, in the words of the royal Psalmist : 
 
 Mercy and truth are met together ; 
 Righteousness and peace have kissed each other .^ 
 
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