forty to sixty per cent, tin alone is free. Every little while a report is started that tin has been found. Hitherto these reports have happily all proved false. It is now said that tin has been found in West Virginia and Dakotah. We have reason devoutly to hope that this may prove false, for, if it should prove true, no doubt the next thing will be forty per cent tax on tin. The mine-owners say that they want to exploit the mine. They do not. They want to make the mine an excuse to exploit the taxpayers.
46. Therefore, when the protectionist asks whether we ought not by protective taxes to force the development of our own iron mines, the answer is that, on his own doctrine, he has developed a new philosophy, hitherto unknown, by which "natural resources" become national calamities, and the more a country is endowed by nature the worse off it is. Of course, if the wise philosophy is not simply to use, with energy and prudence, all the natural opportunities which we possess, but to seek "channels favored or created by law," then this view of natural resources is perfectly consistent with that philosophy, for it is simply saying over again that waste is the key of wealth.
(G) Examination of the Proposal to Raise Wages.
47. "But," he says again, "we want to raise wages and favor the poor working man." Do you mean to say," I reply, "that protective taxes raise wages — that that is their regular and constant effect?" "Yes," he replies, "that is just what they do, and that is why we favor them. We are the poor man's friends. You free-traders want to reduce him to the level of the pauper laborers of Europe." "But here, in the evidence offered at the last tariff discussion in Congress, the employers all said that they wanted the taxes to protect them because they had to pay such high wages." "Well, so they do." "Well then, if they
