270
��Protection vs. Free-trade.
��PROTECTION vs. FREE-TRADE.
��The October meeting of the Liberal Union Club was held at Young's Hotel, Saturday, Oct. 31, 1885, when Senator Morrill of Vermont made some very in- teresting remarks. In the course of his address he said, —
" I understand, gentlemen, that there are here Republicans and Democrats, protective tariff men and free-trade men, and, in the clas- sic language of the newspapers. Mugwumps. If I am to say any thing at all to you to-night, I must speak my honest sentiments. I have been long suspected of being somewhat in fa- vor of a protective tariff, and of being a pretty stanch Republican; and while it has been my effort heretofore to always speak what I believed, if it should run contrary to some of your views, it may be useful in creating a lit- tle effervescence in your stomachs not to be regretted.
" I ought, perhaps, to say that I feel almost as much love and admiration for Massachu- setts as one to the manor born: for near here I found my wife, and she claims Mas- sachusetts as the State of her birth ; and here from 1824 to 1850 I found the great tariff authority was Daniel Webster, the authority not only in Massachusetts, where his name ought to be immortal, but throughout the country. It may have been my misfortune that I have not had the later guides and phi- losophers of some of your learned institu- tions ; but I must frankly confess, that, while I have some respect for standard English lit- erature, I have none at all for the standard English political economy.
" Let me say that, that free-trade economy may be good enough for Great Britain, for England, but it don't do anywhere else. It won't do even for Ireland, and certainly not for America. It may be that some of your learned professors, who are sometimes politi- cians, are greater men than were Webster and Choate, or than are our Hoar and Dawes ; but, I beg your pardon, up in Vermont we don't think so.
" They say, however, that we must have rev- enue reform. Cui bono . For whose benefit ? For they assent that if we should reduce the
��tariff a good deal lower, we might collect the the same amount of revenue. Suppose that that were to be admitted, it is evident then that we should have to import a much larger amount of foreign merchandise, and also should have to furnish a market for a much less, a correspondingly less, amount of Amer- ican productions. It strikes me that the statesmanship that only seeks to create a mar- ket for foreign productions is un-American, and in my judgment the advocates of that policy have a legitimate claim upon the Brit- ish Parliament for their services.
" The Lowells, the Appletons, the Law- rences, the Lymans, and the Bigelows, by plant- ing manufactures on the sterile soil of Massa- chusetts, — and they were the contemporaries of such men as Webster and Choate, and of honest John Davis, and of Winthrop, — and thus developing and multiplying the employ- ments of your people, giving every man of your State an opportunity to do his best, have secured its growth, its prosperity, and its reputation the world over.
" Without this policy, the farms of Massa- chusetts to-day would not bring one-half of their present valuation. It is through this policy that the rich endowments of your col- leges have taken place. It is by this policy that you have established broadcast your common schools. Without it, one-half, more than one-half, of the pulpits of your churches, and the church-going bells, would to-day be silent. Without this policy, your State to-day would not have one-fourth of the present magnitude of its population. And yet some of these men, if they could carry out their policy, if they could be successful, in my judg- ment, in a very short time, would be nothing but tramps in the streets.
" The protective tariff is not a local ques- tion. Its beneficence touches the foot as well as the hand, the heart as well as the head. Its example, the example of Massachusetts, may be as safely followed in the South as in the North, in Virginia and Georgia as in Pennsylvania and New York, in the States beyond the Mississippi as well as in Illinois and Ohio. In fact, our great wheat-fields of the West, unless they can find a great and steadfast home market, will soon find that
�� �
