Protection vs. Free-trade.
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��they have no attraction to emigrants for their magnficent productions.
" A foreign market is a will-o'-the-wisp. The only sure props of our great Western wheat and corn growing territories is a tariff and cheap transportation.
" But it is said that we must have reve- nue reform. And what is that ? Why, it is a Mugwump gravitation downward toward free- trade. The effect of it will be, whether de- signed or not, to cheapen labor, and to deprive labor of some of its present comforts and orna- ments. Its effect will be to send more of our children barefoot into the fields and into the workshops, and less to the common schools.
" I may say that the free-traders would emas- culate the Declaration of Independence; they would not leave us enough manhood to sup- port any thing more than a government of the police, not enough to enable us to chose our own avocations. I trust, however, that we shall have enough of that ancient heroic in- dependence to show that we intend now and forever, in peace or in war, to make our own coats and shirts (in homely phrase), to make our own dresses and blankets, to make our own shoes and stockings, to make our own dinner plates and knives and forks, above all to make our own ships and cannon ; and finally that we shall have enough to demand a little Ameri- canism in our colleges. It strikes me that it would be well, and I don't wish to boycott them, but life is too short for our young men men to learn and unlearn theories that have no root anywhere except upon aristocratic soil, upon the soil of England. And I think that I am in favor of an e.xtension of civil service reform ; and, while I won't do any thing to injure any educational institution, God forbid, yet if any vacancies should hap- pen in their staffs, I would subject the can- didates to a proper civil service examination as to their qualifications."
On the same occasion Hon. William D. Kelley of Pennsylvania made a strong appeal for high tariff. A few of his re- marks are of especial interest to all.
" Now, as to foreign markets ; for, as I say, I came not as a propagandist, not as a missionary, but because I had been invited, and was glad to come. On the subject of foreign markets, let me ask you where they are to be be found. Are you ready to enter Congo, the Congo country, the Congo Free
��State ? What could you sell there ? What can our generation, or your generation, — for I have passed beyond it, — trade with in Con- go ? We cannot enter the British markets. British industry has never been more paral- yzed. Manufacturers were never producing goods with less certainty of profits on the British Islands than now. You cannot hope to get into France. They simply confiscate raw goods ; as, for instance, in the matter of cutlery, drugs : whatever is not free, or put at a fixed dutiable rate, is confiscated, and the party bringing it in is put under penalty. You cannot find markets there. You cannot beat the French people in producing that which is elegant. You cannot beat them in cheapness. You cannot beat the Swiss. There is nobody there to buy any thing. Where can you find a market in which you can compete success- fully with Germany, with France, with Eng- and, with Switzerland, unless you bring your laboring people to live as unhappily as the British laboring people are now living, as I have shown you the Swiss people are living, as the German peasants are living ? You can't do that. You can't maintain a republic with a starving laboring population. You can't promote the welfare and strength of the country, and the safety of capital and society, by degrading the laboring people, and making them feel that they are under the heel of op- pressors instead of co-operating fraternally with their countrymen, and hopeful in seeing others of their countrymen rising from poverty to wealth as they pass from youth or young manhood to graver maturity. We require sym- pathetic action with our laboring people. . . . " I live where manufacturers are concen- trated in power and authority as they are, I think, in no other Congressional district in the country. My district is a set of homes. A larger per cent of the population of Philadel- phia live in houses owned by the head of the family, or which have descended from him to his widow and heirs, than in any other com- munity in the world. We have gone through a very severe pressure. But it does not come from either free trade or protection. The United States, protected as they are, have felt it. England, free trade as she is, has felt it on a higher, a broader, a keener degree. I think that the depression will continue, with little waves of apparent prosperity, so long as the nations struggle to show the Almighty that he was wrong in making two metals which might be used as money."
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