protective tariff scheme because high moral enthusiasm, sentimental idea, are lacking. "The difficulty of uniting many men in permanent alliance for a common object," he asserted September 27, 1909, "increases as that object appeals less and less to any disinterested affection or high inspiration, and rapidly proves itself insuperable when it sinks into a mere scramble of greediness and vanity." A week earlier (September 20) he remarked: "It involves no contest of lofty opinions about justice or righteousness, the rights of democracy or the maintenance of the dignity or authority of the nation. It is trade and dicker, barter and swap."
The policy, declared Mr. Scott, takes wrongfully from one man to bestow upon another; thus confers special privilege. All cannot enjoy the benefits; a few do, and for those few the many, who have no products to "protect," are taxed. The rational tariff duty would be imposed on articles of universal consumption—food, drink and clothing—such as tea, coffee, tobacco, wine, spices, sugar and luxuries in high class textile, leather and metal goods and special luxuries of the rich. "The general principle of 'tariff for revenue only/ "he wrote, September 2, 1892, "is that we should admit free of duty, such commodities, except luxuries, as we produce in our own country and lay duties on such commodities of foreign production as we largely consume yet cannot, or do not, produce ourselves." Such settlement would put an end to the continuous brawl in Congress and throughout the country over the protection of one set of interests at the expense of others or at the expense of consumers. Anything short of it would leave the subject open to perpetual contention and strife; for protection was not an equal policy; never could be. Its most direct consequence were creation of monopolies and enrichment of a few at expense of the many. "Protection" conferred on manufactured goods yet denied to raw products, he said, was discrimination to which Western and agricultural communities would not submit. "Protection" had for its primary defense higher resultant wages for labor; but labor enters into production of raw materials just as into their manufacture.
