who were taxed to do this building up, is a survival of the paternal spirit that was first exercised by the church. Toward the end of the so-called "dark ages" the growing intellect of the world broke away from the hold of the church, and this headship of paternalism and protection was continued by the feudal system. Buckle, writing of the effort of Louis XIV to build up the literary and scientific output of France by a system of rewards and pensions, says: "Kings (United States Government) are not omniscient, and in the bestowal of rewards must be guided either by personal caprice or by the testimony of competent judges and, since no one is competent to judge of literature or science (or manufacture) unless he is himself literary or scientific, we are driven to the monstrous alternative that the rewards must be conferred injudiciously or else that they must be given according to the verdict of the very class by which they are received." (Your hearings committee is much like this, is it not?)

Again, "if a fund were set aside by the state for rewarding butchers and tailors, it is certain that the numbers of these useful men would be needlessly augmented" (tin mines?). If another fund is appropriated for rewarding literary men, it is certain that men of letters will increase more rapidly than the exigencies of the country require" in both cases the artificial stimulus will produce an unhealthy reaction, and when we give to one class we take from another," etc. Å still worse effect, he says in another place, is that "it teaches the people to look up to a protector and fountain head of prosperity and kills their independence and initiative," etc. Members of the Republican party even now show these signs of looking up to their party for everything; it is difficult to get one of them to discuss issues; they seem to fear they will hear argument they can not answer and yet know weakly they must vote against; the result of a generation of teaching that they can not make a living in this most prosperous of all countries without artificial help.

It took years of political and civic turbulence, riot, and the fighting. bulldog tenacity of several remarkably honest and fearless leaders to effect the abolition of the tax on bread in England. This result was bound to be achieved in time, but it was hastened by two advantages which they were fortunate indeed in possessing-first, unselfish, devoted leaders, and, second, their most effective slogan, "Down with the tax on bread." If the fight was long under such a banner as "Down with the tax on bread," which appealed to every one at his most sensitive point, how much slower must the campaign of education be under our banners, "Hurrah for tariff reform "Down, with the tax on hides, glycerin, lumber, and railroad iron." Particularly difficult is it to impress the average voter with our arguments about which he must think in order to understand them, when he sees us met by an army from the opposing camp with banners that appeal to the eye, but stir not the mind from its comfortable lethargy. That army, the Republican party, the most fertile inventors of misleading and vote-getting war cries the world of politics has ever known.

The civilization and education of the world is still so far behind that far more votes are cast in response to a resounding slogan than are influenced by the wisest argument. The Republican party have for thirty years depended upon little else beside, and the historical literature of their campaigns during this period differs not at all in

style and value from the vapid and demagogic ranting with which Bryan rallied his Populistic hosts around his cross of gold and crown of free silver. A shade of difference in bearing only may be imagined in passing-Bryan making the nervous noise of the misused loser; the Republican oratory, redolent of victory past and to come, is quieter and has an air of charitable toleration toward those who yet do not quite grasp the wonderful scientific basis of the protective principle and then the torrent of words, words, words, empty of meaning and unworthy of anyone's attention; no reference to what has been done, said, or written on like subjects in the histories of other countries nor even of our own past; no opinions of political economists who have spent their lives studying, sifting, and comparing to work out the underlying truths of government in its varied relations to trade and the other pursuits of the people; nothing but unworthy, dishonest harping on meaningless catch words designed to delude the voter in his quest for truth and her abiding place. "Protection to infant industries; ""Home market; ""Pauper labor of Europe;" "A cheap coat makes a cheap man;""Prosperity," and "I am its prophet and advance agent, William McDingley; The full dinner pail;" and now, when the sleeve is empty, every trick played, the country can no longer be fooled, they come out with the impudent defiance, "Stand pat "-all shallow sophistries to support the great error of protection. The great error fostered by self-interest has now fixed upon our country a tax greater than the French people were paying when the revolution came on, and it must now occupy our minds for many years and cause much trouble and suffering before we can throw it off.

We have now bred up a generation that believes we must look up to and depend upon a fountain head for our prosperity; our artificial profits are causing us more and more to watch the doings of Congress just as the beneficiaries of Louis XIV's bounties hung around his court, bootlicking for their rewards to the neglect of their work in laboratory and study. This state of things lessens our initiative and weakens our independence, and continued long enough would utterly destroy us. No matter how slight a tendency is, if it is given time enough it will work changes that the unimaginative (i. e., the practical and opposed to all things theoretical and scientific) can not believe possible. This tendency in time would utterly kill that spirit that has made this country look different under our rule from that of the red Indian. There are two other tendencies which we must also reckon with. One is that these infant industries will in time reach the point where the increasing help that we are called upon to favor them with will not suffice, because their existence becomes more and more artificial all the time. The other is that the consumer is getting less able and less willing to pay. When the point is reached when the consumer can no longer pay and the mushroom industries that have been encouraged to go into business can no longer live without help, what will happen?

All protected industries will very naturally combine against any reduction, and their wealth is so great and those profits they stand to lose are so large it will be no mean fight they put up. Mr. Carnegie in this morning's paper says many of these huge industries no longer need this help, but that is no sign that they will give them up. I said several years ago that I would take more stock in his libraries

if he would turn into the United States Treasury all the unnecessary millions the people have been forced to pay to him during the last forty years, or for whatever time they have been unnecessary. The big fellows who no longer need protection will fight harder than will the little mushrooms, to whom a reduction means annihilation, because they have more money to fight with. Andy has formed something of a giving habit—if building monuments to himself with a small part of the money he has taken from the people can by a goodnatured stretch of the imagination be called giving but it has not spread much in the shape of an epidemic.

The free trade in labor that the manufacturer has always enjoyed has been a good thing for him, and the free trade in everything the farmer raises has been a good thing for him and for the people, because if farm products had been protected one or two men would now be in control of all the products, if not all the farms, and the farmers would be only hirelings of a trust. Although the farmer has been taxed unmercifully in the things he has to buy every fall for his family, and now pays about 40 per cent over the price of imported goods (though he never sees any imported goods) for everything he has to have, there is a great deal in that expression you may hear on the street any day; that is, that the farmer is our most independent citizen. Free trade in his own products, and persecution in being forced to pay outrageous taxes for the benefit of others, has made him that. Persecution has made the Jews the best financiers of the world. It would seem to be too elementary to sit down, waste paper and ink, and bore one's best friend with the argument that adversity stimulates initiative and independence, and that protection is exactly the opposite of all that makes a man, but the greed and idiocy of those who believe in protection make it necessary for us to go back to the very A, B, C of political economy and argue from that up, and even then self-interest will probably block all progress, hope we for ever so little.

Although the average farmer probably pays a tax of 20 per cent of his gross earnings on the things he has to buy, and although he pays the imported price and much over, yet never sees a piece of imported goods, the beneficiaries of the injustice put upon him are still so ignorant that after forty years of help from the pockets of the consumers, he is not ashamed to confess that the imported article is, as a rule, far superior in quality to the home product.

There should be no compromise about this fight. We should not even admit that protection has even been of the slightest benefit to the country as a whole. It is absolutely impossible that it could have been, and all this talk that protection has made this country great, but that it is a dear old worn-out coat that we now no longer need, is the most sickening, harmful, and costly rot. Protection has never done anything but harm in all the history of the world, from raising babies, up. We have prospered in spite of it, but would have been many moral and commercial leagues ahead of where we are now if we had never had it to carry all these forty years.

This and these tendencies are of the gravest interest, but unlike "Old Doctor Bryan and his remedies" I have no cure-all to offer for their eradication. When the well-fed and well-protected Pittsburger comes to-day to ask you to put another layer of fat on his ribs or to ask it for a neighbor who is too busy making money to

come and get it for himself, understanding, very properly, that your committee is really a sort of a pay car, etc., if you should be even so irreverent as to joke him about cutting down his schedule, he would tell you that he could not possibly live without it, and nine times out of ten he would be right about it.

Now, if we were four years hence and had a very honest and determined tariff reformer (like, say, Yon Yonson) in the White House, as I hope to see, and a very wise, honest, and equally determined chairman of the Ways and Means, a pair that would want to stop the taxing of the 30,000,000 unprotected farmers for the benefit of the 6,000,000 who are engaged in the protected industries, your task would still be a huge one. Two bad crop years about that time might put these farmers in a bad way of meeting the wants of these pudgy infants. It is no joke that if the nourishment of these infants were cut off many of them would lie down and die. Now, before men will die they will make a struggle, and your committee's effort to frame a tariff bill that would give relief would be met by resistance from a few friends in your legislative halls that would leave it looking like the Wilson bill.

I feel as sure of it as I ever could of anything in the future that the protected interests will continue to feed on the unprotected until the latter can pay no longer. No matter how emphatic an election majority might make it that Congress must give relief, I believe the "interests" would never have to look far to find one or two Senators who would sell out and block the game. In any case, I believe our fight from now on should take a high plane, and we should fight always on the ground that the whole principle of protection is wrong from the ground up; that not one word can be said in its favor; that it has cost this country billions of dollars, and has actually hindered progress in every line. It has caused the abandonment of thousands of farms in the East, and but for it the seas of all the world would be traveled by American-made ships; that we would not still be confessing that nearly everything we buy is better if it is imported. If we had had free trade as near as possible, our "home market would now be staying at home from preference not from force. Why do I make all these wild statements? Because they must be so if it is true that ours is the most richly endowed in natural resources of all the countries of the world.

If that is so, and that our people are the most energetic, from which there is no dissenting voice, how could it be otherwise?

These tariff laws cost us so much, in so many thousand ways that none know about except they who are concerned, that there is no way of estimating it. For one instance, 250,000 farmers last year moved from the great Northwest into Canada. Why? Because the land is the same and the price of their corn and wheat are the same, but the cost of clothing and many other necessaries are about one-half. We invite the uneducated and speechless foreigner to come to us; we educate his children, and when they grow up and are first-class citizens they move to Canada because we tax them out of the country. I didn't intend to write a book, and I haven't said anything new. I intended only to emphasize the fact that I believe the fight should be on high ground, and that we are sure to have a revolution before we get relief. They won't let go; they can always stop any movement against them, and how long can the farmers stand the racket!

Ten years, twenty? Well, it is bound to come, and you may live to see it.

I may be a calamity howler, but the French would have been better off about a hundred and twenty years ago if they had had a few; not that they could have stopped the trouble, but it would have given a few of them valuable warning. I wish you would read Buckle's History of Civilization in England, Volume I, along about page 490.

It is the old proposition of what will happen when an irresistible force meets an immovable body. One must admit that no people can stand an ever-increasing tax nor can they even stand an excessive tax indefinitely, and no one will contend that the protected industries will ever give up this graft willingly. The resistance will not be merely a matter of an election or two, neither. It will be a struggle for life with them. No matter how foolish and unjust it was in the beginning, this artificial support we have given them so long has become vitally necessary to them.

It is not a matter entirely between the two great political parties, either; the Republican farmers of the great West and all over the country must in the end fight for free trade, and the manufacturing interests of the South and elsewhere will oppose it with all their might.

This abuse has grown because not many can realize what a very rich country we have, and it is natural that all have been infected with the bug that protection has been the cause of our prosperity up to this point. We should stop and think how many other useless taxes the great wealth of this country enables us to support with so little apparent harm. We thought the bicycle habit was a frightful expense. We had got used to the hundred and fifty millions a year spent on patent medicines, not to mention the billion or so spent on other useless medicines, doctors, and lawyers; we did not remember the hundreds of thousands who live by their wits in a thousand ways whom the honest toiler has to support. The millions spent on automobiles is mere pin money.

There is a wide difference between the sparrow and the turkey cock, but an infinitesimal variation and a tendency operated upon by plenty of time has caused it all. The gay boys who owned France during the time of Louis XIV never had any such bad dreams that would reveal to them how their good times would culminate in 1793. Nothing but hunger will cause a revolution in a civilized country, but hunger will do it, and do it every time, and in spite of every way I can look at it we are on the way. If we are on the way anywhere we are sure to arrive unless something arises to stop us, and nothing of that kind is in sight now.

Protection is either right or it is wrong in principle, and whichever it is it has been that all the time. Those of us who believe it is wrong ought to come out and say so. When we crowd a protectionist into a corner he will always say, " Well, we must have a revenue.' When he says that he ought to be followed up and made to see that he has given up the fight, because we can have a tariff for revenue without one grain of protection in it.

The leader-I hope it is Yon Yonson-who is destined to come out and fight protection to its extermination, as the Abolitionists did slavery, will immortalize himself; but there will be a lot of trouble before the end is accomplished.

Yours,

GEO. S. BRown.