Ida M. Tarbell

“ There has never been seen, indeed, in the world’s history, a more splendid courage in bearing burdens than the people of the United States—North and South—showed in the Civil War. It is an inspiring thing to study. If it had had no reverse! But it is one of the curious and puzzling phenomena of human nature that the situation which inspires some to their highest endeavor arouses others to their lowest. That the same cause makes martyrs of some men, cormorants of others. If a war for a great cause brings out the nobler qualities of human nature, it brings out at the same time the vicious. ”

“ But practically everybody but the beneficiaries were for cleaning up the tariff. The evils inherent in it—and nobody of intelligence ever denied that they were many—were big, easily seen:
Enormous profits to the few; steadily increasing prices to the many; one-sided development of the country; factories growing like gourds and no ships of our own to carry the goods in; the country sacrificed to the city, the peace of God to the blare and the roar of the steel furnace. These ungrateful children of protection had grown until they threatened to crush us. ”

“ What else was the attempt of that club in 1909 to unite with European cotton manufacturers to restrict the consumption of cotton in order to lower its price?
But should we expect that in an industry which boasts so many men of great ability, daring, and ambition as cotton manufacturing, and in which the rewards are so tremendous, no man will ever be found strong enough to take advantage of the tendencies to combination which already show themselves and to work out a trust? Why should there not be a Rockefeller or a Carnegie in cotton as well as in oil or steel? ”

“ Duties should be so high that our manufacturers can fairly compete with the foreign product, but not so high as to enable them to drive out the foreign article, enjoy a monopoly of the trade, and regulate the price as they please. To this extent I am a protectionist. If our government pursues this line of policy steadily, we shall, year by year, approach more nearly to the basis of free trade, because we shall be more nearly able to compete with other nations on equal terms. I am for a protection which leads to ultimate free trade. ”

“ Any one who has observed the life of the working-man on both sides of the Atlantic knows that wages, conditions, opportunities, are vastly superior as a whole in the United States. It is a New World, with a New World’s hopes. But it is only the blind and deaf who do not realize that the same forces of allied greed and privilege which have made life so hard for so many in the Old World are at work, seeking to repeat here what they have done there. ”

“ Curiously enough, the same intellect which declares that monopoly cannot exist under protection will under stress argue: Take the duty from those who have formed trusts, but give it to us who have not. “In order that you may?” one feels like asking. This was a link in the argument of the gentlemen who pleaded in 1909 that Schedules I and K (cotton and wool) should remain undisturbed. There is no “cotton trust”; therefore continue duties long unnecessary and wink at those which trickery forces through! True, there is no cotton trust—as yet. But how are trusts bred? ”

“ Each group—the wool-growers of the far West and the worsted manufacturers of the East—controls a good-sized block of votes. By uniting these blocks they control probably the largest and most dependable vote of any tariff-protected interest in the country. It is a vote which for over forty years has never bolted. It is a vote which always gets what it asks, for the simple reason that it is powerful enough to defeat any duty in a tariff bill if the backer of that duty is hostile, and nobody doubts it will exercise the power if tried. ”

“ And this is what the high protectionist lawgiver has come to—a complete repudiation of the idea that right and wrong are involved in tariff bills. There is no man more dangerous, in a position of power, than he who refuses to accept as a working truth the idea that all a man does should make for rightness and soundness, that even the fixing of a tariff rate must be moral. But this is the man the doctrine of protection, as we know it, produces, and therein lies the final case against it,—men are worse, not better, for its practice. ”

“ It will not be our fault if the inopportune legislation of the North combined with the reciprocity of wants between ourselves and the South should bring about considerable modification in our relations with America. No one after the recent debate on the slave trade can doubt that England is still in earnest on this point, and will never buy commercial advantage at the cost of her honor. We should infinitely prefer dealing with a single responsible government to maintaining two embassies and running the risk of misunderstandings with two highly sensitive democracies. ”

“ The protectionist who answers every criticism of his rates by conjuring a picture of “pauper labor” is equally conscienceless in his attitude towards the relation of protection to the two most disquieting industrial phenomena of our day, the increase in the cost of living and the multiplicity of corporations which aim to become and often are monopolies. For instance, Mr. Whitman, whose forty years of garrulous and successful defence of the present wool schedule has made him the perfect type of the lay stand-patter, does not admit that there is such a problem as the increased cost of living. ”

“ There is hardly a thing he consumes which this bill forgets to raise the duty upon. Every prominent necessity of life, food, fuel, shelter, and clothing, is embraced and made more expensive to the consumer throughout the country. Even on boys’ pocket-knives the duty is increased about three times—600 per cent—one member of the committee tells me. And yet it is said this is a tariff for mere protection. Why, sir, you are protecting the American people until they will not be able to buy one solitary thing that is protected if this goes on. ”

“ Not only has the average factory owner absorbed the lion’s share of the profits, but he set his face like a flint against spending a cent of the protection he enjoys in humane efforts to make the industry more tolerable. This man, who periodically appears as a suppliant before Congress, praying for a continuation of benefits which cost this whole people dearly, will not, unless driven to it by law and outraged public opinion, protect even the children who work in his mills. ”

“ I do not propose that the remaining years of my life, whether they be in public affairs or in my private business, shall be given up to a dull consent to the success of all these conspiracies, which do not hesitate before our very eyes to use the law-making power of the United States to multiply their own profits and to fill the market-places with witnesses of their avarice and of their greed. ”

“ It is a mistake to suppose that because a man has been twenty years in Congress and has served for a portion of that time on the Ways and Means Committee, he therefore understands the tariff schedules. As a rule, it is safe to say that a Congressman understands rarely the real meaning of the rates he votes for. What he understands is that the Committee has made the bill for what it considers sound party reasons, and that if he does not accept the rate, he or some colleague is in danger of defeat, and he accepts it without too much scrutiny. ”

“ Cox. “Michigan steals on copper; Maine on lumber; Pennsylvania on iron; North Carolina on peanuts; Massachusetts on cotton goods; Connecticut on hair pins; New Jersey on spool thread; Louisiana on sugar, and so on. Why not let the gentleman from Maryland steal coal from them? True, but a comparative few get the benefit, and it comes out of the body of the people; true, it tends to high prices, but does not stealing encourage industry? Let us as moralists, if not as politicians, rewrite the eighth commandment: Thou shalt steal; because stealing is right when common. ”

“ Is it strange that the homes of the factory mothers are generally untidy, the food poor, the children neglected? How can it be otherwise? Her limit of endurance, of ambition, of joy, even of desire of life, has been passed. More appalling, she sees her ability to work falling off. Almost universally, women who have worked ten years in a factory have the patent-medicine habit—they are “so tired” they “take something.” Is it surprising that a few of them finally discover that they can get from beer or whiskey the same temporary strength at less cost? ”

“ The history of protection in this country is one long story of injured manhood. Tap it at any point, and you find it encouraging the base human traits—greed, self-deception, indifference to the claims of others. Take the class chiefly involved in making a tariff bill—the suppliants for protection. We have seen in previous chapters the ends they seek, the methods they employ. What kind of men does this make? It makes men deficient in self-respect, indifferent to the dignity and inviolability of Congress, weak in self-reliance, willing to bribe, barter, and juggle to secure their ends. ”

“ Experience seems to prove that where tariff exists the manufacturer is safer on the inside of the wall, even though it may be that it costs him as much or more to manufacture there than it does at home. The Harvester claims that in spite of the difference of wages, it has no hope of being able to manufacture more cheaply abroad than at home. This is no doubt due to a factor which protectionists unite in ignoring,—the greater productivity of the American workman.
The whole situation is an excellent example of the unnatural and uncertain relations into which tariffs thrust industry. ”

“ People forced by conditions to use dishonest goods, who find their shoes quickly falling to pieces, their coats quickly threadbare, their food adulterated, their rented rooms out of repair, who are forced to pay for things without virtue, quickly lose all sense of quality. They never give it because they never see it. Can an employee who knows that his employer adulterates his fabrics and covers up imperfections regardless of the interests of the consumers, be expected to continue to care for the quality of his own work? ”

“ We can make as good woollen textiles in the United States as are made anywhere in the world; we do make many of them—at double the price that they cost abroad; but cutting off all competition in cheap goods as our tariff does, enables the domestic manufacturer to ignore the quality of these goods as he could not do if he were subjected to proper foreign competition. He knows he can sell what he turns out. There are no other goods for the poor man to buy; the cheaper he can make them the better; they will have to be replenished the oftener, and so trade will be encouraged! ”

“ It must be admitted that no tariff measure can accord with Democratic principles and promises or bear a genuine Democratic badge that does not provide for free raw materials. In these circumstances, it may well excite our wonder that Democrats are willing to depart from this, the most Democratic of all tariff principles, and that the inconsistent absurdity of such a proposed departure should be emphasized by the suggestion that the wool of the farmer be put on the free fist and the protection of tariff taxation be placed around the iron-ore and coal of corporations and capitalists. ”

“ This, then, is the kind of man the protective system as we practise it encourages: a man unwilling to take his chances in a free world-struggle; a man whose sense of propriety and loyalty has been so perverted that he is willing to treat the 361Congress of the United States as an adjunct to his business; one who regards freedom of speech as a menace and the quality of his product of less importance than the quantity; one whose whole duty toward his working-man is covered by a pay envelope. This man at every point is a contradiction to the democratic ideal of manhood. ”

“ We denounce the present tariff levied upon nearly 4000 articles as a masterpiece of injustice, inequality, and false pretence. It yields a dwindling and not a yearly rising revenue.
It has impoverished many industries to subsidize a few.
It prohibits imports that might purchase the products of American labor.
It has degraded American commerce from the first to an inferior rank on the high seas.
It has cut down the sales of American manufacture at home and abroad, and depleted the returns of American agriculture—an industry followed by half our people. ”

“ I will add that in my judgment it will be years yet before anything in the nature of free trade would be wise or practicable in the United States. When we speak of this subject we refer to approximate free trade which has no idea of cutting the growth of home industries, but simply of scaling down the inequalities of the tariff schedules where they are utterly out of proportion to the demands of that growth. After we have calmly stood up and allowed monopolists to grow fat we should not be asked to make them bloated. Our enormous surplus revenues are illogical and oppressive. ”

“ It is not probable that there would have been any such revolt as the McKinley Bill caused. The disillusion the country had suffered over the ability of the Democrats to carry out consistent reforms was too keen. Moreover, what industry wanted and needed more than anything else was to be let alone; even the most irreconcilable of tariff-for-revenue only men could have hardly counselled another revision at this juncture. The Dingley Bill, bad as it was, did not stir the popular mind. ”

“ Men try to construct systems and work out plans in defiance of it, only to see them destroyed; they try to live without it, only to die. Activities that ask toll of our inner honor and crowd our fellow-men, that do not contribute to the general goodness and soundness of life and things, cannot endure. Every practice, law, system of religion, government or society must be finally sifted down to this: Are men better or worse for it? What does it make for, in the main, callousness or gentleness, greed or unselfishness? ”