“A few days ago, the distinguished gentleman from Virginia, who now occupies the chair [Mr. Tucker], made a speech of rare ability and power, in which he placed at the front of his line of discussion a question that was never raised in American legislation until our present form of Government was forty years old; the question of the constitutionality of a tariff for the encouragement and protection of manufacturers. The first page of the printed speech of the gentleman, as it appears in theCongressional Record, is devoted to an elaborate and very able discussion of that question.
“He insists that the two powers conferred upon Congress, to levy duties and to regulate commerce, are entirely distinct from each other; that the one can not by any fair construction be applied to the other; that the methods of the one are not the methods of the other, and that the capital mistake which he conceives has been made in the legislation of the country for many years is that the power to tax has been applied to the regulation of commerce, and through that to the protection of manufactures. He holds that if we were to adopt a proper construction of the Constitution we should find that the regulation of commerce does not permit the protection of manufactures, nor can the power to tax be applied, directly or indirectly, to that object.
“I will not enter into any elaborate discussion of that question, but I can not refrain from expressing my admiration of the courage of the gentleman from Virginia, who in that part of his speech brought himself into point-blank range of the terrible artillery of James Madison, one of the fathers of the Constitution, and Virginia’s great expounder of its provisions.
“In a letter addressed to Joseph C. Cabell, on the 18th of March, 1827, will be found one of those discussions in which Mr. Madison gives categorically thirteen reasons against the very constitutional theory advanced now by the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Tucker]. It would almost seem that the distinguished author of the book which I hold inmy hand had prophetically in his mind the very speech delivered in this House by the later Virginian, for he refutes its arguments, point by point, thoroughly and completely.
“I say that more than a hundred pages of Madison’s works are devoted to discussing and exploding what was, in 1828, this new notion of constitutional construction. In one of these papers he calls to mind the fact that sixteen of the men who framed the Constitution sat in the first Congress and helped to frame a tariff expressly for the protection of domestic industries; and it is fair to presume that these men understood the meaning of the Constitution.
“I will close this phase of the discussion by calling the attention of the committee to the language of the Constitution itself:
“‘The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.’
“Language could hardly be plainer to declare the great general objects to which the taxing power is to be applied.
“It should be borne in mind that revenue is the life-blood of a government, circulating through every part of its organization and giving force and vitality to every function. The power to tax is therefore the great motive power, and its regulation impels, retards, restrains, or limits all the functions of the Government.
“What are these functions? The Constitution authorizes Congress to regulate and control this great motive power, the power to levy and collect duties; and the objects for which duties are to be levied and collected are summarized in three great groups: First, ‘to pay debts.’ By this, the arm of the Government sweeps over all its past history and protects its honor by discharging all obligations that have come down from former years. Second, is ‘to provide for the common defense.’ By this, the mailed arm of the Government sweeps the great circle of the Union to defend it against foes from without and insurrection within. And, third, is to ‘promote the general welfare.’ These are the three great objects to which the Constitution applies the power of taxation. They are all great, beneficent, national objects, and can not be argued out of existence.
“The fifteen specifications following in the eighth section of the same article—such as the power to raise armies, to maintain a navy, to establish courts, to coin money, to regulate commerce with foreign nations andamong the several States, to promote science and the useful arts by granting patents and copyrights—are all specifications and limitations of the methods by which this great central power of taxation is to be applied to the common defense and the general welfare. And it is left to the discretion of Congress to determine how these objects shall be secured by the use of the powers thus conferred upon it.
“The men who created this Constitution also set it in operation, and developed their own idea of its character. That idea was unlike any other that then prevailed upon the earth. They made the general welfare of the people the great source and foundation of the common defense. In all the nations of the Old World the public defense was provided for by great standing armies, navies, and fortified posts, so that the nation might every moment be fully armed against danger from without or turbulence within. Our fathers said: ‘Though we will use the taxing power to maintain a small army and navy sufficient to keep alive the knowledge of war, yet the main reliance for our defense shall be the intelligence, culture, and skill of our people; a development of our own intellectual and material resources, which will enable us to do every thing that may be necessary to equip, clothe, and feed ourselves in time of war, and make ourselves intelligent, happy, and prosperous in peace.’
“To lay the foundation for the realization of these objects was a leading motive which led to the formation of the Constitution, and was the earliest and greatest object of solicitude in the First Congress.
“Two days after the votes for president were counted, and long before Washington was inaugurated, James Madison rose in the first House of Representatives, and for the first time moved to go into the Committee of the Whole on the state of the Union, for the express purpose of carrying out the theory of the Constitution to provide for the common defense and the general welfare, both by regulating commerce and protecting American manufactures. Thus, on the 8th of April, 1789, he opened a debate which lasted several weeks, in which was substantially developed every idea that has since appeared save one, the notion that it was unconstitutional to protect American industry. All other phases of the subject were fully and thoroughly handled in that great debate.
“Our fathers had been disciplined in the severe school of experience during the long period of colonial dependence. The heavy hand of British repression was laid upon all their attempts to become a self-supporting people. The navigation laws and commercial regulations of the mothercountry were based upon the theory that the colonies were founded for the sole purpose of raising up customers for her trade. They were allowed to purchase in British markets alone any manufactured article which England had to sell. In short, they were compelled to trade with England on her own terms; and whether buying or selling, the product must be carried in British bottoms at the carrier’s own price. In addition to this, a revenue tax of 5 per cent. was imposed on all colonial exports and imports.
“The colonists were doomed to the servitude of furnishing, by the simplest forms of labor, raw materials for the mother country, who arrogated to herself the sole right to supply her colonies with the finished product. To our fathers, independence was emancipation from this servitude. They knew that civilization advanced from the hunting to the pastoral state, from the pastoral to the agricultural, which has such charms for the distinguished gentleman from Virginia. But they also knew that no merely agricultural people had ever been able to rise to a high civilization and to self-supporting independence. They determined, therefore, to make their emancipation complete by adding to agriculture the mechanic arts, which in their turn would carry agriculture and all other industries to a still higher development, and place our people in the front rank of civilized and self-supporting nations. This idea inspired the legislation of all the earlier Congresses. It found expression in the first tariff act of 1789; in the higher rates of the act of 1790; and in the still larger schedule and increased rates of the acts of 1797 and 1800.
“In 1806 the non-importation act forbade the importation of British manufactures of silk, cloth, nails, spikes, brass, tin, and many other articles; and the eight years of embargo witnessed a great growth in American manufactures. When the non-importation act was repealed in 1814, John C. Calhoun assured the country that Congress would not fail to provide other adequate means for promoting the development of our industries; and, under his lead, the protective tariff of 1816 was enacted.
“I have given this brief historical sketch for the purpose of exhibiting the ideas out of which the tariff legislation of this country has sprung. It has received the support of the most renowned names in our early history; and, though the principle of protection has sometimes been carried to an unreasonable extreme, thus bringing reproach upon the system, ithas nevertheless borne many of the fruits which were anticipated by those who planted the germ.
“Gentlemen who oppose this view of public policy tell us that they favor a tariff for revenue alone. I therefore invite their attention to the revenue phase of the question. The estimated expenditures for the next fiscal year are two hundred and eighty and one-half million dollars, including interest on the public debt and the appropriations required by law for the sinking fund. The Secretary of the Treasury estimates the revenues which our present laws will furnish at $269,000,000; from customs, one hundred and thirty-three millions; from internal revenue, one hundred and twenty millions; and from miscellaneous sources, sixteen millions. He tells us that it will be necessary to cut down the expenditures eleven millions below the estimates in order to prevent a deficit of that amount. The revenues of the last fiscal year failed by three and a quarter millions to meet the expenditures required by law.
“In the face of these facts can we safely diminish our revenues? If we mean to preserve the public faith and meet all the necessities of the Government we can not reduce the present revenues a single dollar. Yet the majority of this House not only propose to reduce the internal tax on spirits and tobacco but they propose in this bill to reduce the revenues on customs by at least $6,000,000. To avoid the disgrace of a deficit they propose to suspend the operations of the sinking fund and thereby shake the foundation of the public credit. But they tell us that some of the reductions made in this bill will increase rather than diminish the revenue. Perhaps on a few articles this will be true; but as a whole it is undeniable that this bill will effect a considerable reduction in the revenues from customs.
“Gentlemen on the other side have been in the habit of denouncing our present tariff laws as destructive to, rather than productive of, revenue. Let me invite their attention to a few plain facts:
“During the fifteen years that preceded our late war—a period of so-called revenue tariffs—we raised from customs an average annual revenue of forty-seven and a half million dollars, never in any year receiving more than sixty-four millions. That system brought us a heavy deficit in 1860, so that Congress was compelled to borrow money to meet the ordinary expenses of the Government.
“Do they tell us that our present law fails to produce an adequaterevenue? They denounce it as not a revenue tariff. Let them wrestle with the following fact: During the eleven years that have passed since the close of the war we have averaged one hundred and seventy and one-half million dollars of revenue per annum from customs alone. Can they say that this is not a revenue tariff which produces more than three times as much revenue per annum as that law did which they delight to call ‘the revenue tariff?’ In one year, 1872, the revenues from the customs amounted to two hundred and twelve millions. Can they say that the present law does not produce revenue? It produces from textile fabrics alone more revenue than we ever raised from all sources under any tariff before the war. From this it follows that the assault upon the present law fails if made on the score of revenue alone.
“I freely admit that revenue is the primary object of taxation. That object is attained by existing law. But it is an incidental and vitally important object of the law to keep in healthy growth those industries which are necessary to the well-being of the whole country.
“Let us glance at the leading industries which, under the provisions of the existing law, are enabled to maintain themselves in the sharp struggle of competition with other countries. I will name them in five groups. In the first I place the textile fabrics, manufactures of cotton, wool, flax, hemp, jute, and silk. From these we received during the last fiscal year $50,000,000, which is more than one-third of all our customs revenue.
“It is said that a tax should not be levied upon the clothing of the people. This would be a valid objection were it not for the fact that objects of the highest national importance are secured by its imposition. That forty-five millions of people should be able to clothe themselves without helpless dependence upon other nations is a matter of transcendent importance to every citizen. What American can be indifferent to the fact that in the year 1875 the State of Massachusetts alone produced 992,000,000 yards of textile fabrics, and in doing so consumed seventy-five million dollars’ worth of the products of the fields and flocks, and gave employment to 120,000 artisans? There is a touch of pathos in the apologetic reply of Governor Spottswood, an early colonial Governor of Virginia, when he wrote to his British superiors:
“‘The people of Virginia, more of necessity than inclination, attempt to clothe themselves with their own manufactures.... It is certainly necessary to divert their application to some commodity less prejudicialto the trade of England.’—Bancroft’sHistory of the United States, vol. iv, page 104.
“Thanks to our independence, such apologies are no longer needed. Some of the rates on the textiles are exorbitant and ought to be reduced; but the general principle which pervades the group is wise and beneficent, not only as a means of raising revenue, but as a measure of national economy.
“In the second group I have placed the metals, including glass and chemicals. Though the tariff upon this group has been severely denounced in this debate, the rate does not average more than thirty-six per cent.ad valorem, and the group produced about $14,000,000 of revenue last year. Besides serving as a source of public revenue, what intelligent man fails to see that the metals are the basis of all the machinery, tools, and implements of every industry? More than any other in the world’s history, this is the age when inventive genius is bending all its energies to devise means to increase the effectiveness of human labor. The mechanical wonders displayed at our Centennial Exposition are a sufficient illustration.
“The people that can not make their own implements of industry must be content to take a very humble and subordinate place in the family of nations. The people that can not, at any time, by their own previous training, arm and equip themselves for war, must be content to exist by the sufferance of others.
“I do not say that no rates in this group are too high. Some of them can safely be reduced. But I do say these industries could not have attained their present success without the national care; and to abandon them now will prevent their continued prosperity.
“In the third group I place wines, spirits, and tobacco in its various forms which come from abroad. On these, rates of duty range from eighty-five to ninety-five per cent.ad valorem; and from them we collected last year $10,000,000 of revenue. The wisdom of this tax will hardly be disputed by any one.
“In the fourth group I have placed imported provisions which come in competition with the products of our own fields and herds, including breadstuffs, salt, rice, sugar, molasses, and spices. On these provisions imported into this country we collected last year a revenue of $42,000,000, $37,000,000 of which was collected on sugar. Of the duty on theprincipal article of this group I shall speak further on in the discussion.
“On the fifth group, comprising leather and manufactures of leather, we received about $3,000,000 of revenue.
“On the imports included in the five groups I have mentioned, which comprise the great manufacturing industries of the country, we collect $119,000,000—more than ninety per cent. of all our customs revenue. I ask if it be not an object of the highest national importance to keep alive and in vigorous health and growth the industries included in these groups? What sort of people should we be if we did not keep them alive? Suppose we were to follow the advice of the distinguished gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Tucker] when he said:
“‘Why should me make pig-iron when with Berkshire pigs raised upon our farms we can buy more iron pigs from England than we can get by trying to make them ourselves? We can get more iron pigs from England for Berkshire pigs than we can from the Pennsylvania manufacturers. Why, then, should I not be permitted to send there for them?...
“‘What a market for our raw material, for our products, if we only would take the hand which Great Britain extends to us for free-trade between us!’
“For a single season, perhaps, his plan might be profitable to the consumers of iron; but if his policy were adopted as a permanent one, it would reduce us to a merely agricultural people, whose chief business would be to produce the simplest raw materials by the least skill and culture, and let the men of brains of other countries do our thinking for us, and provide for us all products requiring the cunning hand of the artisan, while we would be compelled to do the drudgery for ourselves and for them.
“The gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Tucker] is too good a logician not to see that the theory he advocates can only be realized in a state of universal peace and brotherhood among the nations; and, in developing his plan, he says:
“‘Commerce, Mr. Chairman, links all mankind in one common brotherhood of mutual dependence and interests, and thus creates that unity of our race which makes the resources of all the property of each and every member. We can not if we would, and should not if we could, remain isolated and alone. Men under the benign influence ofChristianity yearn for intercourse, for the interchange of thought and the products of thought as a means of a common progress toward a nobler civilization....
“‘Mr. Chairman, I can not believe this is according to the Divine plan. Christianity bids us seek, in communion with our brethren of every race and clime, the blessings they can afford us, and to bestow in return upon them those with which our new continent is destined to fill the world.’
“This, I admit, is a grand conception, a beautiful vision of the time when all the nations shall dwell in peace; when all will be, as it were, one nation, each furnishing to the others what they can not profitably produce, and all working harmoniously together in the millennium of peace. If all the kingdoms of the world should become the kingdom of the Prince of Peace, then I admit that universal free-trade ought to prevail. But that blessed era is yet too remote to be made the basis of the practical legislation of to-day. We are not yet members of the ‘parliament of man, the federation of the world.’ For the present, the world is divided into separate nationalities; and that other divine command still applies to our situation: ‘He that provideth not for his own household has denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel;’ and, until that better era arrives, patriotism must supply the place of universal brotherhood.
“For the present Gortschakoff can do more good to the world by taking care of Russia. The great Bismarck can accomplish more for his era by being, as he is, a German to the core, and promoting the welfare of the German Empire. Let Beaconsfield take care of England, and McMahon of France, and let Americans devote themselves to the welfare of America. When each does his best for his own nation to promote prosperity, justice, and peace, all will have done more for the world than if all had attempted to be cosmopolitans rather than patriots. [Applause.]
“But I wish to say, Mr. Chairman, that I have no sympathy with those who approach this question only from the stand-point of their own local, selfish interest. When a man comes to me and says, ‘Put a prohibitory duty on the foreign article which competes with my product, that I may get rich more rapidly,’ he does not excite my sympathy; he repels me; and when another says, ‘Give no protection to the manufacturing industries, for I am not a manufacturer and do not care to have them sustained,’ I say that he, too, is equally mercenary and unpatriotic.If we were to legislate in that spirit, I might turn to the gentleman from Chicago and say, ‘Do not ask me to vote for an appropriation to build a court-house or a post-office in your city; I never expect to get any letters from that office, and the people of my district never expect to be in your courts.’ If we were to act in this spirit of narrow isolation we should be unfit for the national positions we occupy.
“Too much of our tariff discussions have been warped by narrow and sectional considerations. But when we base our action upon the conceded national importance of the great industries I have referred to, when we recognize the fact that artisans and their products are essential to the well-being of our country, it follows that there is no dweller in the humblest cottage on our remotest frontier who has not a deep personal interest in the legislation that shall promote these great national industries. Those arts that enable our nation to rise in the scale of civilization bring their blessings to all, and patriotic citizens will cheerfully bear a fair share of the burden necessary to make their country great and self-sustaining. I will defend a tariff that is national in its aims, that protects and sustains those interests without which the nation can not become great and self-sustaining.
“So important, in my view, is the ability of the nation to manufacture all these articles necessary to arm, equip, and clothe our people, that if it could not be secured in any other way I would vote to pay money out of the Federal Treasury to maintain government iron and steel, woolen and cotton mills, at whatever cost. Were we to neglect these great interests and depend upon other nations, in what a condition of helplessness would we find ourselves when we should be again involved in war with the very nations on whom we were depending to furnish us these supplies? The system adopted by our fathers is wiser, for it so encourages the great national industries as to make it possible at all times for our people to equip themselves for war, and at the same time increase their intelligence and skill so as to make them better fitted for all the duties of citizenship both in war and in peace. We provide for the common defense by a system which promotes the general welfare.
“I have tried thus summarily to state the grounds on which a tariff which produces the necessary revenue and at the same time promotes American manufactures, can be sustained by large-minded men, for national reasons. How high the rates of such a tariff ought to be is a question on which there may fairly be differences of opinion.
“Fortunately or unfortunately, on this question I have long occupied a position between two extremes of opinion. I have long believed, and I still believe, that the worst evil which has afflicted the interests of the American artisans and manufacturers has been the tendency to extremes in our tariff legislation. Our history for the last fifty years has been a repetition of the same mistake. One party comes into power, and believing that a protective tariff is a good thing establishes a fair rate of duty. Not content with that, they say: ‘This works well, let us have more of it,’ and they raise the rates still higher, and perhaps go beyond the limits of national interest.
“Every additional step in that direction increases the opposition and threatens the stability of the whole system. When the policy of increase is pushed beyond a certain point, the popular reaction sets in; the opposite party gets into power and cuts down the high rates. Not content with reducing the rates that are unreasonable, they attack and destroy the whole protective system. Then follows a deficit in the Treasury, the destruction of manufacturing interests, until the reaction again sets in, the free-traders are overthrown, and a protective system is again established. In not less than four distinct periods during the last fifty years has this sort of revolution taken place in our industrial system. Our great national industries have thus been tossed up and down between two extremes of opinion.
“During my term of service in this House I have resisted the effort to increase the rates of duty whenever I thought an increase would be dangerous to the stability of our manufacturing interests; and by doing so, I have sometimes been thought unfriendly to the policy of protecting American industry. When the necessity of the revenues and the safety of our manufactures warranted, I have favored a reduction of rates; and these reductions have aided to preserve the stability of the system. In one year, soon after the close of the war, we raised $212,000,000 of revenue from customs.
“In 1870 we reduced the custom duties by the sum of twenty-nine and one-half millions of dollars. In 1872 they were again reduced by the sum of forty-four and one half millions. Those reductions were in the main wise and judicious; and although I did not vote for them all, yet they have put the fair-minded men of this country in a position where they can justly resist any considerable reduction below the present rates.
“My view of the danger of extreme positions on the questions of tariff rates may be illustrated by a remark made by Horace Greeley in the last conversation I ever had with that distinguished man. Said he:
“‘My criticism of you is that you are not sufficiently high protective in your views.’
“I replied:
“‘What would you advise?’
“He said:
“‘If I had my way—if I were king of this country—I would put a duty of $100 a ton on pig-iron and a proportionate duty on every thing else that can be produced in America. The result would be that our people would be obliged to supply their own wants; manufactures would spring up; competition would finally reduce prices; and we should live wholly within ourselves.’
“I replied that the fatal objection to his theory was that no man is king of this country, with power to make his policy permanent. But as all our policies depend upon popular support, the extreme measure proposed would beget an opposite extreme, and our industries would suffer from violent reactions. For this reason I believe that we ought to seek that point of stable equilibrium somewhere between a prohibitory tariff on the one hand, and a tariff that gives no protection on the other. What is that point of stable equilibrium? In my judgment it is this: a rate so high that foreign producers can not flood our markets and break down our home manufacturers, but not so high as to keep them altogether out, enabling our manufacturers to combine and raise the prices, nor so high as to stimulate an unnatural and unhealthy growth of manufactures.
“In other words, I would have the duty so adjusted that every great American industry can fairly live and make fair profits; and yet so low that if our manufacturers attempted to put up prices unreasonably, the competition from abroad would come in and bring down prices to a fair rate. Such a tariff I believe will be supported by the great majority of Americans. We are not far from having such a tariff in our present law. In some respects we have departed from that standard. Wherever it does, we should amend it, and by so doing we shall secure stability and prosperity.
“This brings me to the consideration of the pending bill. It was my hope, at the beginning of the present session, that the Committee of Ways and Means would enter upon a revision of the tariff in the spirit I haveindicated. The Secretary of the Treasury suggested in his annual report that a considerable number of articles which produced but a small amount of revenue, and were not essential to the prosperity of our manufacturers, could be placed upon the free list, thus simplifying the law and making it more consistent in its details. I was ready to assist in such a work of revision; but the committee had not gone far before it was evident that they intended to attack the whole system, and, as far as possible, destroy it. The results of their long and arduous labors are embodied in the pending bill.
“Some of the rates can be slightly reduced without serious harm; but many of the reductions proposed in this bill will be fatal. It is related that when a surgeon was probing an emperor’s wound to find the ball, he said:
“‘Can your Majesty allow me to go deeper?’
“His Majesty replied:
“‘Probe a little deeper and you will find the Emperor.’
“It is that little deeper probing by this bill that will touch the vital interests of this country and destroy them.
“The chief charge I make against this bill is that it seeks to cripple the protective features of the law. It increases rates where an increase is not necessary, and it cuts them down where cutting will kill. One of the wisest provisions of our present law is the establishment of a definite free list. From year to year when it has been found that any article could safely be liberated from duty it has been put upon the free list. A large number of raw materials have thus been made free of duty. This has lightened the burdens of taxation, and at the same time aided the industries of the country.
“To show the progress that has been made in this direction, it should be remembered that in 1867 the value of all articles imported free of duty was but $39,000,000, while in 1877 the free imports amounted to $181,000,000.
“As I have already said, the Secretary of the Treasury recommends a still further increase of the free list. But this bill abolishes the free list altogether and imposes duties upon a large share of articles now free. And this is done in order to make still greater reduction upon articles that must be protected if their manufacture is maintained in this country.
“Let me notice a few of the great industries at which this bill strikes. In the group of textile fabrics, of which I have spoken, reductions aremade upon the manufactures of cotton which will stop three-quarters of the cotton mills of the country, and hopelessly prostrate the business. Still greater violence is done to the wool and woolen interests. The attempt has been made to show that the business of wool-growing has declined in consequence of our present law, and the fact has been pointed out that the number of sheep has been steadily falling off in the Eastern States. The truth is that sheep-culture in the United States was never in so healthy a condition as it is to-day. In 1860 our total wool product was sixty millions of pounds. In 1877 we produced two hundred and eight millions of pounds.
“It is true that there is not now so large a number of sheep in the Eastern States as there were a few years since; but the center of that industry has been shifted. Of the thirty-five and a half millions of sheep now in the United States, fourteen and a half millions are in Texas and the States and Territories west of the Rocky Mountains. California alone has six and a half millions of sheep. Not the least important feature of this interest is the facility it offers for cheap animal food. A great French statesman has said: ‘It is more important to provide food than clothing,’ and the growth of sheep accomplishes both objects. Ninety-five per cent. of all the woolen fabrics manufactured in this country are now made of native wool.
“The tariff on wools and woolens was adopted in 1867, after a most careful and thorough examination of both the producing and manufacturing interests. It was the result of an adjustment between the farmers and manufacturers, and has been advantageous to both. A small reduction of the rates could be made without injury.
“Both of these interests consented to a reduction, and submitted their plan to the Committee of Ways and Means. But instead of adopting it, the committee have struck those interests down, and put a dead level ad valorem duty upon all wools. The chairman tells us that the committee had sought to do away with thead valoremsystem, because it gave rise to fraudulent invoices and undervaluation. Yet on the interest that yields twenty millions of revenue, he proposes to strike down the specific duties and put the interest upon one dead level ofad valoremduty without regard to quality.
“I would not introduce sectional topics in this discussion, but I must notice one curious feature of this bill. In the great group of provisions, on which nearly fifty millions of revenue are paid into the Treasury,I find that thirty-seven millions of that amount come from imported sugar. No one would defend the levying of so heavy a tax upon a necessary article of food were it not that a great agricultural interest is thereby protected, and that interest is mainly confined to the State of Louisiana. I am glad that the Government has given its aid to the State, for not a pound of sugar could be manufactured there if the tariff law did not protect it.
“As the law now stands, the averagead valoremduty on sugar is sixty-two and one-half per cent. But what has this bill done? The complaint is made by its advocates that the rates are now too high. The rates on all dutiable articles average about forty-two per cent.; yet on sugar the average is sixty-two and one-half per cent., greatly above the average. This bill puts up the average duty on sugar to about seventy per cent. This one interest, which is already protected by a duty much higher than the average, is granted a still higher rate, while other interests, now far below the average rate, are put still lower. Metals, that now average but thirty-six per cent.ad valorem, far less than the general average—but little more than half of the rate on sugar—are cut down still more, while the protection of the sugar interest is made still higher.
“If the planters of Louisiana were to get the benefit there would be some excuse for the increase; but what is the fact? One thousand four hundred and fifteen million pounds of sugar were imported into this country last year, but not one pound of refined sugar; every pound was imported in the crude form, going into the hands of about twenty-five gentlemen, mostly in the city of New York, who refine every pound of this enormous quantity of imported sugar. This bill increases the rates on the high grades of sugar far more than on the lower grades, and makes the importation of any finished sugar impossible. It strengthens and makes absolute the monopoly already given to the refining interest; yet we are told that this is a revenue-reform tariff.
“Before closing I wish to notice one thing which I believe has not been mentioned in this debate. A few years ago we had a considerable premium on gold, and as our tariff duties were paid in coin, there was thus created an increase in the tariff rates. In 1875, for instance, the average currency value of coin was one hundred and fourteen cents; in 1876, one hundred and eleven cents; in 1877, one hundred and four cents. Now, thanks to the resumption law and the rate of our exchanges and credit, the premium on gold is almost down to zero. But this fall inthe premium has operated as a steady reduction of the tariff rates, because the duties were paid in gold and the goods were sold in currency.
“Now, when gentlemen say that the rates were high a few years ago, it should be remembered that they have been falling year by year, as the price of gold has been coming down. When, therefore, gentlemen criticise the rates as fixed in the law of 1872, they should remember that the fall in the premium on gold has wrought a virtual reduction of fourteen per cent. in the tariff rates.
“Mr. Chairman, the Committee of Ways and Means has done a large amount of work on this bill. But the views which have found expression in his bill must be criticised without regard to personal consideration. A bill so radical in its character, so dangerous to our business prosperity, would work infinite mischief at this time, when the country is just recovering itself from a long period of depression and getting again upon solid ground, just coming up out of the wild sea of panic and distress which has tossed us so long.
“Let it be remembered that twenty-two per cent. of all the laboring people of this country are artisans engaged in manufactures. Their culture has been fostered by our tariff laws. It is their pursuits and the skill which they have developed that produced the glory of our centennial exhibition. To them the country owes the splendor of the position it holds before the world more than to any other equal number of our citizens. If this bill becomes a law, it strikes down their occupation and throws into the keenest distress the brightest and best elements of our population.
“It is not simply a stalking-horse upon which gentlemen can leap to show their horsemanship in debate; it is not an innocent lay-figure upon which gentlemen may spread the gaudy wares of their rhetoric without harm; but it is a great, dangerous monster, a very Polyphemus which stalks through the land.Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum.If its eye be not out, let us take it out and end the agony.” [Applause on the Republican side.]
But the correlative of revenue is expenditure. Only one other man of this age ever attempted a philosophy of national expenditure besides Garfield—that was Gladstone. No other American ever attempted to regulate appropriations by a philosophical principle. No other man ever attempted to reducethe fabulous and irregular outlay of the Government to a science. Of Garfield’s studies in this direction we have spoken elsewhere. On January 23, 1872, upon the introduction of his first bill as Chairman of the Committee on Appropriations he delivered an elaborate speech on the subject of