The Arena. Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891. Various
with subjects where the conditions and sympathies of men and women play a large part, and where human passions are deeply engaged. In fields like these, where the personal equation of humanity plays a controlling part, it is absurd to attempt to argue as if we were dealing with a mathematical formula. There may be a philosophy of political economy as there is of history; there may be scientific methods of dealing with it and certain economic laws, subject to many exceptions, which we may consider to be established, but nevertheless it is as far from being an exact science as one can conceive. The exact science notion is the misconception of cloistered learning which can build impregnable systems where there are none to attack them, but which has no idea of the practical difficulties of an unsympathetic world where the precious system must meet every possible objection and not merely those devised by its framers. In discussing a question of political economy, therefore, it is well to bear in mind that we are handling a subject where new facts are always entering in to modify old conclusions, and where there are many conditions, the effect of which it is impossible to calculate.
In the third place, the ardent tariff reformer at the present moment always discourses upon his subject as if he had some perfectly new truth to lay before the world from which it would be as impossible to differ, unless one was illiterate or corrupt, as from the conclusion of Galileo in regard to the movement of the earth. In one of our recent political campaigns I quoted an argument of Hamilton’s in favor of protection from his famous Report of Manufactures. Thereupon one of my opponents in a public speech, referring to this quotation, said it would be as sensible to adopt Hamilton’s views on the tariff as to go back to stage coaches simply because those vehicles were the means of conveyance in Hamilton’s time. I could not help wondering what my learned opponent would have thought if I had retorted that, by parity of reasoning, we ought to reject the “Wealth of Nations” because Adam Smith flourished a little earlier than Hamilton, and stage coaches were used in his day also. The simple truth is that there is nothing very new to-day in the question of free trade or protection. The subject is one which has been under consideration for some time. It has received great developments in the last hundred years, and is still so far from the last word that it is safest not to be too dogmatic about it.
In this matter of the tariff, then, we have before us a question which is not new, which is not moral, but which deals simply with matters of self-interest according to the dictates of an enlightened selfishness. What is the condition of the question of free trade to-day in its practical aspect? Fifty years ago, roughly speaking, the movement for it in England became successful, and the English people abandoned a protective tariff which they had maintained for some centuries and adopted the free trade tariff which they have to-day. The latter system has had a thorough trial in England under the most favorable circumstances. If there is any country in the world which, by its situation, its history and its condition, is adapted for free trade, England is that country. If free trade, therefore, is the certain and enormous benefit which its advocates assert, and if it is the only true system for nations to adopt, its history in England ought to prove the truth of these propositions. How near has free trade come to performing all that its original promoters claimed in its behalf? How brilliant has been its success in practise? One thing at least is certain: it has not been such an overwhelming and glittering success as to convince any other civilized nation of its merits. England stands alone to-day, as she has stood for the last fifty years, the one free trade nation in the world. Possibly England of all the nations may be right and everybody else may be wrong, but there is, at least, a division of opinion so respectable that we may assume, with all due reverence for our free trade friends, that there are two sides to this question as to many others.
Let us look for a moment at some of the early promises. Free trade, according to its originators, was to usher in an era of peace and good-will. It was, in its extension, to put an end to wars. It has certainly not brought peace to England, which has had a petty war of some sort on her hands almost every year since the free trade gospel was preached. I do not mean to say that this is in the least due to free trade, but it is quite obvious that free trade did not stop fighting. The prosperity of England has, of course, been undeniably great, and it has been especially great among the vast industrial and manufacturing interests which supported the free trade policy. Possibly they have thriven better under this system than they would have done under the old one, but this must remain mere speculation, and as we know that some protected countries have prospered as much if not more than England, the prosperity argument has little weight. There are, however, other fields where we need not rely on conjecture. Has free trade been an unquestionable benefit not merely to the industrial but to all classes in England? It certainly has not put an end to strikes, for strikes have never been more frequent anywhere than they have been in Great Britain of late years. It does not seem to have perceptibly diminished poverty, if we may judge from such recent books as “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London,” and “Through Darkest England.” The state of Ireland has not been indicative of a healing and life-giving prosperity. In a word the great problems of labor, of poverty, and of over-population seem as severe in free trade England as in protective countries. Free trade again does not seem to have prevented the rise of trusts and syndicates, nor to have stopped the accumulation of vast wealth in a few hands. In other words, there is no evidence that free trade has had any effect on the most serious questions of the day, which touch the welfare of the great masses of the people. All that can be said is that the manufacturing and industrial interests of Great Britain seem to have thriven under it. For a system which arrogates to itself absolute truth, this is a meagre showing.
Free trade has not demonstrated its infallibility in the single country where it has been tried. The question, therefore, for the people of the United States is, whether under their conditions it is well to make the change which England made nearly fifty years ago, and to adopt a system of which the success has been doubtful in its chosen field. In order to decide the question intelligently we must put aside all vague confusions about an exact science which will work the same results everywhere because it operates under an immutable law. Even if free trade had been a brilliant and conclusive success in England, of which there is no proof, does it follow that it would be a better system for us? We have, to begin with, in our possession, instead of a small island a continent capable of almost every variety of natural production and mechanical industry. This is also a new country and a young country. We have been developing our resources rapidly for the last hundred years, but they are still not fully developed. The policy of the United States, although with many fluctuations, has been in the main to develop all our natural and mechanical opportunities to their fullest extent. The free trader is always ready with the terse statement that, “You cannot make yourself rich by taxing yourself,” followed by a freshly humorous allusion to lifting one’s self by one’s boot-straps. He then feels that he has met the case. If political economy and the financial policy of nations were as simple as this argument seems to imply, life would be an easier thing both for nations and individuals. Unluckily the problems of mankind which engage their interests and passions cannot be solved by cheap aphorisms. The statement of the free trader about taxing yourself in order to grow rich has a final and conclusive sound, but it is simply sound. There are, for example, plenty of towns in New England which have built factories and relieved certain persons from taxation in order to secure their capital and industry, and the additional population and the increased taxes which have thus come to the town have made it rich or at least richer than it was before. It is quite possible to adjust taxes or to offer bounties or premiums in such a way as to add to the aggregate wealth of the community.
The free trader’s question is not really pertinent. The point is not whether you will tax yourself in order to grow rich, but whether you will so frame your tax laws and so raise your revenues as to discriminate in favor of your own production and your own wages against the production and wages of other countries, or whether, on the other hand, you will let everything strictly alone and leave the country to come out the best way it can. The general policy of the United States has been to give encouragement to the domestic producer and manufacturer, and maintenance to high rates of wages, by laying duties in such a way as to discriminate in their favor against those outside. The result, speaking broadly, has been to put the United States as a competitor into countless lines of new industries. The effect of the competition of the United States, added to that already existing in the rest of the world, has been to reduce the world’s prices in the products of those industries according to the well-known laws of competition. Hence comes