will ensue before any true adjustment of duties can be made to present conditions, although, both political parties now agree that great changes are absolutely necessary. How can we separate this question from party politics?
It has always seemed to me very absurd, even grotesquely so, that men who are accustomed to put confidence in each other in the conduct of all their private affairs as well as in their town and city work; who trust each other in every walk of life; who serve together on boards of directors in savings banks, insurance companies, trust companies, and the like, and who adjust all differences of judgment in a reasonable manner, yet when this subject of tariff legislation comes up impute to each other, or else sustain newspapers that impute to each other, every form of insincerity, untruth, fraud, and malignant selfishness.
There is nothing so foolish as the imputations which are put upon the advocates of free trade by their opponents, except the corresponding imputations put by their opponents upon the mass of the advocates of protection, of lack of care or consideration for the public welfare. The masses are sincere on either side, however time serving and incapable their political representatives may be.
Conceive what the conditions of this country would be if the ideas which the Cobden Club represents had not prevailed, and if our wheat and dairy products were boycotted as our pork is in Germany; or if our cotton were taxed as it was before the markets of Great Britain were made free. In 1880 there were nearly eight million men occupied in agriculture; now there are ten million, more or less. In 1880 seventeen per cent of the product of agriculture found a home market only by sale for export; now about twelve per cent. If we did not exchange this product for other products, we could not sell it. If we could not sell it for export, over a million men would be driven from the field to the factory and to the workshop.
When I listen to the foolish talk of partisans on either side, and witness the ill-judged contention on the tariff question, I am sometimes inclined to exclaim, "A plague on both your houses!" Is it not time that this method of imputing wholly selfish or bad motives should cease, and that any one or every one who indulges in it should be held in contempt as an example of intellectual stupefaction?
It was well said by President Cleveland when he so bravely brought the subject to an issue, "What we have to deal with is a condition and not a theory."
Let us consider this condition, find out exactly what it is, and then see what we have to do in the matter, each man on his own account.
I have never known any intelligent advocate of a tariff for
