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The coal in the great American coal fields is much nearer the surface, and consequently more cheaply worked, than the coal in England; iron is as plentiful, and it is near the coal; labour, which has been much dearer there, is now falling to the English level. Tariff or no tariff, America will probably keep her own market for the heavier and coarser goods.
He would, if he could, have taken his State out of the Union, because he and the South did not like the tariff. He had the right, as a Senator in Congress, to bring all the influence he could command to compel Congress to modify the tariff, or abolish it altogether. And with this he ought to have been contented.
At present, with such a debt as we have, the tariff is no longer a question with us. The government must have its million a day; and as no tax is less offensive to the people than a duty on imported commodities, we seem compelled to a practically protective system for many years to come.
Canada had asserted her right to control her tariff and commercial treaty relations as she pleased. Now she used this freedom to offer, without asking any return in kind, tariff privileges to the mother country.
The tariff question had been sadly in need of a definite answer, the people had been educated upon it and had given a decision, but the electoral system placed in power the party pledged to the theories of the minority. Aside from the unusual effect of our machinery of election, many small elements entered into the Republican victory.
In no one case in my recollection do they exceed 10 per cent. But then the opponents of Tariff Reform say: "Yes. That is all very well. But though you may begin with moderate duties, you are bound to proceed to higher ones. It is in the nature of things that you should go on increasing and increasing, and in the end we shall all be ruined." I must say that seems to me great nonsense.
All this is called "developing our resources," but it is, in truth, the great plan of all living on each other. The greatest job of all is a protective tariff. It includes the biggest log-rolling and the widest corruption of economic and political ideas. It was said that there would be a rebellion if the taxes were not taken off whiskey and tobacco, which taxes were paid into the public Treasury.
There is another point, whatever might be the influence of the tariff upon the United States, it is as pernicious to the West as it is to the South; and further, that Louisiana, which is a Southern State and a seceded State, has always voted along with Pennsylvania until last year in favour of protection protection for its sugar, whilst Pennsylvania wished protection for its coal and iron.
That State, as everybody knows, is the great iron and steel manufacturing State of the Union, and its representatives in Congress were in that day, as they are in this, the highest of high protective tariff advocates. Before entering Congress, William D. Kelley for a number of years had been a judge of one of the more important courts of Philadelphia.
After the extinction of the public debt it is not probable that any adjustment of the tariff upon principles satisfactory to the people of the Union will until a remote period, if ever, leave the Government without a considerable surplus in the Treasury beyond what may be required for its current service.
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