We greatly overrate the importance of the English and other foreign grain markets.

When the British corn laws were repealed, the inducement was held out by the English, and the hope entertained by our grain growers, that a large market would open there for our products.

But, in twelve years after the repeal of the corn laws, from 1848 to 1860, our exports of breadstuffs to England had decreased, in proportion to our population, almost thirty per cent., even by English estimate twenty-seven and a half per cent.

During the same years the British imports of grain from this country were only one fifth their imports from other countries.

Milwaukee and Chicago often send off in ten days more grain and flour than England has taken from us each year, on the average, for twenty years past.

The eleven Northwestern States, in 1860, produced $900,000,000 worth of grain and provisions for consumption and export, of which only $25,000,000 worth went to foreign countries, and less than half of that to Great Britain, while our Eastern States and the South took $190,248,655 worth, or more than seven and a half times as much as all foreign countries. New England is a larger market for us than Old England. The annual average of our exports to Great Britain from 1846 to 1860 inclusive, is computed at only $6,048,645.

Factories in New England are far better for our country than in England; and a large increase of mills and factories in the West would be a still greater benefit.

By the Reports of Hon. Horace Capron, U. S. Commissioner of Agriculture, our total wheat exports, for forty-three years past, were 670,000,000 bushels-with flour reduced to wheat equal only to the product of the three years, 1866-17-'8. Of this, Great Britain took 95 per cent. of our exports to Europe; yet from 1857 to 1868 we furnished but a quarter of her imports, Europe -ending the rest from her nearer markets, and with her cheaper farm labor. There is no prospect of this meagre result improving, for railroads are building to the great grain fields of Hungary and the Black Sea, to cheapen and facilitate their transportion of grain.

President Grant thoughtfully suggested, in his Annual Message to Congress, that "The extension of railroads in Europe and the East, is bringing into competition with our farm products like products of other countries," and that, therefore, "self-interest, if not selfpreservation, dictates caution in disturbing any industrial interest of the country."

Distance, and the higher wages our civilization demands, put the Western farmer at such disadvantage against the grain grower in Europe that competition is hopeless, except in seasons of great scarcity abroad.

The plain remedy is to increase our home consumers by increasing our home manufactures, and to vary our crops to meet these larger home markets. It is not alone his grain and provisions, which will keep and bear transportation, by which the farmer lives and gains, but his perishable fruits and vegetables, which must find market soon and near home, are, or should be, of great value. Put the factory and farm together, and these find larger market, the farmer is saved from dependence on one crop alone; his land is kept in better heart by this variety of products. Mildew, aad blight and rust, which come from exhaustion of the soil, the result of the constant export of grain, and the want of change in products, will cease, and good farming become possible and profitable, and the father be able to hand over his farm to his sons, not impoverished, but enriched and full of promise of a more fruitful future.

NO COUNTRY, EXCLUSIVELY AGRICULTURAL,} EVER BECAME PERMANENTLY RICH. To take from the earth and not wear it out, the farmer must give back. Let this be done, and crops increase with the growth of populat on; neglect this, and WHEN decay shall come to the best land is but a question of time, COME IT

WILL INEVITABLY.

In New England, with a poor soil, crops increase; in the West, with a rich soil, they decrease in the average. In New England, factory and farm are near each other, making a home market for the farmer's produce, and enabling him to get manure to enrich his soil.

In the West, our produce being carried off, the soil loses thousands of tons of its most precious constituents for crops every year, and receives no equivalent. A distinguished agriculturist said, in 1856: "It would be im

proper to estimate the annual waste to the country at less than an amount equal to the mineral constituents of 1,500,000,000 bushels of corn""" Put the factory beside the farm, and this drain is stopped.

are

WE CANNOT HAVE THE BEST FARMING, UNTIL WE HAVE THE BEST MANUFACTURING IN VARIED FORMS AND MATERIALS, EACH AN INDISPENSABLE HELP TO THE GROWTH AND PERFECTNESS OF THE OTHER We must remember, too, that it is not the quantity but the value of our grain exported that we to consider, and we find that when the foreign demand is large, the price paid is low, and our farmers gain little of course: in the year 1860, when exports were so trifling in quantity, our wheat was at $1.75 per bushel in England. In 1868, when the much larger per centage of our products was taken in Europe, the price was down to $1.35, leaving to the Western farmer about $1.06 in the year of the smaller demand, and only 66 cents when the larger quantity was taken. The rule being, that when rates are anything like remunerative, Europe buys but little of our farm products, say three-eighths of the total exports; when the rates are ruinous to the cultivator, they rise to something approaching three-fifths.

FREE TRADE ASSERTIONS VS. FACTS. ARE TARIFFS ADDED AS TAXES TO THE PRICE OF GOODS?

Were we free from debt, and with a surplus revenue, there might be some seeming reason for free trade talk. Even then it would be a disastrous policy; but with our imperative need for a large revenue, free trade is shameful repudiation and national bankruptcy, and yet this time is chosen to agitate in its favor all over the land, under the auspices of the "American Free Trade League," with its headquarters and support among New York importers, and men closely linked wiih foreign manufacturers!

What class or party of men dare propose to raise over $300,000,000 yearly by direct internal taxation? None are rash enough to dig their own political graves by such proposal or suggestion. Even the free traders are copelled to admit the need and justice of a tariff for revenue, and by that admission overthrow their own shallow sophisms, and are not fairly free traders, but rather pretenders to belief in an impracticable theory.

Our importations should not go beyond $400,000,000 yearly, and ought to be less, and we must raise $150,000,000 from tariffs on these imports.

This admits of but a small reduction in the amount to be raised in this manner, and a little common sense and patriotism should be enough to settle the whole matter for years to

come.

This new outburst of free trade zeal at such a time is suspicious. Political demagogues, under guise of impartiality, can use it to ride into power on complications they thus ferment, but more especially is it a struggle for the control of our market by British manufact

urers.

Great Britain has cheap labor, great capital at low interest, large experience in trade and mauufactures, and narrow territory. We have labor better paid, cotton, wooi, coal, iron, en

ergy and skill, and ample room for farm and factory to be neighbors and allies.

The English preach free trade to us, because low tariffs here will give them advantage in the trade with us, which they greatly need, for, if England loses the United States as her largest and best customer, her industrial and financial supremacy is gone. A few millions spent to demoralize us is but dust in the balance.

Even if our tariff is not changed, the keeping up a feeling which would prevent our capital from investments in new industries would pay them well.

So we have a pretended "revenue reform," into which some well-meaning men are drawn, which would levy a stiff tariff on tea, coffee and other articles we do not and cannot produce, and reduce the duties as far as possible on the article we can and do produce, and in which, with fair protection, we can compete with the foreigner.

Its object is to cut down the duties on articles which the British, and others abroad, make and would sell us, and of course, they are willing our tea, sugar, coffee, etc., should pay

our revenue.

To build up this absurd "reform" and to make protection to home industry seem a base wrong, we hear the loud assertions of free traders and self styled "revenue reformers," that a tariff is a tax, and adds its amount not only to the imported article on which it is levied, but to the price of the same article made here; and that this added price goes to the manufacturing "monopolists," who thus adroitly rob the people. One of the League lecturers said, "On pig, bar and railroad iron, the people last year paid a tax, in the increased price and the duty, of over $45.000,000, of which Government got but $5,000,000, and $40,000,000 went into the pockets of the iron men." The "Free Trader," parades the Tax on a man in his clothes," and the "Tax on a farmer's bedroom" in the same style.

Like assertions are made touching "tax" on lumber, woolens, etc. The aim of all this is plainly to urge the British system of levying tariffs on articles we do not and cannot produce, and reducing or abolishing the duties on articles we can manufacture here. scheme is of British origin, and parent and child are alike.

This

An English writer well says of the effect of the system there on the people, "It hits them doubly, and they suffer both ways; the value of their wages is lessened by the duties charged on these necessaries of food they consume, and their wages are reduced by the free admission of foreign manufactures competing with those they produce." Shall we adopt this miserable system-this mongrel called "free trade, with tariff for revenue?"

Before entering on the interesting process of confronting assertions with facts, let me remark that even if these assertions are true, a vital aspect of the case is ignored, and it is but half stated, such half-statements being often worse and more deceptive than falsehoods. No allowance is made for difference in wages, taxes or interest, or for the benefits and necessity of a large home market. Give our iron makers workmen at British wages (less than one dollar there and more than two dollars a day in our mills), and they could defy England the world over. The horrid $40,000,000, if they get it,

goes largely to their workmen, and the workmen pay three-fourths of it to the farmer for food. Suppose we approach this so-called free trade in our legislation, and our manufactures decrease largely, as they would.

A million of mea, now artizans and consumers, turn to the farm and crowd into the army of producers, raising grain and other food. The home market they now give the farmer, better far than that of England, is gone, our larger surplus would glu. the distant markets, prices would fall, hundreds of millions of dollars kept in circulation among us by home-manufactures would stagnate or go abroad, times would grow hard, labor would go begging (as it always has in our free trade periods), and, even if goods were cheaper, which is doubtful, we should find them of little use to idle people with empty pockets, or to farmers with fat granaries and lean purses.

But let us return to these assertions, about the tariff being a tax levied on the consumer, for the benefit of the "monopolist," so-calle i.

ALEXANDER HAMILTON is supposed to have had some statesmanship and sagacity (proba bly not so much as these learned free trade agents sent out by the New York importers to enlighten us in the West), and in his famed Report of 1791, as U. S. Secretary of the Treasury, he said:

"But though it were true that the immediate and certain effect of a tariff was an increase of price, it is universally true that the contrary is the ultimate effect with every success ful manufacture. When a domestic manufacture has attained to perfection, and has engaged in the pro-ecution of it a competent number of persons, it can be afforded, and accordingly seldom or never fails to be sold cheaper, in process of time, than the foreign article for which it is a substitute. The inter. nal competition, which takes place, soon does away with everything like monopoly, and by degrees reduces the price of the article to the minimum of a reasonable profit on the capital employed This accords with the reason of the thing and with experience."

How has our experience agreed with HAMILTON'S views? Cottons, imported at 50 cents a yard, have been exported of better quality, under a high tariff, at 6 cents. Cotton hosiery from 1860 to 1868 was reduced nearly half in price. Delaines, imported a: 35c. to 50c. were made here in 1868, of equal quality, at 20c. The present prices of woolen cloths, of general consumption, are less than thirty years ago, and woolens are lower, in gold to day, than in 1860, under a lower tariff; carpets are cheaper

and better.

Nails, axes, saws, tools, pins, etc., are lower under protection than formerly. Cast steel was reduced from 18c to 13c. in 1861, and sold in the war for 32c., while the English, no better, was held at 45c., saving our Government some money as well as dependence on an unfriendly foreign power.

England raised the tariff ou iron seventeen times, beginning with $2.50, or ten shillings sterling, in 1679, and going up to $35 a ton in 1819. Did the price rise, as it should have done by the assertions of these wise men? Not at all; pigs and bars are stupid, and would go down? In 1826 England could undersell the world, and offered her iron at less

than $50 a ton, took off the tariff, and cried "Hurrah for free trade in iron!"

So of her woolens, through four hundred years of high tariffs they fell in price, as capital, skill and competition at home increased, and through protection she reached fre trade in woolens; but her suffering workmen beg her to turn back to-day,

Let us follow our imports and prices of iron a little as the simplest mode of details, and as covering the like ground on other articles. From 1839 to 1842, inclusive, the duty on imported pig iron was from $5.31 to $8,59 per ton, and the price from $25 to $37. From 1843 to 1847 the duty was raised to $9; but the price ranged lower, or from $25 to $30.

In 1850 it fell to $20.85, while the cost in England was $19.65, and the tariff 30 per cent. and English bar iron was sold here at $41.87, our British cousins being engaged in selling at cost or less to close up our mills, having paid large sums, in 1846, to spread free trade notions in this country, lower our tarifl, and get us in their power. When this was done they pushed up prices, and, in 1854, sold us 160,000 tons of pig iron at $37.16, costing in England but $17, and with the tariff only 30 per cent., and 45,000 tons of bars at over $70, and railroad iron at heavy prices and profits, all with a low tariff, ani, in 1857, we had a 'crash," and labor went begging, and farmers had their share of trouble.

With the tariff at $9, for four years, from 1843 to 1846, pig iron ranged from $25 to $29, averaging $27,70.

With the tariff reduced to 30 per cent. for four years, from 1853 to 1856, the range was from $27 to $37, and the average was $32, or over $4 higher than under a lower tariff.

These figures we take from official reports of Government Revenue Commissioners, and find great fluctuations in prices, ruinous to us if not guarded against by a tariff; the English producers paying the tariff at times, and again the buyer here, just as markets ranged, and, most noteworthy of all, we see the English pushing down our tariff, selling us iron low to break down our mills, and then, pashing up the price, and reaping immense profits while our tariff was low.

We find the prices gradually coming down, both of foreign and domestic articles, as competition, skill, experience, fit machinery and eapital become invested in growing industries, starting und r a protective policy. Let us put this absurdity of a tariff being necessarily so much addition to the price in another light.

Free traders apply it only to such manufacturers as they wish to reduce the tariff on, and those are such as the British would control in our markets, if possible. Mr. HORACE MAYNARD, of Tennessee, aptly said, in a speech in Congress in March,;

"If this doctrine is true of these articles, it is true of all others; for example of butter, cheese, potatoes, and wheat. The duty on butter and cheese is 4 cents per pound, on potatoes 25 cents per bushel, and on wheat 20 cents per bushel. Now, will any man be bold enough or reckless enough to assert that the duty of four cents per pound upon butter enhances to the consumers by so much the price not only of the 6,650,000 pounds imported from Canada, but also of the entire produce of our own dairies; or that the like duty of 4

cents per pound on cheese adds 4 cents per pound to the consumption prices of American cheese as well as of the 1,500,000 pounds imported from Canada, the 1,175,000 pounds from France, and the 250,000 pounds from England; or that the duty of 20 cents per bushel on wheat adds that sum or any sum to the price either of American wheat, or of the 1,500,000 bushels imported from Canada; or lastly that the duty of 25 cents per bushel on potatoes is an addition of 25 cents a bushel to the market price of our whole potato crop, as well as of the 170,000 bushels imported from Nova Scotia? The folly of such an assertion would be so apparent as to impose upon nobody; it would be a subject of universal ridicule."

In the light of the facts of our experience, HAMILTON'S views are true and sagacious; and surely these facts do not sustain the bare and absurd assertions of the free traders and their friends.

If we follow their advice we carry our grist to British mills and pay heavy tolls, and road fees both ways. Better take our grist to American mills and keep tolls and fees at home, even if we build our mills in the start.

Let us look at a plan of tariff reform quite unlike that we have been examining. That may well be called a scheme to benefit foreign manufacturers and New York importers at the cost and peril of our enterprise and industry. This is a plan to help the best interests of a farmer, worker, manufacturer and importer alike, and to develop the resources of our country.

For brevity's sake we put it in shape of resolves.

"1st. Resolved. That while approving tariff reform, simplifying, increasing the free list, changing rates where needed and just, revising the bonded warehouse system, and especially, changing ad valorem to specific duties, to prevent fraud-we would keep in view, not only the immediate wants of our revenue, but that protection of our industry and that development of our resources by which the prosperity of the people may make the solveney of our Government perfect, and its revenue lasting.

"2d. Resolved, That as a decrease of revenue from duties on imports is feasible, we favor lower duty, or the free admission, of tea, coffee, spices, dye-stuffs, etc., not produced by us, and in universal use, that the people may thereby gain; and would retain duties for protection and revenue on articles we can and do produce, and the home product of which is a benefit to the people.

"3d. Resolved, That while wages are higher and workmen better off with us than in England, and while English workingmen, impelled by the force of hunger, are denouncing free trade, and alleging that it is reducing them to pauperism, leaving them defenceless against still cheaper labor in Europe, and driving heir skilled artizans to protective countries, it would be injustice and injury to American artizans and workmen to adopt or approach a system which is denounced by workingmen in England as lowering their wages and degrading their condition.

"4th. Resolved. That while British workmen and manufacturers are complaining of hunger among workmen and peril to capital, caused by their free trade and revenue tariff systemwhich admits free of duty articles made in

England, while tea, coffee, sugar, tobacco, etc., pay heavy duties-and are alarmed at their vastly growing balance of imports-greater than the exports in 1868 by $580,000,000-and while our foreign debt is $1,500,000,000, growing constantly from excess of imports, and taking away our specie to partly pay the interest, any approach toward free trade would not only put far away the return to specie payments, but would increase our debt abroad more rapidly and make the calamity of a terrible financial crisis swift and sure.' ""

The idea of these resolves was partly realized in the changes made last winter in the tariff reducing duties $24,0000,000, and no doubt the country will benefit thereby.

Is it not plain that this free trade agitation is ill-timed, false in its pretences, and bad in its plans?

"THE EXTENSION OF OUR RAILROAD SYSTEM within the last few protective years has been most extraordinary, and yet the lines now projected promise still more rapid extension in the future. Let them be made and let our farmers fail to provide for corresponding increase in the home demand for their products, and the result must inevitably exhibit itself in the form of a depression of the agricultural interests as great as, if not even greater than, has been ever known. Let them, on the contrary, determine that all our cloths and all our iron shall be made at home, and the road making now in progress will be followed by increased prosperity to all, the old farmers and the new."-H. C. CAREY.

THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, in 1861, gave the clear and forcible views and facts below. It is well to read them in contrast with its free trade talk in later days: "Exclusive of cotton, rice, cane sugar and molasses, which are not American products, the United States exported in the year ending June 30, 1860, to all foreign countries, $61,891,042. Exclusive of the same products, the Western States produced 40 per cent. of the whole agricultural product of the Union. Assuming that the West exports in the same ratio that it produces, and we have a foreign market for $24,800,000 of the value of all agricultual articles produced in the West

ern States.

"As the total agricultural production of the Western States is about $1,159,000,000, of which say $259,000,000 may be deducted for the value of farming impliments, animals held for use, improvement, wear and tear, etc., there remain $900,000,0000 for consumption in the producing States, and for market in other States and foreign countries. It therefore appears that the proportion of the market furnished by the United States for our produce, compared with that furnished by all foreign countries, is as $37 50 to $1 00. If we inquire where this market is found, we discover that the same year the manufacturers of pig-iron produced $67,828,231 worth of that material. The cotton manufacturers produced over $115,000,000, woolen about $60,000,000, leather $93.000,000, boots and other products of leather $70,000,000, agricultural impliments $18,000,000, steam engines $47,000,000, flour 221,000,000, and lumber $93,000,000, making an aggregate of $664,000,000.

"A very large portion of the value of these

manufactured products consists in the western food, which entered into them, and for which they paid. But besides the manufacturing classes, the number engaged in commercial financial and professional pursuits are included among the food consumers. But the peculiarity of the manufacturing class is, that they are not only competing in the market to make the farmers' produce dearer, but to make the farmers' clothing and other articles of purchases and enjoyment cheaper.

"Nothing, therefore, can be plainer than the entire unity and harmony of interest between the manufacturing and farming classes, and their absolute dependence on each other for a market. Those who suppose, therefore, that the manufacturing interests of the country can be broken down without breaking down the farming interests by the same blow, or that the former can be built up without building up equally the latter, are wholly in error."

M. CHEVALIER, a distinguished French statesman, who negotiated with Cobden the Anglo-French treaty of 1860, (claimed as a free trade treaty, but which was not, yet of which the French are growing tired, and asking its repeal), said in 1852:

"It is not an abuse of power on the part of the government; on the contrary, it is the accomplishment of a positive duty, so to act at each epoch in the progress of a nation as to favor taking possession of all the branches of industry, whose acquisition is authorized by the nature of things. Governments are, in effect, the personification of nations, and it is required that they should exercise their influence in the direction indicated by the general interest, properly studied, and fully appreciated. I regard as excellent the desire of some of the eminent men of the principal nations of Europe to establish around them the various branches of manufactures, although I may not praise without distinction, all the measures by them adopted for the accomplishment of their object."

In "the nature of things" we should "take possession" of the manufacture of woolens, cotton, iron, steel, etc., as our natural resources point that way.

JOHN STUART MILL, of England, free trader as he professes to be, in his "Political Economy," says:

"The superiority of one country over another in a branch of production often arises from having began it sooner. There may be no inherent advantage or disadvantage on either side, but only a present superiority of skill and experience. A country which has this skill and experience to acquire, may, in other respects, be better adapted to the production than those earlier in the field; and beside, it is a just remark, that nothing has a greater tendency to produce improvement in any branch of production than its trial under a new set of conditions. But it cannot be expected that individuals, at their own cost, should introduce a new manufacture and bear the burthens of carrying it on until the producers have been educated up to the line of those with whom the processes have become traditional. A PROTECTIVE DUTY, continued a reasonable time, will sometimes be the least

inconvenient mode in which a country can tax itself for the support of an experiment."

This grauts the argument for protection as a principle.

SENATOR MORRILL, of Vermont, in his speech of May 9, on the tariff, made the following very just remarks on the advantages of buying American instead of foreign manufactures :

He said: "When the farmer of Illinois sends wheat to England in exchange for Sheffield cuttery, London watches, or Nottingham laces, he can form no just estimate of the actual value of what he receives, and does not know whether he is cheated or not; but if he can exchange his wheat for such commodities, made in his own neighborhood, be will know all about it. When he buys an Illinois plow, or an Illinois wagon, or Illinois watch, he always gets a prime article at a fair price. The knack of machinery and the profits of trade are no secret at home. The profits on foreign articles are unknown, except that they are known to be generally much greater than upon those of domestic origin. Hence, dealers have an interest in handling foreign to the exclusion of American goods; and the greater profits thus derived enable them to liberally patronize the press, as well as to subsidize peripatetic philosophers of free trade. A par. ticular style of foreign goods is more easily monopolized than those made at our own doors, and, if found suitable, cannot at once and so easily be duplicated by neighboring competitors. A domestic artic e, however, if found saleable, will at once be multiplied, and can be ordered by any number of dealers in such quantities as to cause a reduction of prices by competition. American articles of a staple kind, produced in large quantities, like cut nails, prints, delaines, cotton cloth, whitelead, shoes and boots, are usually sold at a bare commission, and often without any profit at all, whether at wholesale or retail. Many dealers in imported goods keep and sell lines of staple American goods at cost as baits to catch customers for the trade in more profitable commodities, Purchasers have a fashionable partiality for goods of foreign make and style, and have not yet found out that Ameri can iron, cotton, and woolens, are tougher, stronger, and more durable than such as are usually imported. It is true that the relative merits of American manufactures, as compared with some others, appear to be better understood in some places abroad, and British manufacturers have been lately detected in using the stamp and brand of American manufacturers, in order to fradulently dispose of their own good in far off markets. likely, our manufacturers have undervalued the artistic training and culture of their workmen; but it is a vital point which cannot longer be safely neglected. It is not the role of America to follow, but to lead."

THE INDUSTRIAL QUESTION.

Very

The consumption in the United States of iron, steel, copper, lead, zinc, woolen goods, cotton goods, leather and glass, is not less than to the value of a thousand millions of dollars, of which we import to the value of over a hundred millions. To import our full supply of these articles from the cheapest markets of