Tariff reform calls for more than lowering a duty here and there, more than appointing a Tariff Board, more than negotiating a Reciprocity Treaty, good as all these may be. It calls for an intellectual and moral revolt against the entire system of protection as we know it. No leader can accomplish the work needed who does not go to the fight hot with indignation at the intellectual jugglery which has swamped the protective principle and weakened the country’s capacity for sound political thinking and its keenness for distinguishing moral values. Never until such a revolt comes will the clutch of the greedy beneficiaries of the system be wrenched loose. The wrong done to mind and morals is a far more serious matter than any damming up of trade the policy produces. That at most can endure but a few generations. The laws of trade are too powerful to be long interrupted by unnatural barriers like prohibitive tariffs. They finally flow over them as a river over a dam, and eventually toss them aside like the drift they are. That is, all tampering with liberty and truth comes sooner or later to naught. True, in the meantime the people bear the burden. True, the end of all industrial progress, that is, the fair distribution of a production sufficient to keep in health and happiness the people of all the earth, is put off; but that is less serious than the deterioration of intellectual and moral integrity which it has required to build up our dishonest and inhuman tariff laws.
CHAPTER XIII SOME INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL ASPECTS OF OUR TARIFF-MAKING
Difficult as it would be for one to realize it who took up for the first time the present tariffs of the United States, they rest on a formula which as it always has been understood by the majority of the people of the country is not especially intricate or confusing. Put yourself back a hundred years or so, when the country was busy with agriculture and commerce and mining. We had an enormous advantage in these pursuits. We were at a disadvantage in manufacturing. To be sure, from the start we did a little. In the nature of things we would gradually do more, and what we did would be on a solid basis. But, obviously, only the born iron-master, potter, weaver, was going to practise his trade in the new country with the foreigner importing goods cheaper than he as a rule could make them. And so we decided to encourage manufacturing by taxing ourselves.
