icles. If that time should come, the industry that had to
grow up originally under the protection of a duty would become so
fruitful that it could dispense with the duty. Taxes of this kind tend
to become inoperative, provided always that the latent resources for
economical production really exist.

Some years ago a man who had retired from the business of making spool
silk remarked that, in his judgment, a duty of three per cent on
imported silk of this kind would enable the American mills to hold
full possession of their own market. The difference between what it
cost the foreigner to make the silk and what it cost the American to
make it was, as he thought, not over three per cent. If he was right
in his estimate, almost all of the actual duty might have been
abolished without crushing the American manufacturer. Americans had
developed a sufficient aptitude for making spool silk to be able to
get nearly as much of it by turning their labor in that direction as
they could by turning their labor in any other direction and
exchanging the product for foreign silk. We must originally have lost
much by forcing ourselves directly to make the silk, for, at the
outset, we could not make it as economically as we could make an
article which we could exchange for it. At the time of which we are
speaking we could make it with almost no waste, and the case
illustrates a general fact with regard to duties upon articles in the
making of which we are originally at a disadvantage but are afterward
at no disadvantage at all. When our original disadvantage has been
quite overcome, the duty becomes inoperative. Whether we keep it or
throw it off will make no difference to the American manufacturer or
to the American consumer--_provided always that competition is free
and active_. If it is not so, there is a very different story to tell.

_Importance of Changes in the Relative Productivity of Different
Industries._--Instead of getting from the soil gold dust to barter for
merchandise, we have been getting a product that is not so greatly
unlike it. For grains of gold read kernels of wheat, and the statement
will tell what a large portion of our country has produced and
exported. The productivity of wheat raising has made it uneconomical,
in certain extensive regions, to engage in other occupations; but as
the fertility of the wheat lands has declined, and as the productive
power of labor in other directions has increased, we have reached