t serious legislation, based on
sound principles, will encounter graver difficulties. There are
difficulties before our people even where they see clearly what they
want and are trying to get it; but where they do not see what they
want, the case is hopeless. The trust-making part of protective duties
has an effect about which there is no uncertainty, and if the American
people discover this fact, they will not have reached their goal, but
the laborious route that leads to it will at least lie distinctly
before them.

_The Policy demanded in the Interest of Progress._--The general facts
which have here been cited call for the abolition of a certain part of
the existing duties and the retention of another part, and they make
the division between the two parts clear at least in principle. We
want to keep one part of a duty whenever it protects an industry which
is not yet mature but is on its way toward maturity. We want the
industry because it is progressive in its wealth-creating power and
will, one day, make an important addition to our national income.
It is a dynamic agent--a factor in the progress we are making toward
the unrealized goal of universal comfort. We do not want the other
part of the duty, first, because we do not want monopoly. Any feature
of our industrial system which is convicted of being simply a
monopoly-building element is condemned by that fact to extinction, if
the power of the people suffices to destroy it. Does this mean that
the consolidations themselves are thus condemned? Do we not want great
corporations with vast capitals? Assuredly we want them, for the sake
of their economy and of their capacity for greater economy. With the
element of monopoly taken out of them, they will become dynamic agents
and contributors to general progress. The part of the protective
tariff which we need to get rid of is the part that helps decisively
to put the element of monopoly into them; and in that connection the
worst charge that has to be brought against this part of the duties
remains to be stated.

_Protection and Progress._--Monopoly acts squarely against the
continuance of that very progress which the tariff was designed to
create. The entire defense of protection has rested on the dynamic
argument, and the sole justification of the tax which protection
originally imposed is the fact that it has given us industries which
have, in themselves, the power to become more and more productive. It
would b