, especially our farm
products, has been kept constantly in mind, and no effort has been or
will be spared to promote that end. We are under no disadvantage in any
foreign market, except that we pay our workmen and workwomen better
wages than are paid elsewhere--better abstractly, better relatively to
the cost of the necessaries of life. I do not doubt that a very largely
increased foreign trade is accessible to us without bartering for it
either our home market for such products of the farm and shop as our own
people can supply or the wages of our working people.

In many of the products of wood and iron and in meats and bread-stuffs
we have advantages that only need better facilities of intercourse and
transportation to secure for them large foreign markets. The reciprocity
clause of the tariff act wisely and effectively opens the way to secure
a large reciprocal trade in exchange for the free admission to our ports
of certain products. The right of independent nations to make special
reciprocal trade concessions is well established, and does not
impair either the comity due to other powers or what is known as the
"favored-nation clause," so generally found in commercial treaties. What
is given to one for an adequate agreed consideration can not be claimed
by another freely. The state of the revenues was such that we could
dispense with any import duties upon coffee, tea, hides, and the lower
grades of sugar and molasses. That the large advantage resulting to the
countries producing and exporting these articles by placing them on the
free list entitled us to expect a fair return in the way of customs
concessions upon articles exported by us to them was so obvious that to
have gratuitously abandoned this opportunity to enlarge our trade would
have been an unpardonable error.

There were but two methods of maintaining control of this question open
to Congress--to place all of these articles upon the dutiable list,
subject to such treaty agreements as could be secured, or to place them
all presently upon the free list, but subject to the reimposition of
specified duties if the countries from which we received them should
refuse to give to us suitable reciprocal benefits. This latter method,
I think, possesses great advantages. It expresses in advance the consent
of Congress to reciprocity arrangements affecting these products, which
must otherwise have been delayed and unascertained until each treaty
was ratified by the