low as the foreign manufacturer, all good Americans ought to buy
of him and pay him a tax on every article for the privilege. Perhaps we
ought. The original idea was that, when he was just starting and needed
support, we ought to buy of him, even if we had to pay a higher price,
till he could get on his feet. Now it is said that we ought to buy of him
and pay him a price 15 to 120 per cent. higher than we need pay the
foreign manufacturer, even if he is a six-foot, bearded "infant," because
the cost of production is necessarily higher here than anywhere else. I
don't know why it should be. The American workingman used to be able to do
so much more and better work than the foreigner that that more than
compensated for his higher wages and made him a good bargain at any wage.

Of course, if we are going to agree to give any fellow-citizen who takes
a notion to go into some business or other for which the country is not
especially adapted,--if we are going to give him a bonus on every article
he produces big enough to make up for the handicap he labors under because
of some natural reason or other,--why, we may indeed gloriously diversify
our industries, but we shall beggar ourselves. On this principle, we shall
have in Connecticut, or Michigan, or somewhere else, miles of hothouses in
which thousands of happy American workingmen, with full dinner-pails, will
be raising bananas,--to be sold at a quarter apiece. Some foolish person,
a benighted Democrat like as not, might timidly suggest that bananas were
a greater public blessing when they came from Jamaica and were three for a
nickel, but what patriotic citizen would listen for a moment to the
criticisms of a person without any conception of the beauty and glory of
the great American banana industry, without realization of the proud
significance of the fact that Old Glory floats over the biggest banana
hothouses in the world!

But that is a matter on one side. What I am trying to point out to you
now is that this "protective" tariff, so-called, has become a means of
fostering the growth of particular groups of industry at the expense of
the economic vitality of the rest of the country. What the people now
propose is a very practical thing indeed: They propose to unearth these
special privileges and to cut them out of the tariff. They propose not to
leave a single concealed private advantage in the statutes concerning the
duties that can possibly be eradicated without affe