Page:Bearing and Importance of Commercial Treaties in the Twentieth Century, 1906.djvu/22

 I do not think I am wrong in saying that there is not a solitary instance of retaliatory tariffs in our time ever having led to a serious reduction of duties. On the contrary, I only see one result, viz., that States retaliate against retaliators by ever-higher and farther-reaching duties; that they thereby more and more cripple their own industries, because there is hardly any article that is not the raw material of some other industry; that they promote great industrial trusts to the detriment of that free competition which is the very sap and nerve of healthy industrial development; that they artificially increase the cost of the necessaries of life, which, with the growth of democratic power, influence and demand for a fuller share of the good things of this life, can only become a cause of popular discontent, of strikes and combinations for higher and higher wages, of industrial failures, financial crises, an overwhelming increase of the unemployed, even revolution. This is no overdrawn picture. Read the only history of the French Revolution, based on unassailable facts, Taine's Origines, and you will see how tampering with the economics of Nature works out; how quackery breeds quackery, till the whole body politic is so weakened and undermined by "remedies" that when the shock comes, it crumbles, as the old regimé crumbled.

One of the chief difficulties in the way of making retaliatory tariffs effective for the purposes of negotiation with other States is that a duty cannot be reduced after it has been in operation for any time without injuring the trades wich [sic] have come to rely on it. They thus obviously either introduce into the commercial policy an element of instability or are without effect for the purpose for which they are instituted.