Page:Carl Schurz- 1902-03-09 Foreign Commerce.pdf/5

 whose value have been contributed by labor, he considers it, as a rule, fit for exportation and sure to compete successfully in the foreign market. But a majority of our manufactured products generally do not sustain that competition and cannot sustain it, unless the cost of their production be reduced.

Here I touch the tariff. Of course, I do not intend to discuss the general question whether our high protective system is on the whole a good or a bad policy for the country, but only the narrower question of the relation existing between the tariff and our foreign commerce. And then I say that, as the tariff enhances the price of the things the manufacturer has to use in the production of his finished article, it enhances the cost of production; and as it enhances the cost of production, it enhances the price the manufacturer must ask for his finished product to make a reasonable profit; and as it enhances the selling price of the manufactured goods, it puts them at a disadvantage in the foreign market, renders them unfit for exportation, and thus narrows and cripples our foreign commerce.

The remedy naturally suggests itself. It consists in such a revision of the tariff as will deliver our manufacturing industries of those artificial burdens which increase the cost of the things they have to use in production, thus permitting them to obtain those things as cheaply and advantageously as their foreign competitors obtain them, and in that way giving them a fair chance for the export trade.

Let it not be said that this would be developing commerce at the expense of the industrial interests. No, it would be an extension of commerce for the benefit of our manufactures. Far from being the destruction, it will be the liberation of our industries in two senses: It will liberate our manufactures of the clogs that hamper their production, and to those that are now confined to the home market alone, it will open the boundless field of the markets of the world. Nor will the raw material men suffer. Even those gentle shepherds of Ohio, who by dragooning Congress into a strict maintenance of the tariff-taxing of raw material gained their high rank among the most insidious enemies of our industries and our commerce, even they will finally see that a policy calculated to promote the manufacturing of woolens will eventually prove a benefit to the grower of wool. Indeed, in advocating such a policy for the harmonious development of our industries and of commerce together, I claim to be a better friend to our manufacturers, aye, a better protectionist than Mr. ever was.

Now a word about our merchant marine. There is scarcely any subject on which there has been of late years a larger display of high flown oratory, and around which that oratory has raised such a cloud of dust to obscure the true state of the case. We all know