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 their services as ocean-carriers, but (as triumphant Democrats we refuse their services too, and create a vast, cumbersome and incompetent merchant marine, flouting our needy neighbors and crushing, incidentally, our few optimistic citizens who stood ready to fill any vital gap in the stream of water-borne commerce. From any point of view except that of the imperialist, which is quite logical, but which we hotly repudiate, we are in error and must face the consequences; for we can only support our international fallacies with armed flotillas.

In dealing with our neighbors, we come up invariably against a most fiercely debated choice of policies—that of protection or free-trade—of economic barriers or their removal. Fundamentally, this is not an economic question but a political one; and it is in the confusion of terms that special advantage is gained by those who know what they want for themselves. Tariff for the protection of profits may be a politico-economic consideration: it is an economic absurdity as far as the general welfare is concerned. The protection of certain basic standards, however, is a political safeguard which cannot be neglected if we are threatened with the menacing result of politically supported aggregations of economic power in foreign countries, or in our own economic dependencies, for that matter, which give us such things as suspiciously cheap foodstuffs. If it is conceded that taxation is economic responsibility and should therefore be proportionate to basic economic power, then tariffs for revenue are not logically justified. They are tolls of the most stupid and obstructive variety. Barriers for the protection of vital standards, however, are quite another matter. If we do our duty and set a high standard of industrial decency, instead of boasting of it only, we are logically forced to defend this standard against those of our unfortunately organized neighbors who operate on the basis of gigantic sweat-shops for the benefit of a few. It is a little difficult to convince the idealist, but perhaps worth the attempt:

If, in advance of a uniform conception of humanity in the various states of the Union, there was any moral justification for grappling with the child-labor question by the effective method of prohibition of inter-state shipments of the products