Page:Forgotten Man and Other Essays.djvu/97

Rh themselves of the local advantages either by moving themselves to the places, or by trading what they produce where they are for what others produce in the other places. The passenger trains and the freight trains are set in motion by the same ultimate economic fact. Our exports are all bulky and require more tonnage than our imports. On the westward trip, consequently, bunks are erected and men are brought in space where cotton, wheat, etc., were taken out. The tariff, by so much as it lessens the import of goods, leaves room which the ship owners are eager to fill with immigrants. To do this they lower the rates. Hence the tariff is a premium on immigration. The protectionists have claimed that the tariff does favor immigration. But nine-tenths of the immigrants are laborers, domestic servants, and farmers. Probably more than one-third of the total number, including women, find their way to the land. As we have seen, the tariff also lowers the profits of agriculture, which discourages immigration and the movement to the land. Therefore, if the farmer believes what the protectionist tells him, he must understand that the taxes he pays bring in more people, and raise the value of land by settling it, and that they also bring more competition, which the farmer must buy off by lowering the profits of his own (the farming) industry. Then, too, so far as the immigrants are artisans, the premium on immigration is a tax paid to increase the supply of labor, that is,