Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 14.djvu/203

 It may be remembered that the Editor never was at peace with the Republican Party on tariff. Yet he could not quit the party on this issue, first because there was no other party whose policies he could accept and second, because more serious matters than tariff confronted the country arid in those matters only the Republican Party afforded him lodgment. Chief of them was the money question.

The Editor never regarded protective tariff as an enduring policy of the national Republican Party. He considered it a more natural one for the Democratic party, with its local habits. He believed, therefore, that the parties eventually would shift on this question, the Republican to champion tariff for revenue, the Democratic to advocate tariff for protection. "Tariff for revenue only/' he said August 8, 1909, "will become the demand of the North sooner than of the South. But there will be no result, these many years." Again: "As a party of national authority, the Republican Party will find the ideas of the local protectionists less and less suited to the policies for which it stands and must stand."

In the early '80's a common argument used for protective duties was that tariff would help maintain a "favorable balance of trade." This was too flimsy to withstand the editorial broadsides of Mr. Scott's writings. Thirty years later a fresh idea sprang up in defense of "protection" an adjustment of rates "based on difference in cost of production at home and abroad," so as to afford "protection" only to industries that really "needed" it. This was the last phase of tariff that Mr. Scott lived to attack. On April 6, 1910, he said: "It is impossible to ascertain the differences between the cost of production here and abroad. Variations of opinion on this subject will be irreconcilable and endless. . . . The differences will shift and vary continually. None of these differences is or ever will be, a fixed quantity or a steady quantity for any length of time. . . . New factors are continually entering into all processes of manufacture; and cost of materials varies from year to year. Cost of production, being extremely unstable abroad, how can it ever become a basis on which protective tariff laws can be