Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/41

Rh which prevents him from buying forty-five hundred articles as cheaply as he might, and compels him to sell his own products, minute in number, at the lowest price which ingenious legal artifice can dictate, is a measure for his particular benefit. If he has read a paper which denies this, the doctrine is so new to this generation that he has not yet mastered it; and he is apt to treat it with conservative inattention, or as a delusive suggestion, an investment in which must be set down for the present as one to be treated with as much caution as he would exercise in accepting an unheard-of and revolutionary scheme for working his farm.

The siren charm with which the word "protection" asphyxiates him has only casually, as yet, lost for him its sorcery. He is apt to have confidence in some regular order of things, such as the seasons, the sunrise, and the sunset; and to him "protection" is, and has been, through long experience, as stable a factor in affairs as the precession of the equinoxes or the laws of the solar system.

But, if he is ever to rescue his business and make it decently profitable, he must awaken from this long swoon. He must see and know that taxation of this sort is death to him; and is fast making it impossible for an intelligent American to live and raise a family with the decent comforts of life on the best farm in the New England and Middle States. Very rapidly, in New England, the farms are passing into the hands of the foreigner, or distinctly peasant element, a class which reduces the necessities of life to the simplest scale, and which is able to do farming within the family, and so can eliminate the costly feature of hired labor. The question has been asked for years, "How shall we keep our boys on the farm?" But it has never been answered successfully, and never can be. We ought to be profoundly thankful, considering what the farm now is as a business, that we can not keep them there. It is the best possible evidence attainable of the bright wit and level-headedness of the boys that they wish to work where gain is assured at the end of their toil.

I may be told, very likely, that I have skipped one feature of the tariff, the one on wool, which was devised especially for the farmer's profit. But it was not; and, if it had been, it has hurt him instead of helping him. It was devised by men who are either commercial men, or whose predominant interest is commercial rather than agricultural. These men constitute what is known as the Wool-Growers' Association. I think its important factor is made up of middle-men, or salesmen who traffic in the wool product. But, be that as it may, the duty on wool has simply handicapped the manufacturers of woolen fabrics; and by shutting out kinds of wool which we can not raise here, and which the woolen manufacturers must have to mix with native wools, has