Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/460

456. If it is to be made in the old way there is evidence already at hand that it will be based upon misstatements and misunderstanding. It will harm the public infinitely. It may lessen, but it will not abolish, the graft now estimated conservatively at $500,000,000 per year.

The public is thoroughly aroused and the work of reform is progressing as fast as ever any national movement of equal consequence. One of the most fortunate consequences of a justly protective tariff will be the tremendous enlargement of foreign trade. We pride ourselves upon the exportation of $1,082,000,000 of manufactured products, but 63 per cent, of these exports are crude and semi-crude; meat, petroleum, rails, billets, bar iron, lumber, cement, skins, etc. They contain 20 per cent, or less of labor. These are the very products needed by our own more numerous manufacturers at moderate prices for the employment of American operatives and the development into more highly finished products. With tariff correction, these semi-finished products will go abroad in higher forms with from two to five times more of good American labor in them. We shall become in larger and larger measure an industrial bee-hive, with our foundation world-wide and not to be shaken as heretofore by domestic panic. With this broadening of trade will come an intellectual and moral broadening and easement that will make us more truly the world power we sometimes affect to be.