Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/554

520 competition the stimulus of energy. Both invention and energy will gradually relax under a system which, while promising artificial protection on the one hand, creates artificial obstacles on the other. Let those obstacles be removed, let American inventive genius and productive energy enter the struggle with the outside world on fair terms—in the first place with raw material as free to us as it is to others—and you will open a most fruitful field of activity to the strongest forces of the national character.

That our manufacturing industries should be enabled to enter the foreign market is especially important to our laboring men. The mechanical appliances now existing in the United States are in some branches of industry already sufficient to produce in seven or eight months as much as the home market will consume in twelve. Periodical stagnations in those branches must be the result. As the laboring man well knows, it is of the highest consequence to him, not only to be well paid while employed, but to be constantly employed. He will also without difficulty understand that the more limited the market is, the more easily will it be glutted, and the more subject will industry be to periodical stagnation; and that, on the other hand, the wider the market is for the products of labor, the more constant will be its employment.

Nothing could be more amusingly audacious than the efforts made by Republicans to persuade the American workingman that his wages depend absolutely on the maintenance of our tariff, and that American labor will be repressed to the level of “the pauper labor of Europe” if we “surrender any part of our protective system.” Republican speeches and papers fairly teem with comparisons of wages in the United States and wages in England, to show the effect of the protective tariff in one country and of free trade in the other. I shall not here inquire