Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/88

64 hay while the sun shines; and, unless I am greatly mistaken, the consumers will, under this tariff law, be fleeced as they have seldom, if ever, been fleeced before. Nor will the Senator's threat that he and others may vote to repeal the law frighten a single one of them.

Those so disposed, the trust men and the combiners, will make the best of the opportunities presented by the law, and confide in their influence to maintain it. And if the Senator, finding his gloomy apprehensions verified, as he surely will, should really move its repeal, he will be set down as no better than a Mugwump, a member of the Cobden Club, one who has “British gold” in his pocket.

Look back a moment upon this remarkable history: Small protective duties originally designed to foster infant industries, and enormously higher duties given to the same industries one hundred years later; every protective tariff pronounced at first satisfactory, and then a higher one demanded afterward; stability promised each time, and then stability disturbed by the protectionists themselves; the war tariff adopted as a temporary measure, and then continued as a permanency in time of peace; the war duties put on to compensate the manufacturers for certain internal taxes, and then the compensation kept on after the internal taxes had disappeared; a reduction of prices promised to be effected by home competition among the protected industries, and then home competition strangled by means of trusts to keep up prices,—until things now come to such a pass that a grave Senator, himself a protectionist, finds it necessary solemnly to beseech the protected manufacturers to be merciful to the people and not to plunder them too much. I ask you all in candor, Would not—but for the fact that honorable men were in good faith engaged in it—this whole high tariff historically look very like systematic imposture, or, to use a popular parlance, like a huge