Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/387

Rh ment. And this mere statement brands as equally preposterous the other audacious pretence—to the iteration of which, I regret to say, the President has recently again lent himself—that this tariff is needed, or that it is one of its main purposes, simply to offset, in favor of the American laboring man, the difference between American and foreign wages. No subterfuge could be more shameless. I will not go into detail. Let any intelligent man study the schedules of our tariff, and what will he find? He will look in vain for many protected industries that were satisfied with the comparative pittance of an offset for the difference between American and foreign wage scales, or, which is another thing, between American and foreign labor cost in manufactured goods. But he will find many a tariff rate that makes out of a method of raising revenue a monstrous machinery of extortion. He will find plenty of evidence to show him that when a large part of our tariff is denounced as “robbery,” the word may be rude, but not unjust, and that the tariff, by levying tribute upon the people, is promoting the unwholesome fungus growth of colossal private fortunes. And yet the economic aspect of the tariff question seems to me less ominous than its moral and political bearing.

It is indeed time that the American people should open their eyes to the meaning of these notorious facts: “A large number of manufacturing establishments, as well as their allied interests, receive from the Government favors or benefits of great money value in the shape of protective tariff legislation. The political party which, when in power, confers those benefits of great money value, turns to the interests so benefited for pecuniary aid to support it in its efforts to keep itself in power, or to regain power if it had temporarily lost it. The protected interests give to the political party that pecuniary