Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/455

 trip in Africa, is a director in the Texas company, which is trying to become as great a robber as the Standard Oil Co. He told me today that a few months ago his company let a contract to an American firm for an additional tank steamer, at $590,000. A foreign builder offered to build exactly the same ship for $380,000. The Texas company was compelled to pay forty per cent additional because of our policy of protection. What becomes of that additional $210,000? Does it go to American labor? Most of it, probably. When you pay high prices for meat, the farmer is being benefited; when the Texas company pays a high price for a ship, the workmen who fashion the ship, and mine the steel that goes into it, are benefited. Taxes, however collected, mean a burden to the consumer. When you pay twenty cents for an article which formerly cost ten cents, three cents of the excess goes to the workman, and seven cents of the excess is charged by the American politician for cost of collection. It is the workers who pay taxes and the tremendous cost of collection I have frequently spoken in these notes of hearing the English everywhere compliment America. The notion that foreigners sneer at us, is a mistaken one. In the London Telegraph, a copy of which I picked up today, I read a page reference to the death of J. Pierpont Morgan.

"The field of the American financier," the article said, "is a country sixty times the area of England, the most richly endowed territory in the world, inhabited by ninety millions of the most energetic wealth-producers on the face of the globe."

In the same article I read that Mr. Morgan once