development is the inexorable law of survival of the fittest, and fitness for survival, in other words the superiority of any product to competing products, is acquired and ascertained only by competition itself, which the policy of protection is meant to exclude. The watch like any organism has grown by minute successive modifications in the instrument itself and in the processes of its manufacture, each of which is an improvement or an advance on all previous modifications struck out by the inventor in the struggle for life to keep up with the rising demands of the consumer. What any manufacture requires and never more than in its infancy is that universal demand which stimulates invention, and that unrestricted competition which instructs the inventor and puts him on his mettle. But what occasion is there for inventiveness and business enterprise of the normal kind, for improvement in the process and the product, for that superiority which beats the competitor out of the market, when the bare fact of American. origin commands higher prices than the best work? The time, talent, and capital needed for improvement are spent to better purpose in influencing legislation, with the sure result that while the individual manufacturer may grow rich on his spoils. American manufactures stand still or lose ground, an inanimate infancy passing into a manhood of decrepitude and decay. At the same time the obstructed market is a perpetual temptation to the foreigner who exerts himself to recover it by the only means left to him, the greater excellence and economy of his work. The incentives taken from the native are offered by the same hand to his rival and the improvement of foreign products goes on with the deterioration of our own as the same wind blows two ships in opposite directions.

But this transfer to the foreigner of all the incentives to improvement leaves with the native manufacturer a most powerful incentive to production. The artificial price by which he profits being created outright by act of the legislature and not gradually evolved under the natural conditions of unobstructed supply and demand takes effect suddenly, excluding foreign competition and delivering up the home market without preparation to the home producer. Thus the equable competition without violent pressure or strain anywhere between

all producers in all markets is abruptly converted into a life and death struggle of a few producers each of whose fortunes depends upon prompt preoccupation of a single market, and that an uncertain market which may be gradually recovered by the increased excellence and cheapness of the foreign product, or thrown open at any time by another act of the legislature. Over production follows and a suffocated market, a fall in prices which wipes out the artificial price created by the duty on imports, enforced idleness of capital, machinery, and labor, all reacting in acute crisis or long depression of the business interests of the whole country. Already the cry goes up all over the land that the home market is insufficient and that an outlet must be found into the foreign market. At this moment every minister and consul of the United States is under orders to "push" the sale of American products abroad. But as it is beyond the power of the State to augment prices beyond the range of its own taxation the only means it has for capturing the indispensable foreign market is a bounty on exports, a contribution from the public treasury which will remunerate the manufacturer for his loss in underselling the foreign competitor on his own ground. Of two things then, one, either it has exceeded its rights in laying the duty on imports or be trayed its trust in withholding the equally necessary bounty on exports. In fact it has practically conceded the principle. by remitting the internal revenue duties on certain articles when sold abroad.

This then is the fatality of all class legislation that it immediately creates the necessity for further legislation of the same sort. You can't hold the Rhine without the Rhine provinces. The smallest perversion of the functions of the common agent of the people to the exclusive service of an individual or a class means in time the subversion of the State. If the acquisi tiveness of the manufacturing class had any logic in it and the courage of conviction the protective tariff would be a pronunciamiento, the proclamation of a revolution.

Finally it is to be observed that exceptional privileges of any kind can be secured to one class of subjects only by exceptional burdens imposed upon some other. The artificial price by which the producer profits is created by the duty on

It

imports and this is paid by the consumer. But according to the fundamental principle of our polity the only motive permitted to the State for imposing exceptional burdens is wrong. doing of the subjects who bear them; that other subjects benefit by them is an aggravation of the injury if the sufferers are unoffending. The usual argument that American manufacturers are benefited by the exclusion of foreign competition, that protection does in fact protect, is irrelevant and offensive. may be perfectly true, but if true it only forces the previous question, what right has the State to tax the consumer of foreign products beyond the uniform rate for all? The answer is that it has no right unless the purchase and use of foreign products is a public wrong, an injury to the people and an offense to the State; for disproportionate taxation is of the nature of penalty, and penalties are to be inflicted only on the subject who has merited them. This is a point which it is not easy to treat with becoming gravity, but the fact is that the whole protective policy rests upon a real feeling that as there is something patriotic and praiseworthy in using the products of our own country so there is a kind of disloyalty in using those of other countries; a latent feeling which strikes fire sometimes in the collisions of two peoples, as when the ladies. of Berlin resolved the other day to import no more fashions from Paris, or when the Boston patriots threw the contaminated tea overboard. So to buy English cottons or an English ship is to enrich the English spinner or builder, and through him to add to the wealth and power of our hereditary rival and foe. The very existence of foreign States, however amicable our actual relations with them may be, is a perpetual menace to our security, and one of the principal reasons why we have to maintain and arm a State ourselves. To help them by making a market for their products is a sort of treason deserving reprobation. An expression of the enormity of the offense and of the popular feeling about it may be found in any recent budget. of the United States. According to the statement for 1880 the amounts expended in various ways on account of the rebellion of 1860 were in round numbers about $200,000,000, no part of which was drawn as penalty from the revolted States. For the same year the customs revenue was $187,000,000,

So that the sin of re

which nearly balanced the account. bellion, if it was a sin, has been most fittingly expiated, not by the rebel but by the consumer of foreign products.

Now to this it might be replied as before that the popular feeling is the realization of an empty abstraction, that it is not in their industries that foreign States are a menace to us or to anybody but in their dynastic ambitions and race animosities, the political antagonisms which have arrested the civilization of the old world in the dead-lock of an armed truce and burdened the industries by which we all benefit in a thousand ways under the weight of military preparation. But the fitting and conclusive answer is that if the use of foreign commodities is a public wrong it is not a proper source of public revenue. Importation so far as it weakens the State and aids the enemy should not be taxed; it should be prohibited, and if persisted in should be punished; a principle of wide appli cation to which we shall have to recur. The position into which the State has been betrayed is morally intolerable and impossible. It gives character to a specific act by laying bur dens on the agent which in our polity are nothing if not punitive; and condones the offense of its own defining in order to continue the burdens by which it profits.

To resume. The protective tariff is an anomaly in American legislation; a violent interruption and reversal of the normal evolution of our fiscal system justified only for the moment by exceptional conditions which have long since disappeared. Our duty is to get it out of the way with what promptitude is possible; to dismiss at once and forever as a motive for State action the protection of any class at the expense of any other; to remove from the market every vestige of arbitrary and artificial prices as rapidly as the business situation will permit; and to put the finances of the State back into the track and conditions of regular development toward the only result any honest man can avow, the uniform taxation, for the equal benefit, of all.

ARTICLE III.-THE GENESIS OF MODERN FREE INSTITUTIONS.

GOVERNMENT is not an accident. It has its origin in the essential elements of human nature. Aristotle styled man a political animal; and the profoundest investigations into the nature of the State have only confirmed the appropriateness of the epithet. While the individual will is free, men in masses act, under Providence, in accordance with clearly defined laws. Social and political organization and progress are the outcome of tendencies common to the race. Forms may vary, types may change; yet behind all the vicissitudes in the history of states lie principles as invariable in their application as the physical and moral laws of the universe. A chain of causes and effects connects the past with the present, the present with the future. True, indeed, great men rise up, and the whole commonwealth may seem to shake under their giant tread; but they only march ahead of their less gifted fellows, with clearer insight into the realities of their time, and hence with greater power to influence others. They may hasten or retard the development of institutions, but existing tendencies they cannot change. Julius Cæsar left a deeper impress upon his age than any of his contemporaries, for he understood better than they the trend of his country's politics and shaped his course accordingly; but all the deep-souled eloquence of Demosthenes could not preserve Greek independence. A single will may influence, may in a measure direct or control; but human society is too complex an organism to be built up or destroyed by an individual.

Political institutions are the incarnations of ideas, which, implanted in the race, are developed according to circumstances. Like a living organism they have periods of growth, maturity, and decay. They have a reason of being, a mission; when this is fulfilled, they crumble and disappear and live only in results. They are the outcome of efforts, more or less unconscious, toward the adjustment of the relations of men with