on finished fabrics, such as might allay the fears of those who have been so long sustained by high duties that they dread any change. This is a reasonable method. The matter of importance is that we should be headed in the right direction. The time covered in the process of change may well correspond substantially with the life of the existing machinery which has been put at work at the high cost due to past and present conditions. All the machinery in our textile factories has cost at least fifty per cent if not seventy-five per cent more than that of our competitors in England, France, and Germany, on account of the tax upon materials of which that machinery is made. The life of machinery which is used in modern manufacturing ranges from ten to twenty years, averaging perhaps fifteen years. If the relief could at once be given by a removal of the duties upon crude and partly finished materials, with very moderate reduction on the finished goods, we should probably repeat the experience of Great Britain, and we should find, as Gladstone put it, that "the road to free trade is like the road to virtue; the first step the most painful, the last step the most profitable."
The manufacturers of England were formerly so afraid of pauper labor, so called, that when the proposition for the union of Ireland with England was pending, the purport of which was of course to bring Ireland under the same tariff system as that of England, they sent memorials to Parliament in opposition to the union, on the ground that they would be ruined by the cheap labor of Ireland. Of course, they were disappointed; they were not obliged to disturb or stop the factories of Lancashire and of Yorkshire, or to move them across the Channel. The manufacturers of England soon found out that the low-priced labor of people verging on pauperism is the dearest and not the cheapest labor that can be offered.
I will now close this over-long treatise upon the Method of Tariff Reform by submitting what may be called a practical budget. The figures are based upon the actual accounts of the Treasury of the United States, and upon what is hoped may be the maximum expenditure that will be warranted even by the present Congress.
First let me call attention to a few facts. Let us suppose that the civil war were ended—I mean the financial war, which will not be ended until the last dollar of debt shall have been paid and the last pension shall have fallen in. There are certain necessary annual appropriations which must be met year by year. How could we meet them with the least interference with the freely chosen pursuits of the people, and yet with due regard to the conditions in which we are? The ordinary expenses consist of, first, the cost of the civil service, legislative, judicial, consular, and the
