Tariff Commission! The Mills bill, which, if enacted into a law, would still leave behind it one of the highest protective tariffs the world has ever seen—aye, a higher tariff than was designed under the stress of our civil war!
Equally astonishing is the argument that, if the danger is not in the Mills bill itself, it is in the spirit animating it, in the principles embodied in President Cleveland's tariff message. What are those principles? That “the necessaries of life used and consumed by all the people, the duty on which adds to the cost of living in every home, should be greatly cheapened”; and that “the duties on raw material used in manufactures” should be “radically reduced” or abolished. Against the second part of this proposition the Republican party makes its open war. According to them, the free importation of raw material is to destroy the protective system and with it our industries. No more self-evidently fallacious assertion has ever been advanced. It will make Henry Clay, the greatest champion of the protective policy this country has ever had, turn in his grave; for it was he who said: “There are four modes by which the industry of the country can be protected, and one of them is the admission, free of duty, of every article which aids the operations of the manufacturers.” Nothing could be plainer. The recognition of this truth is as old as common-sense. It has not been confined to “free-trade theorists,” but been wisely embodied in many protective tariffs. That our tariff has not recognized it is one of its peculiarly irrational features, for it is in a great measure owing to the artificial enhancement of the price of the raw material that the products of American manufactures have not been more successful in competing with those of other nations in the markets of the world.
It is one of the curiosities of this campaign, that, as I notice in the papers, some Republican protectionists
