peting product
at home. If the duty be so arranged as to produce the greatest
amount of revenue, it must be placed at that point where the foreign
article is able to undersell the domestic article and thus command
the market to the exclusion of competition. This result goes beyond
what the so-called American free-trader intends in practice, but
not beyond what he implies in theory.

The American protectionist does not seek to evade the legitimate
results of his theory. He starts with the proposition that whatever
is manufactured at home gives work and wages to our own people,
and that if they duty is even put so high as to prohibit the import
of the foreign article, the competition of home producers will,
according to the doctrine of Mr. Hamilton, rapidly reduce the price
to the consumer. He gives numerous illustrations of articles which
under the influence of home competition have fallen in price below
the point at which the foreign article was furnished when there
was no protection. The free-trader replies that the fall in price
has been still greater in the foreign market, and the protectionist
rejoins that the reduction was made to compete with the American
product, and that the former price would probably have been maintained
so long as the importer had the monopoly of our market. Thus our
protective tariff reduced the price in both countries. This has
notably been the result with respect to steel rails, the production
of which in America has reached a magnitude surpassing that of
England. Meanwhile rails have largely fallen in price to the
consumer, the home manufacture has disbursed countless millions of
money among American laborers, and has added largely to our industrial
independence and to the wealth of the country.

While many fabrics have fallen to as low a price in the United
States as elsewhere, it is not to be denied that articles of clothing
and household use, metals and machinery, are on an average higher
than in Europe. The difference is due in large degree to the wages
paid to labor, and thus the question of reducing the tariff carries
with it the very serious problem of a reduction in the pay of the
artisan and the operative. This involves so many grave considerations
that no party is prepared to advocate it openly. Free-traders do
not, and apparently dare not, face the plain truth--which is that
the lowest priced fabric means the lowest priced labor. On this
point protectionists are