capture the
markets of the world for American trade; and know that on the wings of
your commerce you carry liberty throughout the world and to every
inhabitant thereof. Go forward, American business men, and realize that
in the time to come it shall be said of you, as it is said of the hand
that rounded Peter's Dome, 'he builded better than he knew.'"

The next great business reform we must have to steadily increase
American prosperity is to change the method of building our tariffs. The
tariff must be taken out of politics and treated as a business question
instead of as a political question. Heretofore, we have done just the
other thing. That is why American business is upset every few years by
unnecessary tariff upheavals and is weakened by uncertainty in the
periods between. The greatest need of business is certainty; but the
only thing certain about our tariff is uncertainty.

What, then, shall we do to make our tariff changes strengthen business
instead of weakening business? Rival protective tariff nations have
answered that question. Common sense has answered it. Next to our need
to make the Sherman law modern, understandable and just, our greatest
fiscal need is a genuine, permanent, non-partisan tariff commission.

Five years ago, when the fight for this great business measure was begun
in the Senate the bosses of both parties were against it. So, when the
last revision of the tariff was on and a tariff commission might have
been written into the tariff law, the administration would not aid this
reform. When two years later the administration supported it weakly, the
bi-partisan boss system killed it. There has not been and will not be
any sincere and honest effort by the old parties to get a tariff
commission. There has not been and will not be any sincere and honest
purpose by those parties to take the tariff out of politics.

For the tariff in politics is the excuse for those sham political
battles which give the spoilers their opportunity. The tariff in
politics is one of the invisible government's methods of wringing
tribute from the people. Through the tariff in politics the
beneficiaries of tariff excesses are cared for, no matter which party is
"revising."

Who has forgotten the tariff scandals that made President Cleveland
denounce the Wilson-Gorman bill as "a perfidy and a dishonor?" Who ever
can forget the brazen robberies forced into the Payne-Aldrich bill which
Mr. Taft defended as "the best