om
competition behind which it was easy by any, even the crudest, forms of
combination to organize monopoly; until at last nothing is normal,
nothing is obliged to stand the tests of efficiency and economy, in our
world of big business, but everything thrives by concerted arrangement.
Only new principles of action will save us from a final hard
crystallization of monopoly and a complete loss of the influences that
quicken enterprise and keep independent energy alive.

It is plain what those principles must be. We must abolish everything
that bears even the semblance of privilege or of any kind of artificial
advantage, and put our business men and producers under the stimulation
of a constant necessity to be efficient, economical, and enterprising,
masters of competitive supremacy, better workers and merchants than any
in the world. Aside from the duties laid upon articles which we do not,
and probably cannot, produce, therefore, and the duties laid upon
luxuries and merely for the sake of the revenues they yield, the object
of the tariff duties henceforth laid must be effective competition, the
whetting of American wits by contest with the wits of the rest of the
world.

It would be unwise to move toward this end headlong, with reckless
haste, or with strokes that cut at the very roots of what has grown up
amongst us by long process and at our own invitation. It does not alter
a thing to upset it and break it and deprive it of a chance to change.
It destroys it. We must make changes in our fiscal laws, in our fiscal
system, whose object is development, a more free and wholesome
development, not revolution or upset or confusion. We must build up
trade, especially foreign trade. We need the outlet and the enlarged
field of energy more than we ever did before. We must build up industry
as well, and must adopt freedom in the place of artificial stimulation
only so far as it will build, not pull down. In dealing with the tariff
the method by which this may be done will be a matter of judgment,
exercised item by item. To some not accustomed to the excitements and
responsibilities of greater freedom our methods may in some respects
and at some points seem heroic, but remedies may be heroic and yet be
remedies. It is our business to make sure that they are genuine
remedies. Our object is clear. If our motive is above just challenge and
only an occasional error of judgment is chargeable against us, we shall
be fortunate.

We