the restrictive
tariff will so variegate and multiply the undertakings in the country that
there will be a wider market and a greater competition for labor; it will
let the sun shine through the clouds again as once it shone on the free,
independent, unpatronized intelligence and energy of a great people.

One of the counts of the indictment against the so-called "protective"
tariff is that it has robbed Americans of their independence,
resourcefulness, and self-reliance. Our industry has grown invertebrate,
cowardly, dependent on government aid. When I hear the argument of some of
the biggest business men in this country, that if you took the
"protection" of the tariff off they would be overcome by the competition
of the world, I ask where and when it happened that the boasted genius of
America became afraid to go out into the open and compete with the world?
Are we children, are we wards, are we still such puerile infants that we
have to be fed out of a bottle? Isn't it true that we know how to make
steel in America better than anybody else in the world? Yet they say, "For
Heaven's sake don't expose us to the chill of prices coming from any other
quarter of the globe." Mind you, we can compete with those prices. Steel
is sold abroad, steel made in America is sold abroad in many of its forms,
much cheaper than it is sold in America. It is so hard for people to get
that into their heads!

We set up a kindergarten in New York. We called it the Chamber of Horrors.
We exhibited there a great many things manufactured in the United States,
with the prices at which they were sold in the United States, and the
prices at which they were sold outside of the United States, marked on
them. If you tell a woman that she can buy a sewing machine for eighteen
dollars in Mexico that she has to pay thirty dollars for in the United
States, she will not heed it or she will forget it unless you take her and
show her the machine with the price marked on it. My very distinguished
friend, Senator Gore, of Oklahoma, made this interesting proposal: that
we should pass a law that every piece of goods sold in the United States
should have on it a label bearing the price at which it sells under the
tariff and the price at which it would sell if there were no tariff, and
then the Senator suggests that we have a very easy solution for the tariff
question. He does not want to oblige that great body of our
fellow-citizens who have a conscientious bel