d extension
of the farming area. These things were done to favor the agricultural
states, but agricultural prices fell so greatly that our farmers for
a long period were nowhere prosperous, and great numbers of them,
both in the East and in the West, were ruined. At the same time a
high tariff on nearly everything the farmers needed to buy was the
political spoil obtained by the Eastern and Middle states. This
further depressed the condition of the farmers and forced them or
their sons into urban industries. A slower development would have
occurred without the waste of national resources in such conflicting
policies of artificial stimulation.

Sec. 12. #Harm of sudden tariff reductions.# It is rarely appreciated how
great is the tactical advantage which the advocates of a high tariff
enjoy in popular political discussion. They can so easily impress the
popular judgment with the evident fruits of their own policy and
with the immediate dangers of the policy of their opponents. When
a protective rate is first applied or is increased, it calls into
existence something visible and tangible, which can be measured in
terms of factories built, men employed, and products turned out. The
increased cost of these results is diffused among many consumers and
reaches them in such indirect ways and in such small increments of
price that they are quite unaware of the way they are affected.[12]

On the other hand, reduction of the tariff works in a direction the
reverse of the enactment. It may cause local crises and may even bring
on general crises. The benefits of the lower prices are diffused and
lost to view; the immediate injury is concentrated and strikingly
evident. Factories are closed, investments depreciate, laborers are
thrown out of employment. The organic nature of local industry causes
these evils to be felt by many classes. Merchants, professional men,
servants, and skilled laborers, that are tributary to the depressed
industry, suffer. The effects are transmitted to commercial and
financial centres and often credit is much shaken. Then follows a slow
and painful process of readjustment.

The low-tariff advocates in America undoubtedly have underestimated
these immediate effects. They have been too abstractly doctrinaire,
have argued too absolutely for the merits of free trade to be applied
instantly regardless of the existing distribution of investments and
of occupations. They have opposed one extreme system by anot