her, with
no thought of the inexpediency and injustice of sweeping changes.
There is a strong feeling among business men that any tariff, be
it high or low, is better than a shifting policy. Despite the great
preponderance of domestic production over foreign trade, it is
perhaps too much to say that the tariff is unimportant in our present
conditions. It can, however, be truly said that business can adjust
itself in large measure to any settled conditions and that radical
changes, especially sudden and large reductions, are fraught with
evils. Long before a new tariff law goes into effect, even months in
advance of its passage, while it is merely in prospect, the course
of trade is abnormally affected. If the rate is likely to be raised,
large importations take place under the lower rate, and for a
considerable time after the law goes into effect imports are small,
while prices rise and domestic production gradually increases. But if
the rate is likely to fall, importations are for months meager, stocks
of goods are reduced to the lowest point, and when the lower rate
goes into effect, large importations follow to the injury of domestic
producers. In many cases a year or two of notice, time given to
enterprisers to adjust their business, would probably do away with a
large part both of the serious losses and of the lottery-like gains
that otherwise occur.

The obvious measure of precaution and of justice would be to put
any new rate into effect gradually.[13] The difficulties are of a
political nature and in the desire of the party in power to "make a
showing" at once of the results of its campaign pledges, in the one
case by starting and stimulating industries through a higher tariff
and in the other by reducing prices to consumers through a lower
tariff. Under the new permanent tariff board, constituted to suggest
tariff changes and to administer the tariff laws, it would be possible
to apply some such feature.

[Footnote 1: See above, ch. 2, secs. 12, 13.]

[Footnote 2: In European countries, on the contrary, the rates that
have been mainly effective have been those levied upon food products,
and the agricultural landholders have been the "protected interests,"
such as the England "landed aristocracy," the German agrarian
"Junkertum," and the French peasant landowners.]

[Footnote 3: See above, ch. 13, sec. 2.]

[Footnote 4: See ch. 4, sec. 6 and ch. 13, secs. 6-10.]

[Footnote 5: In ch. 13, sec. 7.]

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