but nominal
and inoperative because they were upon goods regularly exported,
not imported (e.g., farm products, cotton goods, and some other
manufactures). But some of the reductions doubtless will force the
less efficient plants in some industries touched to increase their
efficiency or go out of business. Time, in any normal period, is
needed for adjustment, but an adjustment of a most abnormal kind is
in progress during the war. Imports from Europe have fallen greatly,
while exports are enormously increased. Old industrial establishments
have been converted to different and temporary uses. The conclusion of
the war must bring a new readjustment that must cause a severe shock
to some enterprises--and this must have been so under any possible
variety of tariff.[12]

Sec. 14. #Some lessons from our tariff history.# Can we draw from the
checkered course of tariff history in America clear lessons of wisdom
for the future? At least certain negative conclusions may be safely
drawn. It is a history of a vacillating public opinion toward the
policy of protective duties. Always the policy has kept some hold
on public sentiment, but it has varied in strength, now waxing, now
waning. The time of revisions has been determined nearly always by
varying needs of revenue. When more income has had to be raised, this
has nearly always been made the occasion and pretext for increasing
the degree of protection for many industries. This is not at all a
necessary connection, for it would be possible to couple internal
revenue taxes and customs duties in such a way that the rates would go
up and down together and give the varying amounts of revenue
required for the government without appreciably altering the relative
profitableness of various private enterprises.

Our tariff history is too largely a record of special favors granted
to classes of citizens, to the citizens of certain localities, and to
particular enterprises. This is apparent even in a general survey, but
almost every more detailed examination of particular protective rates
reveals evidence of suspicious and sometimes scandalous personal
influences at work. The protective policy has always professedly
been advocated for the general welfare to raise wages or to make the
country prosperous, but the initiative has always been taken, and
the valiant work in contributing funds for campaign purposes and
in lobbying bills through Congress has been done, by the interested
manufac