nullification. The high tariffs required by the high prices prevailing during the war, he thought, should be gradually reduced. Every one knows that the advantage of a high tariff on imports is the protection it gives to American industry by keeping up the prices here, and preventing competition with the cheap labor of Europe. But it is equally true that, while keeping prices up is good for the seller, and indirectly for the laborer whom he employs, it is bad for the buyer. Free-trade makes low prices. Avoiding alike the Scylla on the one hand and the Charybdis on the other, Garfield chose a medium. He closed his speech of April 1, 1870, by an appeal against either extreme:

"I stand now where I have always stood since I have been a member of this House. I take the liberty of quoting, from the Congressional Globe of 1866, the following remarks which I then made on the subject of the tariff:

"We have seen that one extreme school of economists would place the price of all manufactured articles in the hands of foreign producers by rendering it impossible for our manufacturers to compete with them; while the other extreme school, by making it impossible for the foreigner to sell his competing wares in our market, would give the people no immediate check upon the prices which our manufacturers might fix for their products. I disagree with both these extremes. I hold that a properly adjusted competition between home and foreign products is the best gauge by which to regulate international trade. Duties should be so high that our manufacturers can fairly compete with the foreign product, but not so high as to enable them to drive out the foreign article, enjoy a monopoly of the trade, and regulate the price as they please. This is my doctrine of protection. If Congress pursue this line of policy steadily, we shall, year by year, approach more nearly to the basis of freetrade, because we shall be more nearly able to compete with other nations on equal terms. I am for that protection which leads to ultimate free-trade. I am for that free-trade which can only be achieved through a reasonable protection.'

As the representative of General Garfield's tariff speeches in these pages, we select the one of February 4, 1878. Of this speech a gentleman of high abilities and information, says: "Having read

and re-read it carefully, and having read all the great speeches made in Congress for forty years before the war on this difficult question, it is my deliberate conviction that the sound American doctrine of protection has never been stated with equal clearness, breadth, and practicality."

THE TARIFF.

"A few days ago, the distinguished gentleman from Virginia, who now occupies the chair [Mr. Tucker], made a speech of rare ability and power, in which he placed at the front of his line of discussion a question that was never raised in American legislation until our present form of Government was forty years old; the question of the constitutionality of a tariff for the encouragement and protection of manufacturers. The first page of the printed speech of the gentleman, as it appears in the Congressional Record, is devoted to an elaborate and very able discussion of that question.

"He insists that the two powers conferred upon Congress, to levy duties and to regulate commerce, are entirely distinct from each other; that the one can not by any fair construction be applied to the other; that the methods of the one are not the methods of the other, and that the capital mistake which he conceives has been made in the legislation of the country for many years is that the power to tax has been applied to the regulation of commerce, and through that to the protection of manufactures. He holds that if we were to adopt a proper construction of the Constitution we should find that the regulation of commerce does not permit the protection of manufactures, nor can the power to tax be applied, directly or indirectly, to that object.

"I will not enter into any elaborate discussion of that question, but I can not refrain from expressing my admiration of the courage of the gentleman from Virginia, who in that part of his speech brought himself into point-blank range of the terrible artillery of James Madison, one of the fathers of the Constitution, and Virginia's great expounder of its provisions.

"In a letter addressed to Joseph C. Cabell, on the 18th of March, 1827, will be found one of those discussions in which Mr. Madison gives categorically thirteen reasons against the very constitutional theory advanced now by the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Tucker]. It would almost seem that the distinguished author of the book which I hold in

my hand had prophetically in his mind the very speech delivered in this House by the later Virginian, for he refutes its arguments, point by point. thoroughly and completely.

"I say that more than a hundred pages of Madison's works are devoted to discussing and exploding what was, in 1828, this new notion of constitutional construction. In one of these papers he calls to mind the fact that sixteen of the men who framed the Constitution sat in the first Congress and helped to frame a tariff expressly for the protection of domestic industries; and it is fair to presume that these men understood the meaning of the Constitution.

"I will close this phase of the discussion by calling the attention of the committee to the language of the Constitution itself:

"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.'

"Language could hardly be plainer to declare the great general objects to which the taxing power is to be applied.

"It should be borne in mind that revenue is the life-blood of a government, circulating through every part of its organization and giving force and vitality to every function. The power to tax is therefore the great motive power, and its regulation impels, retards, restrains, or limits all the functions of the Government.

"What are these functions? The Constitution authorizes Congress to regulate and control this great motive power, the power to levy and collect duties; and the objects for which duties are to be levied and collected are summarized in three great groups: First, 'to pay debts.' By this, the arm of the Government sweeps over all its past history and protects its honor by discharging all obligations that have come down from former years. Second, is to provide for the common defense.' By this, the mailed arm of the Government sweeps the great circle of the Union to defend it against foes from without and insurrection within. And, third, is to promote the general welfare.' These are the three great objects to which the Constitution applies the power of taxation. They are all great, beneficient, national objects, and can not be argued out of existence.

"The fifteen specifications following in the eighth section of the same article-such as the power to raise armies, to maintain a navy, to establish courts, to coin money, to regulate commerce with foreign nations and

among the several States, to promote science and the useful arts by granting patents and copyrights-are all specifications and limitations of the methods by which this great central power of taxation is to be applied to the common defense and the general welfare. And it is left to the discretion of Congress to determine how these objects shall be secured by the use of the powers thus conferred upon it.

The men who created this Constitution also set it in operation, and developed their own idea of its character. That idea was unlike any other that then prevailed upon the earth. They made the general welfare of the people the great source and foundation of the common defense. In all the nations of the Old World the public defense was provided for by great standing armies, navies, and fortified posts, so that the nation might every moment be fully armed against danger from without or turbulence within. Our fathers said: Though we will use the taxing power to maintain a small army and navy sufficient to keep alive the knowl edge of war, yet the main reliance for our defense shall be the intelligence, culture, and skill of our people; a development of our own intellectual and material resources, which will enable us to do every thing that may be necessary to equip, clothe, and feed ourselves in time of war, and make ourselves intelligent, happy, and prosperous in peace.'

"To lay the foundation for the realization of these objects was a leading motive which led to the formation of the Constitution, and was the earliest and greatest object of solicitude in the First Congress.

"Two days after the votes for president were counted, and long before Washington was inaugurated, James Madison rose in the first House of Representatives, and for the first time moved to go into the Committee of the Whole on the state of the Union, for the express purpose of carrying out the theory of the Constitution to provide for the common defense and the general welfare, both by regulating commerce and protecting American manufactures. Thus, on the 8th of April, 1789, he opened a debate which lasted several weeks, in which was substantially developed every idea that has since appeared save one, the notion that it was unconstitutional to protect American industry. All other phases of the subject were fully and thoroughly handled in that great debate.

"Our fathers had been disciplined in the severe school of experience during the long period of colonial dependence. The heavy hand of British repression was laid upon all their attempts to become a self-supporting people. The navigation laws and commercial regulations of the mother

country were based upon the theory that the colonies were founded for the sole purpose of raising up customers for her trade. They were allowed to purchase in British markets alone any manufactured article which England had to sell. In short, they were compelled to trade with England on her own terms; and whether buying or selling, the product must be carried in British bottoms at the carrier's own price. In addition to this, a revenue tax of 5 per cent. was imposed on all colonial exports and imports.

The colonists were doomed to the servitude of furnishing, by the simplest forms of labor, raw materials for the mother country, who arrogated to herself the sole right to supply her colonies with the finished product. To our fathers, independence was emancipation from this servitude. They knew that civilization advanced from the hunting to the pastoral state, from the pastoral to the agricultural, which has such charms for the distinguished gentleman from Virginia. But they also knew that no merely agricultural people had ever been able to rise to a high civilization and to self-supporting independence. They determined, therefore, to make their emancipation complete by adding to agriculture the mechanic arts, which in their turn would carry agriculture and all other industries to a still higher development, and place our people in the front rank of civilized and self-supporting nations. This idea inspired the legislation of all the earlier Congresses. It found expression in the first tariff act of 1789; in the higher rates of the act of 1790; and in the still larger schedule and increased rates of the acts of 1797 and 1800.

In 1806 the non-importation act forbade the importation of British manufactures of silk, cloth, nails, spikes, brass, tin, and many other articles; and the eight years of embargo witnessed a great growth in American manufactures. When the non-importation act was repealed in 1814, John C. Calhoun assured the country that Congress would not fail to provide other adequate means for promoting the development of our industries; and, under his lead, the protective tariff of 1816 was enacted.

"I have given this brief historical sketch for the purpose of exhibiting the ideas out of which the tariff legislation of this country has sprung. It has received the support of the most renowned names in our early history; and, though the principle of protection has sometimes been carried to an unreasonable extreme, thus bringing reproach upon the system, it