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advantages if the laborers, instead of acting in concert for the greatest good of all, had each acted independently. If we get a high remuneration under protection, that is evidence that protection was needed, and will be needed until we gain a skill so much greater than others as to overbalance the greater cost per man of our labor.

Thus every aspect of the matter is consistent, straightforward, clear, and natural. We are not, like the free-traders, confounded by the presence of prosperity in the United States in spite of and in contradiction of all our theories, nor by the presence of the direst poverty in Ireland, Portugal, Turkey, and India. Paragraph 35 reads:

"The application of these ideas to the matter in hand is simple and direct. I have spoken wholly as a political economist whose business it is to study theoretical questions. If it is proper to do anything about wages, the right thing to do is to abolish all protective taxes, and that will let them rise where they ought to be.”

The author of this review of Professor Sumner's paper has written wholly as a political economist whose business it has been for many years to study theoretical questions. It is of the utmost consequence to sustain wages, and this will be done by continuing the protective policy. Otherwise the growth of our non-agricultural industries will be checked, and the country will become disproportionately addicted to farming, with a constant diminution of the profits of that occupation and of wages and profits in all occupations.

We have now finished Mr. Sumner's paper. He had afterwards a long conversation with the Commissioners, in which he repeated that protection lowered wages, declared that New England would have been greatly richer had there never been any tariff, and that the South was about to greatly harm herself by introducing manufactures; and he scoffed at the theory of Franklin, Adam Smith, and Mr. Mill which teaches the great advantages of frequent industrial centres to the farming population. This he dismissed by calling it the famous Truck Farm argument. It is not necessary to go through those conversations, as they evolved no new point, and as the positions above referred to are not warranted by any reasoning in accordance with the political economy of the

latter half of the nineteenth century as set forth by Mr. Mill and by many authors on the protectionist side. I believe there is not a particle of doubt that protection sustains and gradually raises wages; that New England and the whole country is greatly richer by reason of it; that the South is doing very wisely in introducing manufactures; and that the "Truck Farm argument" is sufficiently justified by the authorities I have named, by all sound economic reasoning, and by common sense.

"PROGRESS AND POVERTY."

I.

IN "Progress and Poverty" Mr. Henry George has given to the world a brilliant work, admirably written, full of eloquence, radiant with the noble aspiration of diminishing human suffering, and absolutely devoid of that too common cowardice which stops at each sentence to consider whether the words about to be written will be in harmony with opinions avowed upon the other side of the Atlantic.

But the ability and earnestness of the author and the tremendous importance of his subject make it all the more necessary to examine with care every doubtful premise and every questionable deduction, and to collect what evidence we can as to the exactness or carelessness of his methods of reasoning. Of these we have some specimens in an article published by Mr. George in the Popular Science Monthly for March, 1880, entitled "The Study of Political Economy." In this he says:

"The effect of a tariff is to increase the cost of bringing goods from abroad. Now if this benefits a country, then all difficulties, dangers, and impediments which increase the cost of bringing. goods from abroad are likewise beneficial. If this theory be correct, then the city which is the hardest to get at has the most advantageous situation; pirates and shipwrecks contribute to national prosperity by raising the price of freight and insurance; and improvements in navigation, in railroads and steamships, are injurious. Manifestly, this is absurd."

It is certainly absurd, but the absurdity must be looked for in Mr. George's reasoning. The true statement should be this: One of the effects of a tariff is to increase the cost of bringing certain kinds of goods from abroad. Nevertheless a tariff is said

to be beneficial. If so, then everything which increases the cost of bringing from abroad not only those certain goods, but all goods, must likewise be beneficial. The obstacles he mentions not only raise the price of a particular kind or kinds of goods, but of all goods, and that of passage also, and they diminish the value of all exports. The railroad and the steamship facilitate every sort of exchange, but this does not prove that every sort of exchange is beneficial. Rum, opium, small-pox, and leprosy do not become desirable because distributed by rail and steamer! A tariff does not stop all exchanges, but only some. That would be a droll syllogism which ran: "If to stop some exchanges be beneficial, then to stop all exchanges would be beneficial." Mr. George continues thus:

"And then I looked farther. The speaker had dwelt on the folly of a great country like the United States exporting raw material and importing manufactured goods which might as well be made at home, and I asked myself, What is the motive which causes a people to export raw materials and import manufactured goods? I found that it could be attributed to nothing else than the fact that they could in this way get the goods cheaper, — that is, with less labor. I looked to transactions between individuals for parallels to this trade between nations, and found them in plenty: the farmer selling his wheat and buying flour; the grazier sending his wool to a market and bringing back cloth and blankets; the tanner buying back leather in shoes, instead of making them himself. I saw, when I came to analyze them, that these exchanges between nations were precisely the same thing as exchanges between individuals; that they were in fact nothing but exchanges between individuals of different nations; that they were all prompted by the desire and led to the result of getting the greatest return for the least expenditure of labor; that the social condition in which such exchanges did not take place was the naked barbarism of the Terra del Fuegians; that just in proportion to the division of labor and the increase of trade were the increase of wealth and the progress of civilization. And so, following up, turning, analyzing, and testing all the protectionist arguments, I came to conclusions which I have ever since retained."

The reader who is familiar with the Free-Trade and Protectionist controversy will need no one to point out the weakness of the above paragraph.

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