for the promotion of selfish schemes. Nothing could be more hateful to true and genuine democracy than such offenses against our free institutions.

In several of the States the honest sentiment of the party has asserted itself in the support of every plan proposed for the ratification of this terrible wrong. I may perhaps be permitted to express a hope that the State of Pennsylvania will not long remain behind her sister States in adopting an effective plan to protect her people's suffrage.

It remains to say that in the midst of our rejoicing and in the time of party hope and expectation we should remember that the way of right and justice should be followed as a matter of duty and regardless of immediate success. Above all things, let us not for a moment forget that grave responsibilities await a party which the people trust; and let us look for guidance to the principles of the "True Democracy" which "are enduring because they are right, and invincible because they are just."

THOMAS BRACKETT REED

PROTECTION AND PROSPERITY

Thomas Brackett Reed, American legislator, was born at Portland, Maine, October 18, 1839. After practicing law and holding various minor political offices in his native state he was sent to Congress in 1877. There he served until 1899. He was the speaker of three Congresses in which position his firmness won him the halfaffectionate title of "Czar" Reed. He died in Washington, D. C., December 7, 1902. What follows is from his speech in the House of Representatives, in 1894, summing up the debate on the Wilson Tariff bill. His Introduction, "Oratory, Past and Present," is printed in Volume VIII, and another speech in Volume III.

In this debate, which has extended over many weeks, one remarkable result has already been reached, a result of the deepest importance to this country. That result is, that the bill before us is odious to both sides of the House. It meets with favor nowhere, and commands the respect of neither party. On this side we believe that while it pretends to be for protection it does not afford it, and on the other side they believe that while it looks toward free trade it does not accomplish it.

It is evident that there is no ground for that hope entertained by so many moderate men, that this bill, bad as it is, could be a resting place where our manufacturing and productive industries, such as may survive, can reëstablish themselves and have a sure foundation for the future, free from party bickering and party strife. Hence, also, there can be no foundation for that cry, so insidiously raised that this bill should be passed at once, because uncertainty is worse than any bill can possibly be. Were this bill to pass both branches to-day, uncertainty would reign just the same.

It is often said that the truth is the simplest. That is so, after you understand the truth, but when you do not a lie is

far simpler. When Copernicus discovered the theory of the universe it took centuries for men to believe it. The Ptolemaic theory was so simple that anybody by using his eyes could see the sun rise in the east and set in the west just like the moon, and to-day most men accept the Copernican theory, not on their own understanding, but on the general belief of mankind.

I shall not, therefore, in what I have to say, be able-being, as I hope, on the side of truth-to rival the charming simplicity of the gentlemen opposite, or, like them, to compress the universe into the nutshell of a speech. I regret this the less because I know that many a philosopher has put the world into a nutshell only to find that the nutshell contained a world in which nobody ever lived, or moved, or had his being, and consequently a world which was of no human account.

Whether the universal sentiment in favor of protection as applied to every country is sound or not, I do not stop to discuss. Whether it is best for the United States of America alone concerns me now, and the first thing I have to say is, that after thirty years of protection, undisturbed by any serious menace of free trade, up to the very year now last past this country was the greatest and most flourishing nation on the face of this earth. Moreover, with the shadow of this unjustifiable bill resting cold upon it, with mills closed, with hundreds of thousands of men unemployed, industry at a standstill, and prospects before it more gloomy than ever marked its history-except one-this country is still the greatest and the richest that the sun shines on, or ever did shine on.

According to the usual story that is told, England had been engaged in a long and vain struggle with the demon of protection, and had been year after year sinking farther into the depths, until at a moment when she was in her distress and saddest plight, her manufacturing system broken down, "protection, having destroyed home trade by reducing," as Mr. Atkinson says, "the entire population to beggary, destitution, and want." Mr. Cobden and his friends providentially appeared, and after a hard struggle established a principle for all time and for all the world, and straightway England enjoyed the sum of human happiness. Hence all good nations should do as England has done and be happy ever after.

Suppose England, instead of being a little island in the sea, had been the half of a great continent full of raw material, capable of an internal commerce which would rival the commerce of all the rest of the world.

Suppose every year new millions were flocking to her shores, and every one of those new millions in a few years, as soon as they tasted the delights of a broader life, would become as great a consumer as any one of her own people.

Suppose that these millions, and the 70,000,000 already gathered under the folds of her flag, were every year demanding and receiving a higher wage and therefore broadening her market as fast as her machinery could furnish production. Suppose she had produced cheap food beyond all her wants, and that her laborers spent so much money that whether wheat was 60 cents a bushel or twice that sum hardly entered the thoughts of one of them except when some Democratic tariff bill was paralyzing his business.

Suppose that she was not only but a cannon shot from France, but that every country in Europe had been brought as near to her as Baltimore is to Washington-for that is what cheap ocean freights mean between us and European producers. Suppose all those countries had her machinery, her skilled workmen, her industrial system, and labor 40 per cent cheaper. Suppose under that state of facts, with all her manufacturers proclaiming against it, frantic in their disapproval, England had been called upon by Cobden to make the plunge into free trade, would she have done it? Not if Cobden had been backed by the angelic host. History gives England credit for great sense.

It so happens that America is filled with workers. There are idle people, but they are fewer here than elsewhere except now, when we are living under the shadow of the Wilson Bill. If those workers are all getting good wages they are themselves the market, and if the wages are increasing the market is also increasing. The fact that in this country all the workers have been getting better wages than elsewhere is the very reason why our market is the best in the world and why all the nations of the world are trying to break into it. We do not appreciate the nature of our market ourselves.

We are nominally 70,000,000 people. That is what we are in

mere numbers. But as a market for manufactures and choice foods we are potentially 175,000,000 as compared with the next best nation on the globe. Nor is this difficult to prove. Whenever an Englishman earns one dollar an American earns a dollar and sixty cents. I speak within bounds. Both can get the food that keeps body and soul together and the shelter which the body must have for sixty cents. Take sixty cents from a dollar and you have forty cents left. Take that same sixty cents from the dollar and sixty and you have a dollar left-just two and a half times as much. That surplus can be spent in choice foods, in house furnishings, in fine clothes, and all the comforts of life-in a word, in the products of our manufactures. That makes our population as consumers of products as compared with the English population 200,000,000. Their population is 37,000,000 as consumers of products which one century ago were pure luxuries, while our population is equivalent to 175,000,000.

If this is our comparison with England, what is the comparison with the rest of the world, whose markets our committee are so eager to have in exchange for our own? Mulhall gives certain statistics which will serve to make the comparison clear. On page 365 of his Dictionary of Statistics he says the total yearly products of the manufacturers of the world are £4,474,000,000, of which the United States produces £1,443,000,000.

I do not vouch, not can anybody vouch, for these figures, but the proportion of one third to two thirds nobody can fairly dispute. We produce one third, and the rest of the world, England included, two thirds.

The population of the world is 1,500,000,000, of which we have 70,000,000, which leaves 1,430,000,000, for the rest of mankind. We use all our manufactures, or the equivalent of them. Hence we are equal to one half the whole globe outside of ourselves, England included, and compared as a market with the rest of the world, our population is equal to about 70,000,000.

I repeat, as compared with England herself as a market our people are equivalent to 175,000,000. As compared with the rest of the world, England included, we are equal as a market to 700,000,000.