FOREIGN TRADE AND RECIPROCITY.

BY FRANKLIN MACVEAGH.

Protection is in trouble. It needs help. Hence the McKinleys and the Blaines. There would not be all these efforts at rescue if there was no peril for the active friends of protection do not hunt where there is no game. The main causes of the trouble are worth mentioning. First there is the alarming clamor of the people for the cheap goods which protection used to promise as the result of protection, but which it is now the life and death struggle of protection to forestall. This makes a part of the trouble. But another cause is even more serious. It is nothing less than a threatened breaking down of the protection system by its own weight. It is confronted by over production and the exhaustion of the home market; and the specter of its own cheap goods rises at its feasts. And then there are also the first rumblings of a moral revulsion that heighten this critical situation-of a storm of indignation against the defilements of legalized spoliation. And now come the rescuers of protection. The first recourse of the life-saving crew was to trusts. But while trusts temporarily limit production and ward off cheap goods they are a makeshift, for extreme profits will attract capital. The thing fatal to trusts, however, is this: That while they may ward off one danger they aggravate the others, turning the people's mildness into anger. Protection is bad enough; but this is protection protected by trusts. The next effort of the rescuers was the McKinley Bill. The idea here was the enlargement of the home market by the most stringent possible exclusion of all foreign goods. But this new policy was strangely frantic. Like the trust scheme, it saw but one of the difficulties to be overcome; and took no precaution against the rising tide of the popular demand for reform. Finally, when all is promising failure, Mr. Blaine appears-reappears. Shrewder than Mr. McKinley, Mr. Blaine is fully aware of both dangers-the exhausted market and the exhausted people. He proposes his lively plan of reciprocity both to widen protection's market and to rehabilitate the perish ing superstition of the farmer and the moral unconsciousness of those good citizens who have been supporting protection for partisan reasons. Will the protectionists adopt reciprocity? If they don't they are lost; for the bald principle of a permanent, prohibitory and perpetually rising tariff aided

by trusts, which is the simplest meaning of the McKinley Bill, has no chance. And if they do accept reciprocity, they are lost. Is then the case of protection hopeless? My friends, gunpowder can't save it. Let us see, specifically, why reciprocity cannot rescue protection; and incidentally, why reciprocity cannot itself succeed.

Reciprocity sounds well and is proposed with a certain theatrical effect; but it is illogical, not very moral, and exceedingly oppressive in intent; utterly superficial and hopelessly impossible in plan; and, as an answer to the hightening aspirations of this expanding nation, petty beyond measure.

In the first place, it logically undermines the very foundations of protection. It undertakes to extend its area, but in doing so it surrenders all of protection's intellectual claims. These claims are that it is possible, profitable and the only wisdom for our nation to live within itself; and that mutual foreign commerce is contraband in peace and war. When therefore we quit our isolation or admit the necessity of free trade with other nations, even if they scarcely count, we admit the impossibility of our system, and give up whatever made it an intellectual proposition. This might explain the hesitancy of the protectionists to follow Mr. Blaine; for reciprocity would be but the first halting place, the first refuge in the retreat of a beaten system.

In the next place, it abandons what is left of the moralities of protection. The surrender of a scientific basis does not worry reciprocity; it doesn't mind retreat, if it can avoid submission. It is willing to throw overboard the principles if it can save the spoils-to bankrupt the character of protection to save a mere remnant of its days. Better for protection to go down with its old flag flying. It must, in any event, soon pass away. Let us hope for the honor of the country that it may pass away while there still lingers about it some suggestion of a disinterested theory, some of its old pretensions to patriotism. Its memory might then have something of the happy fortune of its mediæval prototype. There having been a subtle something in that age when tariffs were levied by the barons of the Rhine, which relieved the baron's conduct of the external aspect of robbing, the ruins of their castles have come down to us through the centuries, touched more and more by the forgiving lights of romance.

If any one is surprised that reciprocity means only the rescue of protection, and that, by the overthrow of its philosophy and morality, it is simply because reciprocity catches the ear, and because the word has had a liberal meaning. But there are two kinds of reciprocity-liberal reciprocity, meant to help the people, and protectionist reciprocity, meant to help the protectionists-genuine reciprocity, which would make goods cheaper, and this kind of reciprocity, which would make goods dearer. This kind seeks new markets for our high-priced goods, and would thus prevent them from becoming cheap in our own country. It is full of tricks, and is simply a bribe for South American nations to lend themselves to the support of our tottering system, and attempt to enlist Southern mercenaries, Latin Hessians, to aid our inadequate force to keep down the rising liberties of this people. And thus for a new period of waiting-until our pro

tected industries are too large for these new markets, as they already are for ours—cheapness is to be again deferred.

That is the purpose of protectionist reciprocity. It must fail. The scheme is hopelessly impracticable for two reasons-because it is an attempt to make water run up hill, and because it is too late. How an attempt to make water run up hill? It must be remembered that our farm products are not in the question: they need no reciprocity of course, for they already mingle with all the farm products of the world. But our protected manufactures cannot compete; and it is these high priced goods that we propose to substitute for the low priced goods of Europe, not by competition but by hocus-pocus. That is our task. Is it not to make water run up hill? Is it practicable? Would you like to undertake this job of hocus pocusing the South Americans?

And can we also induce these nations for the sake of this no-advantage, for the sake of the privation of having only one coat where they might have two, voluntarily to isolate themselves from the trade centers and the money markets and the civilization of Europe? This too, would have to follow because no respectable treaty-making power would consent to make a treaty inferior to ours. Can we hope to have them deny themselves England, France, Germany and their mother countries, all to help us to bolster up our troubled protection?

Strange as it may sound, it is literally true that the South Americans' could have no motive for all these heavy pecuniary sacrifices and privations, and for all the dreary isolation of their lives, except that of benevolence toward our unbenevolent oligarchy. If, Mr. Chairman, there ever was a time when they might have received something back, it is now too late.

For what under the sun haye we left to offer them in return for all this suffering and self-denial, except the rewards of a future life? What is there left for us to reciprocate with? Delightful as it might be to separate ourselves still further from the nations that are most civilized, and choose as our intimates these simpler nations which are nearer to nature, it is too late. We have nothing left to reciprocate with, having already taken our tariff off all of the few things the South Americans have to sell, except a certain cheap grade of wool; and if our Latin friends will wait a short year or two we will, without the slightest expense to them, take the tariff off that too. Our infant wool manufacturers are already in full cry after that particular fleece. Yes, Mr. Chairman, reciprocity has waited too long.

We hear some criticism by the Blaine people of the form which reciprocity took in the McKinley Bill; but what could the poor bill do? It could not offer to take duties reciprocally off, for ours were already off. It could only threaten to put them reciprocally on. This, it is true, is an inverted reciprocity; but one ought not to be disappointed to find reciprocity with South America inverted. The sad truth, as we all know, is that these duties on coffees, sugars and the like, being purely revenue duties, were thought to be of no use to protectionists. They went into the Government's pockets-not into the protectionists' pockets; their exchange value

was not understood. They were therefore taken off by the protectionists to avoid reducing protective duties-to protect protection. Now protection, having thus eaten its cake, of course has not kept it. But why is the unhappy McKinley to be blamed for not having the cake which protection ate ?

But it is too late, any way; for the protectionists are now divided among themselves. Not alone are there McKinley men and Blaine men with uncomplimentary opinions of each other, but many protected manufacturers are weary of protection altogether. In a little while the politicians and editors are likely to be the only protectionists left. The cry for free wool and free ore and free coal coming up from the very inner circle of protectionism, proves that protectionist reciprocity has come too late. And it is too late because the people are getting wild about cheap goods. To Mr. McKinley this seems ignoble; but it portends the judgment-day. No new deception will deceive. The gammon of high prices has had its day, with its occult theories that the more you pay for goods the better you are off. A game will assuredly sometimes end where you always pay the dealer in hard cash, and, for return, you must yourself do the imagining that, in some other relation of life, you get your money back with a profit.

And finally, it is too late because that other influential delusion has begun to fade, to-wit: the delusion that protection must be maintained because Lincoln freed the slaves. The truth is that, having been given plenty of rope, protection is about to hang itself; and adroit as Mr. Blaine is, he is helpless to grant a reprieve. But why should this great, young, abounding nation, this favorite heir to all the riches of nature and the chosen apostle of freedom-why should it longer be restrained by the narrowness, the selfishness and the isolation of protection, or waste its dignity and forget its mission in schemes of petty reciprocity? It is right to break down our Chinese wall, of course; but we do not need reciprocity for that. The greatest material achievement that now lies before us-the climax of our national strength-is the achievement of a world-wide diversified commerce; but we need no treaties for that. Take the taxes from our ships and set them free to accept the favoring winds of heaven, and take the taxes from our goods, and wherever there is a sea there will be our flag, and wherever there is a port there will be our commerce.

In such commerce there abide the untold riches of the future-and abides what is far more to be desired than the sum total of riches, their juster distribution.

But, Mr. Chairman, there is something in such a commerce more interesting than its wealth. Its profounder interest rests in this, that its direction is toward the only adequate companionship for our great people, which is the entire company of the civilized nations, and toward one of the lofty and fixed ideals of humanity-the perfectly free and habitual intercourse and companionship of civilized mankind.

And to this companionship, in spite of prejudice and political tradition, the nobler tendencies of nature and progress are urging us forward. The rebellious enterprise and invention of man are rapidly eliminating

time and space, those chief supports to the political obstacles which prevent the friendship of nations. Nay, all the untrammeled forces of nature and of life, whether simple or complex-steam and electricity, the disinterested drift of intellect, the spontaneous impulses of sentiment, the thirst for knowledge, the noble impatience with the provincial, all which stirred the Greeks to overrun the boundaries of Greece, all which justified the conquests of Rome, all which let light into the Dark Ages through the rifts broken by the Crusades, all which burst the bonds of custom and flooded the world with the light of the Fifteenth Century, all which now consitutes the equalizing and fraternalizing spirit of Democracy—are bending to the task of bringing mankind into free communion.

And sooner or later we shall all know each other, help each other, trade with each other and learn from each other. And out of the natural unrestricted companionship of the world there will come to all a prosperity impossible to a system of repression, a civilization impossible to a system of isolation, and a manhood impossible to those who deny the brotherhood of man.