theories evolved-where? In a closet? Since protection's champion prefers that name for the thinkers workshop. Oh, no, in counting houses, iron mills, quinine factories, and on sheep ranches. On sufficient data applied to an inexact science? By no means; on the results of an inspection of the individual theorists' bank, and profit and loss accounts. Neither Mr. Blaine nor any of his followers have been heard to question the sufficiency of the data, or doubt the value of the results. The conclusions of the conscientious student, with no axe to grind, or personal ends to subserve, upon a science admittedly complex and baffling, are to be laughed at as mere theories. The conclusions of the manufacturer, who knows the science only as it touches his individual pocket, are to be given respectful attention, and legislation is to be shaped in accordance with them. Weak indeed must that cause be, which flatters common ignorance by calling it common sense; which must remove the thinker from its path by a sneer. In the domain of science the man without data has no place, and he who asks him to determine without knowledge, by using his common sense, bids him make a fool of himself. It is the same application of common sense by which Brother Jasper determines that the "sun do move " because he sees it move. It is the same common sense which is expected to declare that because the country has increased in wealth during the existence of a high tariff, the prosperity was due to the tariff. By the same logic our prosperity up to 1860, was due to slavery, and the marvelous growth of Chicago is due to the bad smell of its river.

But since they prefer or claim to prefer experience rather than theory, let the argument be upon that basis. That a flourishing merchant marine does not depend on the giving of subsidies, the very statement of Mr. Blaine which I have quoted suggests. He says, that with subsidies American fleets would now be rivalling the fleets of England as they rivalled them before the war? And did they then rival them before the war? That they did, is written on every page of our history up to 1860. Was it by reason of subsidies? No, but against every opposition of foreign country, and our own blundering navigation laws. New England shipping had its beginning in 1631 with the building of the Blessing of the Bay." The growth of the merchant marine and the commerce of the colonies excited the wonder of the civilized world. Before 1724, English ship carpenters complained of the competition of the Americans, and in 1760 the colonies were building new ships at the rate of about 20,000 tons a year, most of them sold in England. Burke pictured the commercial condition of the colonies in the most eloquent language of his greatest speech, and while declaring that when speaking "of the commerce with our colonies, fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful and imagination cold and barren." He at the same time implored Parliament, in particular not to arrest the noble course of their marine enterprises." The growth up to this time had certainly been not only without subsidies, but in the face of the most unnatural opposition from the mother country. After independence was achieved the United States rapidly claimed the seas as the scene of their greatest glory. The number of entries of British ships in 1800, was not one-fifth of those that entered

in 1790, while in the same decade the entries of American ships increased thirteen times over. And thence on our shipping increased, until it was the pride of our country that our flag was carried to every sea, and that our sailors were the best in the world. Our fleets did rival England, and it never occurred to the owners to ask the government to pay them for doing it. In 1856, 79 per cent of the tonnage from foreign ports was carried in American ships. What more convincing proof can we require that subsidies are not necessary to the existence of a flourishing and successful merchant marine? What measure of honest pride might not we entertain in contemplation of the glorious achievements of American enterprise, daring and energy, which made our country peer of any nation in the world upon the seas, if only the view ended with 1860. What chagrin and humiliation must we not feel as we study the lame conclusion of our maritime history. With the resources which nature gave us we led the world. By our own act we resigned our proud position and took a humble place among the stragglers. If, by its growth, our merchant marine astonished the world, its decline was no less startling in its rapidity. In 1860 twothirds of our commerce was carried in our own ships; in 1885 but one-fifth. During four years prior to 1861, the tonnage of American steam vessels entering our ports averaged 41 per cent. During the four years prior to 1887, it averaged but 16 per cent., and this, too, during a period when the shipping of every European country largely increased. We may well ask why. Shall we not stultify ourselves if we say that the want of subsidies destroyed that which came into being and flourished without subsidies? We must seek further, and it need not be far. The period of the decline of our shipping interests was the period of our high tariff. The early laws declared that no American could fly his country's flag at his mast head, unless his ship was built in the United States. It remained for the Solons of 1860 to place a large tax upon iron and steel, and the manufacturers thereof used in ship building just at the time when wood was giving way to metal and sails to steam. Prior laws had said we should not buy abroad; these laws made it impossible to build at home; and yet Mr. Blaine says the decline of our merchant marine is due to our "impotent fear" of the word subsidies. We support a vast army, garrisoned in custom houses at every port of entry on the shores of our country to wage war on the commerce of every nation desiring to trade with us, and with whom it is our interest to trade. By taxing his raw material we drive our manufacturer out of competition for the markets of the world. And yet Mr. Blaine can find no better reason for the decline of our shipping than the lack of subsidies and an impotent fear of the word, and dazzles us with a Congress of Nations in the interests of trade.

It should be clear then that the present condition of our shipping is not due to the constant failure of the government to protect navigation, for as we have seen government has endeavored to protect it. The decline since 1860 has not been due to the lack of subsidies, because the growth itself prior to that time was without their aid. That our experience has not been peculiar, a study of history will disclose. It has been the experience of the nations that ships do not make commerce, but that commerce

brings into being ships. Whenever it has been attempted to create a commerce by paying for the building or operating of ships out of the public treasury, there has resulted only failure. True, Mr. Blaine says, "that England has taken possession of the seas, because she has never been affrighted by the word subsidy.” England has had no need to be affrighted by that word, because in her vocabulary it means payment for public service, and not gratuity to private enterprise. With colonies scattered all over the globe, with vast governmental and military institutions, inter-dependent upon each other, and requiring constant and expensive intercourse, she has necessarily spent large sums for public serviec; but she pays for service alone, and lets the work to the highest and best bidder. Nor will it do to say that the result has been the same as though these payments had been gratuities, for explanation would still be needed for the undoubted fact that but few of the English lines have engaged in this public service, or received the government's patronage, while many of the most prosperous British lines have never received a dollar of public money. England has taken possession of the seas, because, in spite of her high priced labor, she knew that she had nothing to fear from intercourse with every land; she has bought where she could buy cheapest and sold where she could demand the highest price, and an immense merchant marine has been the necessary result. Let us look further than England. The two most successful steamship lines from the Continent are from Hamburg and Bremen, and they receive no pay from the government other than moderate postage rates.

But if illustrations are not lacking of the truth that subsidies are not necessary to successful marine service, they are also at hand to show that the granting of subsidies and the building of ships therewith, do not insure a successful merchant marine. France, in 1881, established a subsidy system, based both on tonnage of ships built and number of miles sailed. What was the result? French tonnage increased over one hundred per cent in two years; but as Mr. Wells says, the French learned that ships are the children, and not the parents, of commerce. Ships increased, but commerce did not proportionately. Competition became vastly greater, freight rates fell, and companies which had paid dividends before the subsidies, paid them no longer. France had for her vast expenditure only a demoralized merchant marine. Austro-Hungary tried the same experiment with like results. What reason have we to believe that the same system applied to our own marine service will have any different effect?

If from neither the history of our own country, nor the experience of other nations, we can find any support for the assertion that our prestige on the sea will be regained by adopting a subsidy system, by what means then may we expect to regain that prestige? How, but by undoing our own work, and establishing again the same conditions under which we acquired our supremacy? Let us not, in the same breath that we cry out for more ships, declare for the prohibition of foreign commerce. Let us no longer deplore the fact that we have not our share of the world's trade, while we forbid our manufacturers to buy their raw material where it is to be had at the least cost. Having killed our shipping by our marvelous

system of taxing the many for the benefit of the few, let us not commit the absurdity of attempting to bring it to life by a new taxation. This is a case where the hair of the dog cannot be good for the bite. The foundation of the protective system is the belief that the good fortune of one nation is the misfortue of another; that comfort, prosperity, and happiness in the English workman's home, means privation and poverty and despair in the home of his American cousin; that nations must constantly be engaged in industrial warfare, and that those who believe differently are secretly in league with the enemy. As the logical end of such a conflict, the time must come when the people of earth will be like shipwrecked sailors, tossed to and fro by the waves, from whose breasts privation has so banished human instincts, that each regards hungrily his fellow's flesh. If that theory be true, which Heaven forbid, it should need no sentimental considerations to show a nation where its welfare lies. Self-interest should dictate the preservation and not the waste of the wealth which nature has given. What then shall be said of that system, which encourages the destruction of forests and impoverishing of mines, the rapid waste of all natural resources, to meeting necessities which admittedly can be supplied at less cost from without our border; which debars us from exchanging that which costs us little, and which we do not need, for that which we must have, and to produce which would cost us much? What have we to fear from open rivalry in the world's marts? Is it our high rate of wages? If they are high, it is because the products of a given amount of labor are proportionately large, and not because of a system which robs the wage fund derived from profitable pursuits to pay for labor in other industries which cannot support themselves. Is it lack of natural resources? Has not nature been busy in storing up upon this continent her richest treasures, untouched by the necessities of mankind, while millions were feeding on those of the old world?

Let the American people have free raw material, permit them to buy where they would sell, accord the same free entry to foreign wool which we ask for the native hog, and a commerce will arise such as has blessed no nation in the history of the world. We will then no longer seek to devise a means to sustain a merchant marine. The commerce which demands it will maintain it, and its cost will be but a small incident in the mighty volume of trade. Give us free American ships and remove the tax from the American flag, and the American flag will float from the mast head of American ships over every water of the globe.

NATIONALISM;

AS PROPOSED BY EDWARD BELLAMY.

BY DAVID B. JONES.

Revision is certainly on the rampage in this, as well as in the Old World. The condition of the age is well illustrated by that of the goat which was found in an express car upon an eastern railway. Failing to find the usual marks upon the goat indicating his destination, the expressman inquired of those who had placed him there, and one of them answered: "I don't know and he don't know. and he's eat up his tag and nobody knows." If this age ever had a tag indicating its destination it certainly has eaten it up and it is now traveling at a fearful rate, but what its destination is nobody knows. The land where "nobody knows" is the paradise of the dreamer and the fanatic. They are constantly looking for something to revise. They have revised the devil, poor soul, into a mere reminiscence; and the only reason we have not had a public demand for a revision of the ten commandments is the fact that they have been so long and so universally revised for private use. In this off-hand revision of the traditions of the past and the tried experiences of our race, we can find a very useful hint in the frequent comment which could be heard in Dr. McCosh's class rooms at Princeton, when some member of the base-ball or foot-ball team was called upon by the doctor for a statement of the doctrines of Hume or of Berkley, or some of the ancient philosophers. After listening with evident and growing impatience to the student's wild and daring revision, the doctor would put a period to the recitation with an emphatic "No sir! Sit down sir, Hume was not a fool." During the prevalence of the epidemic for revision we should remember with the old doctor that the past was not all fool.

It is certain that the sufferings and miseries of the masses are not of recent origin. It is true that history makes scant mention of their sufferings, but we know that in every age, as slaves and serfs, they must have bitterly tasted the truth of the saying that "man that is born of woman is short of days and full of trouble." No one can read ancient or modern history without seeing beneath its pageantry and show of power the misery of those who supported the burden of it all; without seeing their wistful and longing look as they seem to stretch out their arms with the