THE AMERICAN TARIFF.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXIV, Issue 72, 18 November 1912, Page 4

THE AMERICAN TARIFF.

Dr. Woodrow Wilson, in the course of a speech at the Economic Club dinner in New York, referred to the tariff in the following terms:—“The ideal of the tariff was a very pretty one. ft was that the Government, would foster industry of every kind and meet the interest of everybody by Customs duties which would protect the .American producer against foreign competition, and enable him to develop the virgin resources of America and all her unorganised energies upon a free domestic field. But the practice has been very different from the ideal. At first it was a sort of scramble for favours. There were no particular favourites. The Committee of Congress heard everybody and tried to please everybody. The result warhaphazard. There was neither plan nor consistency in the tariff schedules. As far back as 1826 the scramble re suited in what was immediately called the ‘tariff of abominations, ’• but those were amateur days. The tariff pro fessional had not been established- in business. The scramble was scandalous, but not fatal. In our day we see an expert lobby, some figures dominating all the rest; particular interests that have grown very strong under the tariff playing a dominating part in the whole business of seeking favours and privileges by means of taxation. . . The tariff question therefore, is radically altered in its aspects. In place of a general clamor for protection, there is now substituted a thoroughly organised system of control, and there is nothing the chief tariff benelicaries fear so much as the substitution in Congress and the Federal Executive of men not accustomed to their control and independent of it for those who have made it a part of their party creed and political religion. Their attitude is that the man who will not stand by the protected interests is an enemy of the country as well a-s of the party. It lias become a matter of perverted conviction rather than of pecuniary corruption, and is the more striking and difficult to handle because the men who defend it have their whole process of thought beclouded and perverted. . .