Morris tribune. [volume] (Morris, Minn.) 1880-2000, 1903-03-07
TARIFF Commission
IS ONE NEEDED IN THEIR COM
TRY TODAY.
Paper Read by A. A. Stone at the
Meeting of the Social Science Club

l
Meeting of the Social Science Club
February "a.
Government revenues raised from
duties on imports are at once the
most unjust and the most feasible
form of taxation in existence. 1t
man must be robbed, it is much
better for his peace of mind if he
never finds it out. 1t the profession
al highway robber could devise some
method whereby his victims would
never know that they had been
robbed, he would hail it as the
browning invention of the age That
is just what the statesmen of this
and other countries discovered some
generations since and it must be con.
fessed that we, the victims, submit to
it with good grace.
But any method of taxation is
more or less unequal in it's operation,
no matter how just and impartial it
may be in theory. So we may as
we'll make up our minds that the
tariff is here to stay. Our problem
then, is to make it as impartial in it's
operation as possible, at the same
time chat we are adjusting it so as to
incidentally protect our infant in
dustries. Perhaps that is not strictly
correct because according to the
prevailing laws, protection is the
dominant idea of the tariff and by no
means incidental.
Perhaps the first reason why the
tariff is not equal in it's workings is
because the conditions of inter-
national as we'll as of home trade and
manufactures are constantly chang
ing. The conditions of yesterday are
not the conditions of today. They
shift and change with the tide and
the seasons. Duties couscientiously
levied yesterday with view to the
protection of sore, perhaps social
ed infant industry are today but an
instrument of extortion in the hands |
of the same infant industry, now a
giant, grown greedy, extortionate.
and remorseless, by tina meat it has
been nourished upon Ehe American
people object to being the neat The
trust may have had a foster mother
that murtured it but the tariff is the
prolific mother that gave birth to the
whole brood.
In anc Their respect the tariff is not
practical in its workings and this is
conspicuously true when it is prohi-
bitive, For example: Because of
the clamor for protection by a very
Insignificant but noisy minority, we
prohibited the importation of Cuban
sugar, whereby we benefited the
beet sugar industries in very mic
roscopic degree, were guilty of injus
.ice to Cuba, entaiiing hardship and
suffering en- the Cuban people for allof
which the great good-natured Ameri-
can consumer paid, the beet sugar
man in money and the people of
Cuba in the loss of our self-respect.
The Cuban on the other hand, turned
his attention to cotton growing and
at no distant day may be our chief
competitor in the cotton markets of
the world.
Some day when Tennyson's pro-
phecy is realized,
When the war drum throbs no longer
And the battle flags are furled.
In the parliament ofman,
The federation of the world.
we shall have learned thu political
and commercial wisdom of the Golden
Rule. The statesman and man Of
business who divorces heart from
head will not live in that age. If
there are a few still lingering round
they will be pointed to as fossilizsd
specimens Of former civilization.
But to return to my subject:
think | have said enough to indicate
that our tariff laws should be more
flexible, more easily changed to meet
the ever changing needs of trade and
cratic. AS they are at present they
are run in cast-iron mould and can
not be changed except as Congress
breaks the moulds and recasts the
law in new one which is again out
of date, archaic, primitive, and pro-
badly an instrument of extortion by
the time Congress assemblies again.
But again the tariff has ever been the
foot ball of the political gridiron.
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