The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1913-04-08

are to be to which they will be reQuir- ed to adjust themselves. It is clear to the whole country that the tariff duties must be altered. They must be changed to meet the radical alteration in the conditions of our economic life which the country has witnessed with in the last generation. While the whole face and method of our indus trial and commercial life were being changed beyond recognition the tariff schedules have remained what they were before the change began or have moved in the direction they were giV- en when no large circumstance of our industrial development was what it is today. Our task is to square them with the actual facts. The sooner that is done the sooner we shall escape from suffering from the facts and the sooner our men of business will be free to thrive by the law of nature Cthe nature of free business) instead of by the law of legislation and arti- dcial arrangement.
 How Tariff Has Grown.
 we have seen sesf4f legfs4afion wan der very far afield in our day-very far indeed from the field in which our prosperity might have had a normal growth and stimulation. No one who looks the facts squareIy in the face or knows anything that lies beneath the surface of action can fail to perceive the principles upon which recent tariff legislation has been based. We long ago passed beyond the modest notion of protecting the industries of the country and moved boldly forward to the Idea that they were entitled to the direct patronage of the government. a IORuy ffrnn-o Sn that the men now active in public policy hardly remember the conditions that preceded tive have sought in our tariff schedules to give each group of manufacturers or producers what they themselves thought that they needed in order to maintain a practically ex- elusive market as against the rest of the world Consciously or unconscious ly we have built up set of privileges and exemptions from competition be- hind which it was easy by any. even the crudest, forms of combination to organize monopoly, until at last noth- ing is normal, nothing is obliged to stand the tests of efficiency and econo- my. in our. world of big business, but everything thrfves By concerted ar Fangement- Only new principles of action will save us from a final hard specialization of monopoly and a com plete loss of the influences that quick en enterprise and keep independent en- srgy alive
 Must Abolish Privilege.
 It Is plain what those principles must ne. We must abolish Everything that pears even the semblance of privilege or of any kind of artificial advantage and put our business men and pro- ducers under the stimulation of a con- stant necessity to be efficient, econom- Ical and enterprising. masters of com petitive supremacy, better workers and merchants than any in the world. Aside. from the duties laid upon arti- cles which we do not and probably cannot produce, therefore, and the duties laid upon luxuries and merely for the sake of the revenues they yield, the object of the tariff duties hence forth laid must be effective competi- rion. the whetting of American wits by contest gIthI I.h the < wits ri of the tesr of the world.
 H- -.Ar1Id ha unwise to move toward