The New York herald. [volume] (New York, N.Y.) 1920-1924, 1921-07-19
(, TUESDAY, JULY 10. 1921.
Fordney Tariff Dynamite.


are powerful, resolute national fig
ures that must stand between mem
bership of blind folly and the danger
It. threatens to the country. What a
few sane, strong, courageous men
have been able to do in either house
to squelch public squander and to
hasten reduced taxation they can do
to preserve the nations natural re-
sources from exhaustion and to sal
wage it's industries and trade from
ruin. They cannot fail in this latter
and greater undertaking without
having those others largely go for
naught
There is one way and there is one
hope for the American people to get
back to normal business normal work
and normal living. 1t is to throttle
imitation with an unrelaxing, merci-
store American costs of production
to- basis where we can buy and sell
among ourselves as we must buy and
sell to maintain our national mar
kets; and where we can sell and buy
among other peoples as we must sell
and buy to recapture and hold our
foreign markets. Not to do it means
to- scrap American Industries broad
cast and to perpetuate American I'M
employment to a total of many mill
ions of men.
tariff, as its bitterest critics say of 1t,
is all bad. 1t is not a fact that it is
more bad than good. On the contrary
1t is a fact that it adheres to old and
sound principles which are more than
ever essential to the protection of
American industry and American
labor from the cut-throat competition
of cheap labor goods of bankrupt for
eign countries whose pauper produc-
ers get paid for their labor in what
amounts to fraud money.
And it is a fact that. in degree,
the Fordney tariff will serve with a
new principle our largest and best
end most necessary foreign custom
crs, thereby serving ourselves, in so
far as our business with them is
more valuable to us than our bust
ness with all the rest of the world
put together. But indisputably the
Fordney tariff is high explosive of
immeasurable potential menace.
The new Fordney tariff principle
is the American valuation system. 1t
Is to be recognized frankly that it is
a principle which must be intelli-
gently worked out and scrupulously
applied. 1t must be modified where
it needs modification and liberalized
where il needs liberalization, so that
it shall not either pillage the Ameri-
can consumer or kill all the foreign
markets of the American producer.
1t must be as clear as sunshine
that duty based merely on foreign
valuation would, under the topsy-
turvy economic conditions of the
Old World, let the pauper labor and
debased currency goods of Russia,
Poland, an Austria, a Czecho-Slo-
vakia, even a Germany, drive out of
our market the dearer labor and
higher currency goods of the United
Kingdom, Canada, France and the
Scandinavian countries.
Without an equalizing valuation
system of some kind we should be
getting the floods of goods from
abroad just the same, but by that
automatic pauper labor and debased
currency discrimination we should
be barring out the imports of our
greatest foreign customers, to whom
we could not sell IL they could not
in turn sell TO us.
1t must be no less clear that IL we
doSnot give to the foreign countries
on; which depends the overshadowing
bulk of our export business fair
chance TO market here such goods
an we are glad to take and need to
take from abroad then our own home
Industries that manufacture for ex-
port to those countries will thereby
be thrown to the wolves. Losing an
industry that uses materials and en-
ploys labor and scatters earnings at
home for export trade Is every whit
Az heavy blow as losing an indus.
try that operates for and within our
own home market
Again, it must be just as clear that,
once, the principle of American valu-
alton is accepted as necessary to pre-
serve both our life or death home
markets and our indispensable for