two months after the wilson bill became a law, the democratic majority in the house of representatives suffered as thorough a reverse as had the republicans in 1892. the house stood, after the election, 246 republicans, 104 democrats, and 7 populists. the south returned 33 republicans. the painful failure of congress to make the honest and thorough revision of the tariff which the country had expected was certainly one cause of the party’s overthrow. honorable men could not sanction the scandal and barter which had attended the making of the new law. but there were other and powerful causes for the defeat. there was the silver question. with every month it became more certain that silver was to be the issue in the next campaign. there was a possibility at least that the republicans would continue to make the issue their own. the group of western republican senators who in 1890 had voted for a tariff bill of which they did not approve in order to get votes for a silver bill of which the voters did not approve, were more hotly devoted to free silver than ever,—more determined to make it a party measure. already several republican state conventions had declared for it. among the new england congressmen there seems to have been a willingness to prepare the way for some kind of action, at least to consider free silver, for in the spring of 1894 henry cabot lodge made a conciliatory and ambiguous speech on the subject in the senate and there 238were others, who like him seemed to be ready to go either way. on the other hand, free silver had no hope with the then dominant faction of the democratic party. mr. cleveland and his supporters were willing to go down to defeat rather than even seem to encourage the fallacy. free silver then carried many voters to the republicans in the fall of 1894.
the strongest reason for the overthrow was the least sound. it was an unreasoning revolt against the party because of the panic of 1893 and the long period of hard times which had followed it. the panic happened after mr. cleveland was nominated, and therefore his election and his policy caused it! the public overlooked entirely the fact that hard times, failures, falling prices, and labor troubles had begun soon after the passing of the mckinley bill and had steadily become graver with every month of its life. between 1890 and 1894, the period the mckinley bill was in force, ohio-scoured wool fell from 71? cents to 44? cents, a drop of 27 cents. in 1896, under the wilson bill, wool began to revive. bessamer pig-iron fell off from $18.00 to $12.00 per ton between 1890 and 1894. these same tendencies were shown in nearly all prices where the articles carried prohibitive tariffs. almost, if not quite as great a fall in prices occurred in 1890, 1891, 1892, and 1893 under the mckinley bill, as after the wilson bill went into effect and a lower duty had been added to the general depression. the tariff considered the fall was greater under the mckinley bill on many important articles. take steel rails; under the mckinley bill of 1890, they bore a duty of $13.44 per ton. in 1890 they sold at an average price of $31.77. in 1891 the price fell to $29.91; in 1893 to $28.12?. the wilson bill reduced the duty on rails to $7.84. the average price the first two years after the bill went into operation was $24.00, and in the third year the price rose to $28.00. the lowest price at which steel rails have ever been 239sold in this country was in the first year of the dingley bill, $17.00 per ton. after the duty was put on barley for the farmer by the mckinley bill, the price went up for one year, 1891, but in 1892 it fell off 10 cents, and in 1893, 14 cents. free barley and the continued depression did little worse.
hides had no duty under either the mckinley or the wilson bills. the price began to fall in 1892, reached its lowest level in 1894, and in 1895 rose higher than it had been in many years. all woollen goods fell under the mckinley bill and began to recover in 1896. measured by business failures and labor troubles, the period of the mckinley tariff was as disastrous as that of the wilson. indeed, there is quite as much reason for laying the panic of 1893 to one bill as to the other, but neither was responsible.
the new congress, which was elected in the fall of 1894, first met in december, 1895. mr. reed was elected speaker of the house and nelson dingley, also of maine, was appointed chairman of the ways and means committee. mr. dingley was a man over sixty years old, a hard-working, conscientious, experienced politician. he had been born and educated in maine. he had been one of the state’s best newspaper editors and had filled, one after another, nearly all her offices, that of governor included. in 1881 mr. dingley was sent to congress, where he had soon become invaluable because of his extraordinary fund of information on all sorts of subjects, particularly on all things relating to american history and american industry. he held the doctrine of protection in much the same pious regard as did mr. mckinley. for him it was a settled dogma—the only question was the amount of a duty, and to the estimating of that he brought an amazing patience in calculation and in investigation. his colleague, mr. boutelle, once said that he had for years lived in the same hotel with mr. dingley 240and that he had never entered his room that he did not find him surrounded by documents, a pad on his knee, laboriously digesting them for his purposes. facts alone stirred his mind. no man was ever witty enough or wise enough to impress nelson dingley, but no fact was too unimportant to receive his attention. it is obvious that any tariff bill he directed would be carefully made.
the first business of the new congress was to provide revenue. mr. cleveland’s administration had inherited, as already pointed out, a deficit of nearly $70,000,000. the tariff bill which had been revised to increase the revenue had failed. the sugar refiners, finding that a duty was to be put on raw sugar, had brought in enormous quantities, free, to hold for their needs. thus, by their foresight, the treasury in mr. cleveland’s first year was despoiled of revenues it had a right to count on. again, the income tax on which they depended for a large sum was declared unconstitutional. something had to be done to bring in more money. the republicans had decided to use their power to put back the tariff on wool and to increase that on a variety of manufactured articles, and on december 26, 1895, mr. dingley reported a bill providing for these increases. the bill was passed at once by the house. its fate in the senate shows how thoroughly the tariff had already been replaced by free silver. the finance committee did not report it, but recommended to the senate that the needed revenue be raised not by the house bill, but by the free coinage of silver; and pathetically enough, poor mr. morrill, who for forty years had struggled for sound money, was obliged, as chairman of the committee, to report the measure.
this putting of the tariff in second place was the more evident as the time approached for the national convention of 1896. silver was the question in which the real interest 241lay, not the tariff. nevertheless, the wool-growers and woollen manufacturers, the iron and steel association, the high protectionists everywhere, began, months before the convention, a determined campaign to commit the republicans to tariff revision as a leading issue, and to name william mckinley for president. “bill mckinley and the mckinley bill” seemed to them a slogan sufficient in itself to win an election. they had their way. the platform declared protection to be the “bulwark of american industrial independence and the foundation of american development and prosperity.” it also declared with evident reluctance its opposition to the free coinage of silver except by international agreement with the leading commercial nations of the world.
the intention of the wool and the iron and steel interests and their allies to force the tariff to the front in the campaign, was frustrated at once by the extraordinary sweep to silver in the democratic convention and the revolt to that party of a large body of leading republicans. if the election was to be won at all, it had got to be won by an unequivocal and whole-hearted stand for the gold standard and to that mr. mckinley was forced, half-silverite as he was, after a few flat efforts to arouse enthusiasm for the bill of 1890. it was mckinley and the gold standard, not mr. mckinley and prohibitive tariffs, which was opposed to bryan and free silver, and in 1896, mr. mckinley won by the votes of the gold democrats. it is probably true that many of them were given to understand that the republicans would let the tariff alone or at least would not be in a hurry to revise it: at least that claim was made by men of character and intelligence. it was hardly mark hanna who could have made such a promise. mr. hanna knew too well what his backers in iron and steel and wool expected, and would demand for their contributions. that these contributions were large, there 242can be no doubt. james m. swank, the general manager of the iron and steel association, has said that more money was spent to elect mr. mckinley than had been spent to elect mr. harrison, and certainly mr. swank was in a position to know.
at all events, the work to which mr. mckinley called congress in extra session immediately after his inauguration, on march 4, 1897, was not establishing sound money; it was raising more revenue by duties “so levied upon foreign products as to preserve the home market as far as possible to our producers; to revive and increase manufacturers; to relieve and encourage agriculture; to increase our domestic and foreign commerce; to aid and develop mining and building; and to render labor in every field of useful occupation the liberal wages and adequate rewards to which skill and industry are justly entitled.” why mr. mckinley expected a new bill to do what his own had not been able to do, he did not explain.
the new bill was almost ready to report when the extra session was called, for mr. dingley and his committee had been at work all of the preceding winter preparing it. a sincere effort was made to give a good bill according to republican lights. “we expect,” mr. dingley wrote colonel george c. tichenor, who was assisting him, “to cut nearly all our duties considerably below those of the act of 1890.” in not a few cases, mr. dingley accepted the wilson rates practically as they stood. this was true of the metal and cotton schedules. he felt safe in doing this, because, as he said, they were “really made by the manufacturers.” throughout the schedules the committee aimed to replace the wilson specifics by ad valorems and, of course, this caused more or less uncertainty as to whether or not by the change those rates had not been raised more than the committee acknowledged. 243the democrats charged that they had, but the fact seems to be that mr. dingley sincerely aimed to keep duties nearer, if possible, to the wilson bill than to the mckinley bill. the committee particularly desired to escape the charge of fixing prohibitive duties. this had been done in 1894, professedly to cut down the revenue, and the mischief it had worked the party was not yet forgotten. in spite of the repeated assurances of mr. dingley that the extremes of the bill of 1890 were to be avoided, the committee did report many rates as high and a few even higher; for instance, the duties on flax and linen were advanced. a number of the unimportant articles which the old bill had put on the free list were put back in the dutiable list, as were nearly all the important articles made free by the wilson bill,—wool, salt, lumber, cotton bagging, cotton-ties, and burlaps.
works of art had been made free by the democrats; the dingley bill restored the duty. one reason given was that “many objects having no artistic quality or merit whatever, and calculated rather to corrupt than encourage art or culture” were being imported! foreign books, that is, “books in language other than english,” over twenty years old, engravings, etchings, music, maps, scientific books and periodicals and supplies of all kinds for colleges, libraries, galleries, and laboratories had been allowed to come in untaxed by the wilson bill; all these duties were restored by the dingley bill. travellers were again subjected to the irritation of having their luggage overhauled, and the amount of purchases allowed them was reduced to $100.00. this exasperating tax first appeared in the mckinley bill; here the limit fixed was $500.00. the democrats dropped the clause but it was now restored. but in spite of these medi?val provisions, the dingley bill, when presented to the house on march 19, 1897, was a fairly good protectionist measure, 244certainly a real improvement on the mckinley bill. there were fewer prohibitive rates, less contradiction, and less quakery.
in introducing the bill, the republicans had laid down a program for rushing it through the house by march 31, and this was carried out, under protest, of course. the bill did not come to the senate from the finance committee until may, and it came back with many changes. mr. aldrich, the chairman of the committee, claimed that on the whole these changes were downward. he was emphatic in his assertions that moderate duties were expected by the country. it was “thoroughly understood in the last political campaign,” said mr. aldrich, “that if the republican party should be again intrusted with power, no extreme tariff legislation would follow. it was believed, in the changed condition of the country, a return to the duties imposed by the act of 1890 would not be necessary even from a protective standpoint.
“industrial conditions in this country, with very few exceptions, do not demand a return to the rates imposed by the act of 1890. the bitter contest which is going on among the leading nations of the world for industrial supremacy has brought about improvements in methods and economies in production to an extent which was not thought possible a few years ago. these new conditions must be taken into account in considering the rates to be imposed.”
when the finance committee had believed the house rates extreme, mr. aldrich said that they had lowered them. a comparison of the bills shows that this was the fact in the case of the chemical, the earthen ware, and the glass and metal schedules. there were also reductions on certain parts of the wool schedule. while the senate amendments, on the whole, aimed at lowering rates, they also aimed, like the house bill, to protect everything which asked protection. 245the sugar schedule had undergone material changes and mysterious ones. the rates on all but the lowest raw sugars were higher than they were in the dingley bill, and there was a gap between sugars of 87° and 88° polariscope test much wider than between any other two grades. this exceptional differential was effected by such indirection that there was an immediate cry that mr. aldrich was trying to play into the hands of the sugar trust. the schedule was twice changed in the senate, but when the bill came into conference mr. dingley succeeded in having the house rates restored.
the political make-up in the senate in 1897 was such that it created for the republicans a situation not unlike that of the democrats in 1894. their republican majority was considerable, but there was a group of this majority interested in free silver and not in the tariff, and it could not be counted on. if they supported the bill, it would be in return for concessions which they might ask. almost at once it developed that this group was going to use its power to raise the duties on all grades of wool higher than the house or senate had proposed to do. wool had been free under the wilson bill. to cut a duty on an important product like wool 11 and 12 cents a pound without giving time for adjustment, of course causes a severe strain on a business even in prosperous times; to do it at a moment when all business is depressed and when the particular product, as in the case of wool in 1894, has been suffering ups and downs for many years, is to increase the strain dangerously near the breaking point. free wool did intensify an existing distress but that the sheep growers would not have rallied from it and adjusted themselves in a very few years, no disinterested person can for a moment believe. if they had been willing to do this, there is no doubt that the business of wool-growing would be on a 246more solid basis to-day than it has ever been in this country. it would be conducted according to those laws of supply and demand which govern trade, and not be subjected, as it is now, to periodical excitations and depressions as public opinion forces duties up or down. the wool-growers had no thought, however, of accepting the situation as long as they had political power. judge william lawrence, the president of the national wool-growers association, kept up a clamor throughout the campaign, and when the new bill was under consideration, demanded rates higher than wool had ever received. he was sternly rebuked by strong protectionists for his greed. “any revision of the tariff,” one influential interest allied to him, said, “which carried such rates of duty on this raw material, would not only fatally hamper the american wool manufacturer, but would excite on the part of the people such natural opposition, by reason of their prohibitory character, that their enactment would necessarily be followed by agitation for their repeal, an agitation which would grow and gather and continue until it finally resulted in still another tariff revision, perhaps at the end of four years. to insure any degree of permanence to the tariff law about to be enacted it is necessary that, in so important a schedule as this, it shall commend itself to the popular judgment as one constructed on fairly conservative lines. the schedule proposed by judge lawrence far exceeds in its proposed rates of duty any schedule ever before demanded with reference to any article, either raw or manufactured, in connection with any revision of the tariff ever undertaken in the united states.
“it is not necessary in this connection to undertake any analysis of these proposals. their significance will at once be apparent to every wool manufacturer. their enactment would be tantamount to a blanket provision in the law to the 247effect that ‘the importation of wools of foreign growth is prohibited, on and after the passage of this act.’ such a wool schedule would not only be fatal to the wool manufacturer, but equally fatal to the wool-grower; for it would enormously restrict the use of domestic wool, which would be superseded by foreign wool imported in the manufactured form.”
but judge lawrence and his association, as had been proved in 1883 and again in 1890, held moderate protection as little better than free trade. they wished to shut out all foreign wool. they refused to modify their demands now, and when both house and senate committees put the rates down, they turned on their representatives with a demand that their wants be satisfied. that they could rally a group strong enough to defeat the bill was plain. the western silver senators were also wool senators. they took no interest in the bill as a party measure; they would gladly defeat it if it did not give them what they wanted. moreover, the demand for a duty on wool was supported by a group of eastern woollen manufacturers who had always exercised great political power. this was the group known as the national association of wool manufacturers. although they deplored judge lawrence’s extreme demands, they stood for a duty on wool. in the judgment of this association, they must either support the wool duty or be prepared to abandon their own protection; accordingly they now resolved that “an impartial application of the principle of protection is essential to a complete and uniform development of the industrial resources of the nation,” and they “earnestly” seconded the appeal for a duty on wool. this resolution they sent to the wool-growers, who naturally had always been suspicious of the support of men willing to work for a law which made their own materials dearer, with a 248private note, assuring them that “a spirit of sympathy and fellowship” towards all wool-growers animated the association. that his spirit was far from animating all in the business, the loud protests against taxing wool which came from many leading but non-political woollen manufacturers at this time is evidence. so strong was the vote the wool interest mustered that the senate finally yielded in its fight for the lower duty. eight and 9 cents a pound on clothing and combing wool were what it had been struggling for; 10 and 11 cents were granted: but when the bill went into conference these rates were advanced to 11 and 12 cents, making the duties exactly what they were in the mckinley bill. the duty on wool of the third class, that is, on carpet wool, was raised higher than in the bill of 1890, an entirely indefensible increase. we did not then and do not now raise carpet wool in this country. our land is too valuable. but the western growers of coarse wool had been told that carpet wool was being imported free for use in cloth-making, that it was “deplacing” american wool, and they had demanded that it should be taxed. it is probable that a small amount of carpet wool did and still does find its way into certain clothes, but it is a negligible amount, and to put a tax upon the raw material of an entire industry, making every yard of domestic carpet dearer for the sake of protecting the scared wool-growers of the west against a purely imaginary competition was as silly as it was unjust.
the demand of the wool-growers that the prohibitive duties on all kinds of wool substitutes be restored, was imperative. by raising the cry of “shoddy” they could wrest a duty from congress on any material, no matter how valuable to the manufacturer. perhaps no word has been more unjustly degraded in the history of industry in this country. the world has never produced enough raw wool to meet the demand 249for woollens. it has always been necessary and probably always will be necessary, to use wool waste and wool rags. ingenious machines have been devised for preparing all this material for the manufacturer. it is a legitimate part of the business, and one that helps to provide warm, cheap clothing for the poor. “it would be as unreasonable,” says one authority, “to despise paper makers because they use up linen rags, or to despise dyers who use colors made from coal tar, as to despise manufacturers who use up waste woollen rags as shoddy. it is said that 125,000,000 pounds of shoddy, mungo, etc., are manufactured into wool every year in england alone. if this immense quantity were wasted, it is difficult to estimate the increase which would take place in the price of wool and the consequent dearness of cloth; but the result would be that countless persons would be unable to afford proper clothing.” the wool-growers cut off all importations of shoddy in the new schedule. it would displace american wool. as we shall see, it drove the manufacturers, not to use more wool, but to find a substitute for wool.
of course, the mckinley rates on raw wool meant the mckinley rates on woollen goods, that is, if the national association could get them. in principle, they were those of the compact of 1867, between the two wings of the wool industry, which rates have already been explained. they provided for compound duties; that is, one set of duties which made up to the manufacturer for the tax he paid on his raw material—the aim being, of course, to put him on the same basis as his foreign rival—and a second set which was purely protective. in estimating the first class of duties, the national association demanded that four pounds of wool should be reckoned to a pound of cloth. it had been shown again and again that it was only “sometimes” that this 250amount of wool was required for a pound of cloth, that the effect of the ratio was to make all of the heavy-shrinking wools for which four or more pounds were needed too dear to be imported, and at the same to give an entirely unnecessary compensation to cloth goods made from wools which shrink but slightly. when the point was made, the national association raised a hue and cry, and congress was warned to respect its influence as it had been in 1890. when it came to the duties for protection the association which had protested against the greed of the wool-growers in demanding high duties showed themselves equally greedy and more successful; for the wool-growers, except in the case of carpet wools, which we do not produce, had to content themselves with the mckinley rates, while the woollen manufacturers were able to raise the duty on the goods which are chiefly imported to the highest point it had ever touched, 55 per cent. it is interesting to note that in the compact of 1867, to which the association constantly appealed in the making of the dingley bill as it had in earlier bills, 25 per cent was considered a proper protection for the goods on which the association now asked and received 55 per cent. when the bill finally passed the conference it carried the same puzzling provision for a duty on wool tops as had been put into the mckinley bill on the suggestion of the then president of the national association of wool manufacturers, mr. william whitman. as we have seen, this was not a clearly stated figure: tops were to carry the duty of the basket clause of the schedule. figured out, this amounted to a higher duty on tops than the bill provided for yarn, which is the more advanced stage of wool on its way to cloth. there was opposition to this duty and grumblings of manipulation, but it was many years before the truth about it became public property.
251the success of the national association in getting into the bill exactly what it wanted was generally believed by those who knew what was going on in washington at this time to be due to the confidential relations with the finance committee of the secretary of the association, s. n. d. north. during the making of the wilson bill, mr. north was known to have had a desk in the office of senator aldrich, and from that vantage ground to have made a desperate but unsuccessful attempt to secure for the industry he represented something of the favor which other lobbyists were wresting from the democrats. during the making of the dingley bill he occupied the same inside position. to all appearances he was a confidential clerk of mr. aldrich’s; as a matter of fact, he was a paid representative of the woollen manufacturers, looking after their interests while apparently aiding the finance committee as he could. that mr. aldrich, himself, did not understand the real nature of the wool schedule finally adopted, one can hardly doubt, for he told mr. north at the time, according to a letter the latter gentleman wrote to mr. whitman: “i don’t suppose this tariff is going to last long, because the rates are so high; but i am perfectly willing that the wool manufacturers should have all that there is in it and that the tail should go with the hide.”
the influence on the bill of this despotic power of the wool interests was similar to that of sugar on the wilson bill, but it did not make itself clear in the senate as it had in the earlier bill. it came out in the conference of the two houses which followed the passage of the bill by the senate on july 7. some 872 amendments had been tacked to the measure and the conference spent nearly a fortnight over them. when finally reported, the rates were generally higher than either the house or senate had advised. it was impossible 252to give to wool all it demanded on a threat of defeating the bill, unless other interests were favored, and so it happened that when the dingley bill was finally passed, it was, on the whole, a more oppressive measure than the mckinley bill. moreover, it was made more oppressive by a house and senate whose leaders had declared from the beginning of their work that the country asked and had been promised moderate duties. it was as real a breaking of promises as the wilson bill was a surrender of principles.
and there was a general feeling among those who had made it, and in the administration itself, that as mr. aldrich told mr. north, duties were too high and would have to come down. what would have happened if the public mind had continued to be occupied with the tariff as it had in 1890 and in 1894, it is difficult to say. it is not probable that there would have been any such revolt as the mckinley bill caused. the disillusion the country had suffered over the ability of the democrats to carry out consistent reforms was too keen. moreover, what industry wanted and needed more than anything else was to be let alone; even the most irreconcilable of tariff-for-revenue only men could have hardly counselled another revision at this juncture. the dingley bill, bad as it was, did not stir the popular mind. silver occupied it, and silver was soon displaced by the most absorbing interest which a country can have—a war—and the war was followed by the question of imperialism, and imperialism was not settled before the country had entered on a period of such magnificent and bewildering prosperity as it had never before dreamed. the heavy decline in prices which had begun in 1891 reached its lowest point for raw materials at the end of 1896, for manufactured goods in 1897. it was not until 1904 that the prices which manufacturers had received in 1890 were re?stablished, but 253after they were once reached, they soared rapidly far beyond. as for raw materials, they regained the ground they had lost much more quickly.
wealth of all descriptions began to increase in an unheard of way. in 1897 the gold and silver produced in the united states was worth something over $89,000,000; in 1900 this had risen to $115,000,000, and in 1905, to over $122,000,000. while in 1897 we produced over 8,500,000 tons of pig-iron, in 1905 it was 16,500,000, and we were consuming about all we produced. of bituminous coal in these three years we produced respectively 131,000,000, 189,000,000, and 281,000,000 tons. of wheat we grew in 1897 over 530,000,000 bushels, about the same in 1900, and in 1905 nearly 700,000,000 bushels. the cotton crop in 1897 was valued at $319,500,000; in 1900 at $511,000,000, and in 1905 at $632,000,000. our hay averaged an annual value in this period of over $500,000,000; our potato crop something like $150,000,000. the value of our farm animals in 1897 was about $1,655,000,000; in 1900 it was $2,280,000,000; and in 1905 over $3,000,000,000. and so one might go on recording phenominal growths of almost everything which the earth yields in return for man’s labor. and never before had there been so rapid an increase in the number of laborers available. we could bring in labor free and in this period we used the privileges as never before. immigration which in 1897 was but 230,000 rose in 1900 to 448,500; and in 1905 to over 1,000,000. the great bulk of these newcomers were men of a working age, that is, over fifteen and under forty. these great numbers were added annually to those who already were at work in the country until in 1900 nearly 30,000,000 people were busy in this country, drawing from the earth the materials of wealth, moulding them to men’s uses, and transporting them to the markets where they were 254wanted, and these markets were not those of the united states alone. our home consumption was enormous, but we bought and sold with all the nations of the earth in constantly increasing quantities, selling always many millions more than we bought.
how much had the dingley bill to do with this great outpouring of wealth? it certainly did not cause it. a wave of prosperity was sweeping around the globe, as one of depression had from 1891 to 1897; england, germany, france, and the orient, shared in the blessings. the dingley bill could neither retard nor accelerate this. it could not and did not grow a potato or produce a gold nugget, but it no doubt did cause more of the materials we were producing to be manufactured at home than would have been done under the wilson bill. without it much of the capital and labor given to manufacturing would have gone to agricultural uses and commerce. sheltered from competition, men aimed to make in the country all that a highly prosperous home market would consume of necessaries, of novelties, of ingenious conveniences, and of luxuries. the dingley bill relieved the manufacturer of the necessity of considering what was doing in his trade in other nations. this enormous advantage enticed more capital proportionally than into other lines of industry. and as the industry expanded, immigration was excited. manufacturing as conducted to-day requires much cheap labor. save in the skilled work where comparatively few are needed, american labor—naturalized foreign labor, will not stay long. immigration was necessary in order to supply the cheap labor the textile and the steel and iron industries needed. that is, the dingley bill may be credited with adding two or three hundred thousand consumers yearly to our domestic market. the value of this addition is doubtful when we examine the standard of living of the immigrants, 255the amount of their earnings sent home, and the large proportion of those who are transient, that is, who return to their native land to end their days: just what this proportion is, it is impossible to say, but something of its size may be judged from the steerage passengers sailing annually from the ports of the united states. in 1900, for instance, 448,572 persons came in by steerage, and 293,404 went out. in 1905 1,026,494 came in, and 536,151 went out. the value of the increase in the size of the domestic market, which may fairly be credited to the dingley bill, is less impressive also when it is compared with the value of the markets of many millions we might have been conquering at this time if we had had the shipping on the seas which we once had, and which, as already has been seen, we have destroyed by prohibitive tariffs on iron and steel and lumber, and by hampering navigation laws.
the first uneasiness over the bill which its authors felt was along the line of foreign markets. we were not conquering them as rapidly as we ought, or as we must, if our tremendous production was to be disposed of. that which the thoughtful had been warning against was happening. in our zeal to produce, we had not intelligently arranged what we were to do with our products. the dingley bill had, it is true, provided a scheme of reciprocity. the really important provision in the scheme gave the president power to negotiate trade treaties with any country, subject to ratifications by the senate. mr. mckinley soon after his inauguration appointed a special plenipotentiary to negotiate these treaties,—john h. kasson, who had always been a moderate protectionist, and who had seen the capitulation of the party to the manufacturers of the country with disgust and dread. mr. kasson undertook the work with enthusiasm. by 1900 he had several treaties signed and before the senate. the most important one was with france. by this treaty 256we could import into her territory a very large number of articles at a minimum duty, and we in return were to give her a reduced duty on many of her products. not only mr. kasson, but mr. mckinley himself urged the ratification of these treaties. there was no doubt but that the public generally favored them. but there had appeared in opposition the same forces which had made the mckinley bill, the wilson bill, and dingley bill what they were,—political measures, trading contracts, by which for so much influence, so much duty was given. these nervous, superstitious, and greedy forces decided against reciprocity. the nature of their opposition was very well summarized in one of the hearings on the subject by a manufacturer who was himself in favor of the french treaty.
“we have striven to know, both before coming to washington and since our arrival here, what are the objections to the treaty. we have been informed that the knit-goods manufacturers have been opposed to the ratification of the treaty. we are now informed that of the $100,000,000 worth of knit-goods consumed in the country last year, only $240,000 came from france. we have been informed that the manufacturers of pottery and silks were opposed to the ratification of the treaty. we are now told that both industries have admitted that no injury would be suffered by them. we have learned that the manufacturers of spectacles have believed that they would suffer injury, but they were shown that there would still remain to them eighty-eight per cent of the present tariff; they have been satisfied to believe that no injury would come to them. we have been informed that the manufacturers of imitation jewellery object to the ratification of the treaty. we understand that the treaty proposed to reduce the duty from 60 to 57 per cent. we are further informed that the probabilities are that the result of the treaty will increase far more largely the exports of this class of manufacturers from the united states to france than they import from france to the united states.
257“we have heard that opposition to the ratification of the treaty has been based upon the proposed reduction in our tariff on prunes. we find that our exports of prunes to france amount to $260,000, while the imports of prunes from france to the united states amount to $14,000. we have understood that manufacturers of chemicals, gloves, and braids have stated that they will be injured by the ratification of the treaty. after an honest effort to learn the facts in the case, we are reduced to the conclusion that in actual working of this treaty the injuries suffered by them would be problematical in every case, and imaginary in most cases.”
treaty after treaty was negotiated, but in spite of urgency from the most respectable sources, congress refused to act on them, and finally in march, 1901, mr. kasson resigned. his chief did not give up the cause, however, for in the memorable buffalo speech of september 5, 1901, mr. mckinley said:
“the period of exclusiveness is past. the expansion of our trade and commerce is the pressing problem. reciprocity treaties are in harmony with the spirit of the times; measures of retaliation are not. if, perchance, some of our tariffs are no longer needed for revenue, or to encourage and protect our industries at home, why should they not be employed to expand and promote our markets abroad?”
the very essence of all this opposition to free or freer exchange on the part of the manufacturers was the fear of lower prices and cheaper goods. they held as a part of their narrow economic philosophy, the theory that the cheap coat makes a cheap man, that prosperity means limited production and high prices. at bottom, the manufacturer eliminates from his calculations all consideration of the consumer. but the consumer exists, and finally, in spite of the enormous prosperity of the country, the consumer was heard from. the dingley bill about 1900 began to hit the rocks for which it had from the start been headed.