LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 
 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
AMERICAN SOCIAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION. 
 
 1. — 
 
 RECENT PHASES OF THOUGHT 
 
 IN 
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY: 
 
 PAPER 
 
 READ AT THE 
 
 FOURTH ANNUAL MEETING, 
 
 BOSTON, OCTOBER 14th, 1868, 
 
 I 
 
 PROF. A. L. PERRY, 
 
 OF WILLIAMS COLLEGE. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 1868. 
 
 J. H. EASTBURN'S PRESS. 
 

RECENT PHASES OF THOUGHT IN POLITICAL ECONOMY. 
 
 I have ventured to entitle the paper, which I now have the 
 pleasure of submitting to the Association, Recent Phases of 
 Thought in Political Economy. He would mistake the purpose 
 of the paper, however, who should suppose it, from its title, an 
 attempt to estimate critically the latest views on economical subjects 
 propounded in the leading nations of the world. However interesting 
 such a criticism might prove, were it intelligently and thoroughly 
 done, neither my own knowledge of languages nor my opportunities 
 for reading enable me to undertake so comprehensive a task. My 
 present purpose is far humbler ; namely, to indicate, at a few central 
 points, and in a general way, the changes that have come over 
 Political Economy in the past few years. That such changes have 
 supervened ; that the bearings of the science are altered ; that its tone 
 is more tonic, and its spirit more spiritual, than in the last generation ; 
 every one conversant with the scientific thinking of the two periods 
 on the subject will readily admit ; and one not thus conversant, might 
 readily convince himself, by passing in succession from the perusal of 
 the pages of Say and Ricardo, for example, to the perusal, for 
 example, of the pages of Bastiat and Macleod. Such a reader would 
 be conscious at once, as of a passage from a comparatively lifeless 
 region to a region on every hand bursting with vitality. If he should 
 find, as he would find, less in the later writers that is definite, 
 dogmatic, mathematical, he would find more that is vital, humane, 
 divine. 
 
 In relation then, first to value ; second to money : and third to 
 trade ; let us study the nature and magnitude of these changes. 
 
 Although value is the sole subject of Political Economy, it is 
 remarkable that the earlier writers do not even undertake to define it. 
 They write about it. they lay down many truths concerning it. but 
 
they do not tell us what it is. Aristotle, indeed, incidentally, not in 
 his Economies, where we should expect to find it, but in his Ethics, 
 gives us a perfect definition of property, namely, "And we call every- 
 thing property, the value of which is measured by money." But though 
 Ave find scattered through the writings of this transcendent thinker, 
 many acute definitions, some shrewd inferences, and pretty copious 
 information relating to the proper science of value, we nowhere find 
 any definition or analysis of value itself. Adam Smith entitles 
 his book the Wealth of Nations ; but, strangely enough, he does not 
 tell us anywhere in his pages what wealth is, what its constituents are, 
 or even give us any criterion by which we may determine its presence. 
 He throws new light upon most parts of the field of value ; he broods 
 the truths already demonstrated by others with those first discovered 
 by himself into a tolerably harmonious system ; his name is now and 
 probably always will be, the eminent name in the history of the 
 science ; and yet he leaves the very centre of that science — the 
 meaning and scope of value — unillumined by his genius. 
 
 The brilliant school in Political Economy that he founded, with 
 Malthus, and Ricardo and McCulloch and Senior and Mill for its 
 greater lights, devoted themselves with more or less of assiduity to an 
 investigation of value ; but they confined themselves to a study of its 
 manifestations in material commodities, and came to the conclusion in 
 general, that the cost of the production of these commodities is the 
 cause and the measure of their value. According to this view, value 
 inheres in the commodities themselves ; it is there, and can be ascer- 
 tained by a study of the commodity itself, by learning what it lias cost 
 of human labor. On this view, value is a quality of tilings — some- 
 thing put into them : and once in them, rigidly remaining in them, as 
 its concavity remains in a wooden-bowl when it has been once 
 hollowed out. If cost of production be the cause and the measure of 
 value, this cost once ascertained, and value is no longer a matter of 
 doubt, it becomes, as it were, a physical quality of the thing, some- 
 thing that can be anatomized out of the tiling itself, or as the writers 
 in question usually phrase it, it is a purchasing-power, superinduced 
 upon the natural physical powers of the thing. Hence the study 
 of value became a study of things : its operations Were supposed to lie 
 
within the sphere of matter. And not more diligently have the 
 physiologists sought for the subtle principle of life amid the play 
 of material organisms, than did the political economists of this school 
 search for the law of value amid the changes of matter. Wonderful 
 is the ingenuity of Ricardo, for instance, in applying the formulas of 
 mathematics to the supposed changes of value through the varying 
 cost of production of certain tangible commodities ; and accordingly, 
 instead of developing a comprehensive theory of value, he gives 
 us admirable practical rules for estimating the average price of certain 
 manufactures. Viewed under this aspect, however useful the science 
 of political economy might be for the practical guidance of men 
 engaged in transforming or transporting material forms on their way 
 towards an ultimate market, there is nothing in it enkindling, nothing 
 that connects it vitally with the free play of the human faculties, 
 and still less with the benevolent purposes of the great Father. 
 
 Very un fortunately, also, this school in general. (McCulloch is 
 a partial exception) did not discriminate value from utility, and 
 consequently and logically came to a law of landed rents, and to 
 a law of population, which are so contrary to a natural sense of justice 
 in men, and to a natural confidence in the wisdom of God, that no 
 wonder Carlyle hurls in scorn at Political Economy the stinging 
 epithet — the dismal science .' Dismal indeed, if the Ricardo law of 
 Rent, and the Malthus law of Population, be fundamental principles 
 in it ! The utility of wheat, is its capacity to gratify the desire 
 for food ; its value, whatever it will exchange for in a free market ; 
 two ideas, one would suppose, quite diverse from each other. And 
 yet, because the exchange is in one sense the consequent of the 
 utility — men being willing to give something for it on account of its 
 capacity to gratify desire — the two distinct ideas commingled com- 
 pletely in the views of these writers, or rather, were not separated by 
 them out of the complex into simples. Notice the logical con- 
 sequences. Food is a necessity to human life, it can only be pro- 
 duced out of land ; the capacity to produce food is the natural utility 
 of the land : they who own land have become possessed of a natural 
 utility which God gave to all men alike ; through their control of this 
 utility, they control another natural utility, namely, the capacity 
 
of wheat to sustain life; utility is in the land, value is in the land, 
 utility is in the wheat, value is in the wheat ; therefore the land owners 
 sell God's free gifts, the// dole them out to other men for fay; they 
 have intercepted divine bounties descending from heaven, and, as 
 landlords, have become the lords of creation, they stand in God's 
 stead, only they deal out what he designed as gifts — for a considera- 
 tion. Under this view, land is a monopoly, its ownership is usurpa- 
 tion, and its rent pay poured into the bosom of those who render 
 nothing in return. Moreover, the interests of land-owners are 
 directly antagonistic to those of the rest of mankind ; it is for 
 their interest that food be scarce and high : are not they the Joseph 
 who lias all the com ? The nearer the world is to starvation, the 
 nearer they are to paradise ! Now see the Ricardo law of Rent. 
 Some land just repays the expenses of cultivation, and leaves no 
 margin for rent. All lands with superior advantages to this, pay 
 rents rising higher according to the degree of superiority. When, 
 then, the price of food rises higher, cultivation can go down lower — 
 to poorer soils — which only lifts higher the wdiole scale of rents, 
 according to present superiority over the poorest land in cultivation 
 — the land-owners rendering no greater service than before. The 
 higher the price of bread, the greater the revenue of landlords, who 
 had but to sit still with arms across, and receive a larger and larger 
 rent for the use of the natural and inherent qualities of the soil ; and 
 if onlv corn-laws should continue to prohibit the importation of foreign 
 grain, then the deap-seated antagonism of interests between land- 
 owners and the landless masses becomes not simply bitterness, but 
 also doom. No wonder, under such a presentation of things as this, 
 that such a man as Elliott struck up his corn-law rhymes: — 
 
 "He knew the locust-swarm that cursed 
 
 The harvest-fields of God. 
 On these pale lips, the smothered thought 
 
 Which England's millions feel, 
 A fierce and fearful splendor caught, 
 
 As from his forge the steel ; 
 Strong-armed as Thor, a shower of fire, 
 
 His smitten anvil flung; 
 God's curse, Earth's wrong', dumb Hunger's ire, 
 
 He grave them all a tongue!" 
 
Moreover, all increase of population but made the bondage to land- 
 ords worse and worse. New mouths demand more bread ; a demand 
 for more bread raises the price of bread, which only raises rents high- 
 er, and dooms the existing poor to a worse starvation. Accordingly, 
 Political Economy wearied itself in reading homilies to the working- 
 classes on the sin of rearing families ; its first and last word of com- 
 fort and advice to God's poor was, marry if you please, but propagate 
 at your peril ! What a contrast in spirit, in language, in scope, 
 between the teaching of Malthus and Ricardo and the original 
 benediction of the Creator on his creatures : " And God blessed them, 
 and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply and replenish the 
 earth and subdue it;" not, we maybe sure, in derogation of reason and 
 affection, but only under their impulse. 
 
 A false view of the nature of value intensified what would otherwise 
 have been the sufficiently pitiable lot of England's poor, because it 
 made even their leaders helpless and hopeless ; a false view of the 
 nature of value unnerved, in large measure, the strong arm of Dr. 
 Chalmers himself in his efforts for the poor ; and thus we see in a 
 lurid light the inseparable relation of views of value to Social Science. 
 
 The modern magic word that has already transformed the face of 
 our science of Economy, removed the dark clouds that lowered over 
 her features, and shown her to be what she is, the bright daughter of 
 Heaven, was first effectively spoken by Bastiat, and that word is 
 Services ! Services : the word carries us away from things at once to 
 persons. How many persons ? Two always ; the person serving 
 and the person served, only each is reciprocally serving and served ; 
 each renders something to the other for the sake of receiving some- 
 thing from him in return. Man and his varying wants ; man and his 
 living motives, become the chief object of interest; and the science is 
 lifted from its blind, molelike groping amid dead matter up into the 
 free region of living spirit ! What is value ? We look at the word 
 etymoloffically, and find it derived from the Latin valere, to pass 
 for, to be worth ; there is a hint of a. comparison in the original meaning 
 of the word ; and current language always states the value of anything 
 in the terms of something else. How much is the piano worth ? 
 Four hundred dollars. But what kind of a comparison determined 
 
8 
 
 the value of the piano? Not such a comparison as the carpenter 
 institutes between the Length of his square and the length of a hoard; 
 the square has length and the hoard has length, and the simple appli- 
 cation of the one to the other determines the length of the board in 
 the terms of the square. But there is no physical quality, as length, 
 common to the piano and the dollars ; a peculiar kind of comparison 
 is necessary to determine the value of the piano in the terms of the 
 dollars. The carpenter measures the board by himself, alone ; and it 
 makes no difference in the result, whether the square be his own, or 
 a borrowed one ; but no one man can determine, by any possibility, 
 the value of the piano in dollars ; and no two men can determine it, 
 except one be the owner of the piano and the other be the owner of 
 the dollars. There must be two persons. — two owners ; and more 
 than this, there must be a free action ; a voluntary exchange of 
 ownership. — oAvnership in the dollars must be yielded for the sake of 
 ownership in the piano, and ownership in the piano yielded for the 
 sake of ownership in the dollars. Thus, and only thus, is the value 
 of the piano fixed for that sale. Value never existed until two con- 
 curring minds created it by a voluntary exchange of services. Is 
 there, then, value in the piano ? Except by a figure of speech, No ! 
 Is there value in the dollars ? Except by metonymy, No ! Value 
 exists, where alone it is created, in the minds of men ! There is what 
 may be called anticipated value, estimated value, before the bargain 
 is struck and the exchange is actually made, but value does not 
 exist until two concurrent minds strike it into being ! It is indeed a 
 relation, as Bastiat says, but is also a fact ; just as marriage is a 
 relation and also a fact. Will you take a definition ? value is the 
 
 RELATION OF MUTUAL PURCHASE ESTABLISHED BETWEEN TWO 
 
 services by their exchanoe. Now it will be clear to every person 
 of penetration, that this view of value exalts the science of value to a 
 place among the great sciences. It is a social science of course, 
 because exchanges are only possible in a state of society ; but, more 
 than this, it is a science that begins and ends, not in matter, but in 
 the living forces that actuate men, in the subtle and ever-shifting but 
 at the same time the pervasive and indisputable principles of human 
 nature. He who deals with value successfullv. does it because he has 
 
9 
 
 » 
 
 learned men successfully, their wants, their tastes, their fondheeis to 
 have early what everybody will have a little later, the probable 
 changes of fashion, and the thousand and one subtleties that go 
 to make up mercantile sagacity. Your man of business must be a 
 man of brains. The field of production is no dead level of sluggish 
 uniformity ; it is like the billowy and heaving sea ; to navigate most 
 successfully requires foresight, a wise courage, a power of adaptation 
 to varying circumstances, skill to veer and tack when the wind 
 changes, and a will to scud before a favoring breeze with all sails set. 
 There is scope for the development of ingenious mind wherever man 
 and his motives become the chief study. 
 
 And, best of all, a few logical inferences from this view of value 
 supersede the fallacies that have made this science the mortal dread 
 of many. If what men sell are only services, will not the competition 
 of those ready to render them eliminate God's free gifts from influence 
 on value ? Can men charge anything for what God has done for 
 their land, their wheat, their product of any kind ? Some of those 
 ready to sell land, wheat, or other product, are ready to sell them for 
 a fair equivalent for what human hands have done to fit them for sale. 
 The action of these some will compel, through competition, the similar 
 action of all. Land itself is a productive instrument made such by 
 human efforts ; and its price to-day would hardly compensate those 
 efforts. There is a God-given utility in wheat ; but its value, which is 
 a far different thing, is the birth of men's exertion. There are no 
 deep-seated antagonisms within the sphere of exchange; not even 
 between landlords and the foodless poor. If there be such antagonism, 
 and there is. in England and elsewhere, it comes from the maladmin- 
 istrations of men in government, and not from the fundamental laws 
 of Economy. 
 
 Services that spring from sympathy and duty are free and moral : 
 services rendered for the sake of an exchange are economical; which 
 distinction throws a clear boundary-line between the adjacent fields of 
 Economy and Morals. 
 
 And now. secondly, the tendency of recent thinking in relation to 
 Money is not so definitely in one direction as that in relation to Value, 
 but it mav be more briefly characterized. I think that 1 shall not 
 
10 
 
 mistake it, if I say, that the result of the best modern thinking on this 
 subject is, that gold and silver should constitute the only money of the 
 nations, and that whatever paper is used to facilitate exchanges should 
 be simply and openly credit, and thus sharply discriminated from 
 money itself. The conclusions of science and the drift of experience 
 coincide in pointing strongly to a continued and indispensable use of 
 gold and silver as money, and also to a continued and increasing use 
 of paper, which paper however should be such as to render it impossi- 
 ble to be confounded with money. The divergence of view on this 
 point of our best writers is more superficial than real ; and I think I 
 have discovered the bog whence the mists have arisen that prevent 
 our seeing eye to eye in this matter. The usual mercantile and scien- 
 tific division is into money and currency ; money is coin, and currency 
 are the various forms of paper, bank-bills, treasury -notes, checks, drafts, 
 bills of exchange, and so on. As these forms of paper are all currency 
 under the definition, the inference is that they are alike in their nature 
 and effects on exchanges. Are they alike ? Common language certainly 
 recognizes a difference. Common language calls bank-bills and green- 
 backs money: it does not call checks, drafts, and mercantile bills money. 
 Is this distinction in ordinary speech grounded on a difference ? I 
 think it is, and an important difference. Let us compare a bank-bill 
 and a check. I admit that the ultimate foundation on which these 
 rest is identical. The bill is the banker's promise to pay ; the check 
 is an order on the banker to pay, based on a deposit, which deposit is 
 nothing in the world but the banker's promise to pay. A deposit is 
 not the thing deposited : money deposited becomes the banker's abso- 
 lute property the moment it passes his counter : his entry on his books 
 to the depositor's credit, which is the deposit, is in effect a promise to 
 pay on demand. A check is the depositor's order on this virtual 
 promise. Bills and checks therefore rest on the same basis, namely, 
 the banker's promise to pay. But the career of the two is very 
 different : the bill passes without endorsement indefinitely in payments; 
 the check, although it may pass by endorsement through several hands, 
 yet practically rarely makes but one payment : the bill has a general 
 purchasing power by which it passes in exchange among all classes of 
 the people, on which ground common language stamps it as money. 
 
11 
 
 the possession of a generalized purchasing-power being the sole char- 
 acteristic of money, while checks have as yet scarcely found their way 
 outside what are called the mercantile classes : also, if I mistake not, 
 the law discriminates between bills and checks, — a payment accepted 
 in bills is final, a payment accepted in a check is not final ; if the check 
 is dishonored, the receiver has a remedy against the last giver : and 
 also, which is the main thing, the multiplication and circulation of 
 bank-bills, which are popularly regarded and accepted as money, have 
 the same influence on the meaning of the word dollar, as a similar 
 multiplication and circulation of gold dollars would have, so that the 
 denominations of value are at the mercy of bank-bills and treasury- 
 notes in a sense in which they are not at the mercy of checks and 
 bills of exchange. Money, through its denominations, is a measure of 
 value, as well as a medium of exchange ; and the denominations follow 
 the fortunes of the medium ; as the medium rises in purchasing-power 
 the meaning of the word dollar changes for the better, as the medium 
 sinks in purchasing-power the signification of the word dollar sinks 
 with it. Dollar does not mean now what it did seven years ago, and 
 I pray that it may mean somewhat different from what it does now 
 seven years hence ; I mean now the denomination dollar, not the 
 physical thing dollar, which of course is all the while 25 J- grains of 
 gold coined T \ fine. My point is that any paper that has the charac- 
 teristic of money, that is, such a generalized purchasing-power as 
 enables it to pass among all classes in final payments, affects the 
 meaning of the word dollar as no activity and multiplication of checks 
 drawn on specie in deposit, and honored as such, can affect it. Let us 
 suppose that the greenbacks had not been made legal-tender, had been 
 allowed, as they should have .been if treasury-notes were issued at all, 
 to take their own chance as to value as simple national promises. I 
 have no doubt that they would have come into as general circulation 
 as they did come, and hardly less doubt that their average depreciation 
 would have been less than the depreciation has actually been. Their 
 slight depreciation would have displaced the coin, as the coin was 
 actually displaced by the legal-tenders ; and their greater depreciation 
 would have varied constantly the meaning of the word dollar as the 
 depreciation of the legal-tenders varied it ; and this, because the notes 
 
12 
 
 would have been accepted as money, of which dollars and cents afe 
 the denominations. No multiplication of other forms of credit would 
 hare had this effect ; at least, in anything like the same degree. It 
 
 was not the sale of the bonds that sensibly depreciated the greenbacks, 
 
 it was the augmentation of the greenbacks themselves. Do checks, 
 any number of them, drawn on deposits of greenbacks, that is to say, 
 drawn on a banker's promise to pay in lawful money tend to vary the 
 value of that money? Do the operations of the New York Clearing- 
 House, setting off checks and other forms of credit against each other, 
 to an extent, as Mr. Wilder says in a late number of the "Radical," 
 of $100,000,000 a day, have any tendency to vary the denominations 
 of that money in which the balances are struck? 
 
 If this point be well taken, and I feel pretty sure of its soundness, 
 some important consequences folloAV from it. First, some of these 
 forms of credit that are technically called " currency " are more than 
 that, they are, to all intents and purposes, "money," aud become far 
 more influential and hazardous as such. My friend, Dr. Walker, 
 argues at length that deposits are currency : admitted ; but are they 
 currency in the same sense that bank-bills are ? Are they able to play 
 mischief in the same way as bank-bills can play mischief? It 
 certainly seems to me that here is the point at which scientific confu- 
 sion and practical disaster begin. A thorough mutual understanding 
 on this point would, I think, bring the greater part of our political 
 economists and advanced students of money into complete harmony. 
 All are agreed on the untold advantages of simple credit ; on the 
 beautiful operation of checks and drafts ; on the magnificently working 
 scope of bills of exchange both inland and especially foreign ; all are 
 agreed that the use of these economizing expedients of credit dispenses 
 with the necessity of large masses of coin ; and all will agree, 1 think, 
 that the constantly increasing use of these substitutes for coin has 
 tended to diminish the present value of the precious metals even more 
 perhaps than their increased production has diminished it. What only 
 needs now to be shown scientifically and to be practically perceived 
 by legislators is. that no possible extension of the use of these or 
 other credit-forms can ever dispense with the use of gold and silver 
 altogether, since there must be something mot credit which has a 
 
18 
 
 nuturnl limitation of supply and consequently a comparatively steady 
 va l„e, in which the balances of credit can he struck, and in whose 
 ^nominations thus kept as steady as possible all these vast operations 
 of credit can be measured. Credit can do great things, hut it can 
 never become independent of money, since money is the sole measure 
 of values, and since the measure can only be kept steady through the 
 9 teadiness of the medium. And as a logical consequence of tins truth, 
 .Linkers and legislators should know that what we call paper-mo^ 
 is an impertinence and a nuisance. Strictly speaking, it is neither 
 ,,-edit nor money ; it is a hybrid monster, and has been in the times 
 past, and is to-day, potent rather for evil than good. It has come m 
 simply because men have not defined sharply to themselves the distinct 
 spheres of Credit and Money. Credit-paper, simply as snch, is 
 excellent and indispensable; it is nothing but evidence on paper of 
 a right to demand from somebody so much money; it may be 
 exchanged against another similar right ; it may he set off against 
 another corresponding right; since a release from debt is equivalent 
 to a payment in money, and a mutual release from debts is equivalent 
 to a reciprocal payment in money ; and it would seem as if a right to 
 demand money would never have been confounded with money itself. 
 Nevertheless, we have all been educated into this confusion. We have 
 been obliged all our lives to handle paper that was designed to circu- 
 late as money ; we have been taught to call it money ; it has exercised 
 both of the functions of money ; it has been a medium of exchange as 
 currency, and as money it has influenced directly the denominations 
 dollars 'and rents; and moreover, lately, we have been obliged to 
 handle paper that was forced upon us as money, and, I regret to add, 
 is still needlessly forced upon us as money. The legal-tenders lane 
 made the confusion worse confounded. What we are compelled by 
 law to take as money, is it not money? is a question that is now 
 ,„ it: , th „, th e masses of this country, and there is logical point to their 
 question, and considering how they have been educated doctrinally 
 al ,d practically, considering the persistent action of the government m 
 „„,,„! to this paper, taking in its legislative department no single step 
 towards reducing or removing it we are to be careful how we condemn 
 the conclusions of any part of the people; and. as nun of science, we 
 ,.,„ „- h ,. no countenance to the shallow and blinded partisanship, thai 
 
14 
 
 assumes that " our side " is free from all complicity in the common 
 disaster, and hurls the charge of being conscious and guilty repudiators 
 at men quite as honest as, and not much worse puzzled than, other 
 people. We are to do all we can to remove the cause of this confu- 
 sion, that is to say, to discountenance the use of any paper that 
 professes to be money, and, in its action is money ; to strive to influence 
 public opinion towards a speedy return to specie ; to hold and teach 
 that the j:>roper sphere of credit is quite distinct from the peculiar 
 sphere of money ; not to attack the national banks as such, or even 
 their circulation as such, for these banks had a patriotic origin, and 
 are a great improvement on our old state-bank system, and are 
 capable of becoming, what now they are not, an unmixed benefit to 
 the people ; but to pave the way by discussion, conversation, and 
 political action, for the good time coming, when it shall be regarded 
 as no part of sound banking to issue paper-money so-called, and still 
 less a part of good government to do so ; when banks shall deal in 
 debts and deposits and loan the national coined money ; when this 
 money shall be the only money in the hands of the people ; and when 
 every form of legitimate credit, resting back safely on the bare good 
 faith of individuals and nations, shall know that its value is measured, 
 and its face will be paid or its balance struck, in well-authenticated, 
 unmistakable money. 
 
 Unless I greatly err, substantially this is the latest and the soundest 
 phase of thought in regard to money. 
 
 I find I have left myself short space for the third branch of my 
 subject, — the matter of foreign trade. But it gives me a pure and 
 deep pleasure to state in this presence, on this October day, that the 
 tendency of thought and action, scientific and popular, in all the world, 
 is indubitably, decidedly, and irrevocably towards free trade. 
 
 By free trade I mean, what everybody means, a trade on which 
 low duties are laid in the interest of legitimate taxation only. 
 
 It is an old trick of the devil to cover up a wicked thing with a 
 good word. A masterpiece of this sort of accursed deceit is under the 
 word " Protectionr 
 
 No such duties, in point of high rates, complications in the way of 
 levying them, number of articles burdened by them, or discriminations 
 
15 
 
 in favor of the rich, were ever laid in any civilized country since the 
 world began, as those under which the United States are noiv laboring. 
 This action of the national government is in spite of the most recent 
 and best opinions of the best authorities here and everywhere : in 
 spite of the teachings of all experience hear and elsewhere : in spite 
 of the present tendencies and example of every enlightened nation 
 on the globe. 
 
 I hold in my hand the present tariff of the German Zollverein, 
 which went into operation the first day of last June ; also, the present 
 tariff of the United States. Look at them. This is, at least, five 
 times bigger than that ; and the average rates assessed in this are, at 
 least, ten times higher than in that. The highest rate levied in this 
 is ten per cent., and that on only one article, rail-cars. I doubt if 
 the average rate levied in this, on the thirty-seven classes of articles 
 charged at all be five per cent. ; the actual rate paid on every dutiable 
 article imported into the United States in the year 1866 was 48.58 
 per cent., and in 1867, 47.33 per cent. We are congratulated that 
 our tariff is productive. Productive ? Why should it not be ? It takes 
 to itself, bodily, almost one-half of the value of all dutiable goods 
 imported ! To say that such a tariff is productive is only another way 
 of saying that it is hard work to destroy the commerce of a great people ! 
 If the people trade at all, of course a tariff that takes nearly one-half 
 the value of the goods exchanged for, will be in one sense productive ; 
 but I venture the assertion, in the light of Greek, Roman, English, 
 Belgic experience, in the light of common sense, to say nothing of 
 science, that it is nothing like so productive as a reasonable, almost 
 burdenless tariff would prove. 
 
 I have no time to speak of Belgium, which throve with unwonted 
 prosperity from 1814 to 1830, under a tariff whose maximum was six 
 per cent., on manufactured goods, and on raw materials three per cent.; 
 and which is nourishing now under a tariff from which every "protective" 
 feature is expunged. We shall see the same in this country, 
 
 " On some fair future day 
 Which fate shall brightly gild."