all producers in all markets is abruptly converted into a life and death struggle of a few producers each of whose fortunes depends upon prompt preoccupation of a single market, and that an uncertain market which may be gradually recovered by the increased excellence and cheapness of the foreign product, or thrown open at any time by another act of the legislature. Over production follows and a suffocated market, a fall in prices which wipes out the artificial price created by the duty on imports, enforced idleness of capital, machinery, and labor, all reacting in acute crisis or long depression of the business interests of the whole country. Already the cry goes up all over the land that the home market is insufficient and that an outlet must be found into the foreign market. At this moment every minister and consul of the United States is under orders to "push" the sale of American products abroad. But as it is beyond the power of the State to augment prices beyond the range of its own taxation the only means it has for capturing the indispensable foreign market is a bounty on exports, a contribution from the public treasury which will remunerate the manufacturer for his loss in underselling the foreign competitor on his own ground. Of two things then, one, either it has exceeded its rights in laying the duty on imports or betrayed its trust in withholding the equally necessary bounty on exports. In fact it has practically conceded the principle by remitting the internal revenue duties on certain articles when sold abroad.

This then is the fatality of all class legislation that it immediately creates the necessity for further legislation of the same sort. You can't hold the Rhine without the Rhine provinces. The smallest perversion of the functions of the common agent of the people to the exclusive service of an individual or a class means in time the subversion of the State. If the acquisi tiveness of the manufacturing class had any logic in it and the courage of conviction the protective tariff would be a pronunciamiento, the proclamation of a revolution.

Finally it is to be observed that exceptional privileges of any kind can be secured to one class of subjects only by exceptional burdens imposed upon some other. The artificial price by which the producer profits is created by the duty on

imports and this is paid by the consumer. But according to the fundamental principle of our polity the only motive permitted to the State for imposing exceptional burdens is wrongdoing of the subjects who bear them; that other subjects benefit by them is an aggravation of the injury if the sufferers are unoffending. The usual argument that American manufacturers are benefited by the exclusion of foreign competition, that protection does in fact protect, is irrelevant and offensive. It may be perfectly true, but if true it only forces the previous question, what right has the State to tax the consumer of foreign products beyond the uniform rate for all? The answer is that it has no right unless the purchase and use of foreign products is a public wrong, an injury to the people and an offense to the State; for disproportionate taxation is of the nature of penalty, and penalties are to be inflicted only on the subject who has merited them. This is a point which it is not easy to treat with becoming gravity, but the fact is that the whole protective policy rests upon a real feeling that as there is something patriotic and praiseworthy in using the products of our own country so there is a kind of disloyalty in using those of other countries; a latent feeling which strikes fire sometimes in the collisions of two peoples, as when the ladies of Berlin resolved the other day to import no more fashions from Paris, or when the Boston patriots threw the contaminated tea overboard. So to buy English cottons or an English ship is to enrich the English spinner or builder, and through him to add to the wealth and power of our hereditary rival and foe. The very existence of foreign States, however amicable our actual relations with them may be, is a perpetual menace to our security, and one of the principal reasons why we have to maintain and arm a State ourselves. To help them by making a market for their products is a sort of treason deserving reprobation. An expression of the enormity of the offense and of the popular feeling about it may be found in any recent budget of the United States. According to the statement for 1880 the amounts expended in various ways on account of the rebellion of 1860 were in round numbers about $200,000,000, no part of which was drawn as penalty from the revolted States. For the same year the customs revenue was $187,000,000,

So that the sin of re

which nearly balanced the account. bellion, if it was a sin, has been most fittingly expiated, not by the rebel but by the consumer of foreign products.

Now to this it might be replied as before that the popular feeling is the realization of an empty abstraction, that it is not in their industries that foreign States are a menace to us or to anybody but in their dynastic ambitions and race animosities, the political antagonisms which have arrested the civilization of the old world in the dead-lock of an armed truce and burdened the industries by which we all benefit in a thousand ways under the weight of military preparation. But the fitting and conclusive answer is that if the use of foreign commodities is a public wrong it is not a proper source of public revenue. Importation so far as it weakens the State and aids the enemy should not be taxed; it should be prohibited, and if persisted in should be punished; a principle of wide appli cation to which we shall have to recur. The position into which the State has been betrayed is morally intolerable and impossible. It gives character to a specific act by laying bur dens on the agent which in our polity are nothing if not punitive; and condones the offense of its own defining in order to continue the burdens by which it profits.

To resume. The protective tariff is an anomaly in American legislation; a violent interruption and reversal of the normal evolution of our fiscal system justified only for the moment by exceptional conditions which have long since disappeared. Our duty is to get it out of the way with what promptitude is possible; to dismiss at once and forever as a motive for State action the protection of any class at the expense of any other; to remove from the market every vestige of arbitrary and arti ficial prices as rapidly as the business situation will permit: and to put the finances of the State back into the track and conditions of regular development toward the only result any honest man can avow, the uniform taxation, for the equal benefit, of all.

ARTICLE III.-THE GENESIS OF MODERN FREE
INSTITUTIONS.

GOVERNMENT is not an accident. It has its origin in the essential elements of human nature. Aristotle styled man a political animal; and the profoundest investigations into the nature of the State have only confirmed the appropriateness of the epithet. While the individual will is free, men in masses act, under Providence, in accordance with clearly defined laws. Social and political organization and progress are the outcome of tendencies common to the race. Forms may vary, types may change; yet behind all the vicissitudes in the history of states lie principles as invariable in their application as the physical and moral laws of the universe. A chain of causes and effects connects the past with the present, the present with. the future. True, indeed, great men rise up, and the whole commonwealth may seem to shake under their giant tread; but they only march ahead of their less gifted fellows, with clearer insight into the realities of their time, and hence with greater power to influence others. They may hasten or retard the development of institutions, but existing tendencies they cannot change. Julius Cæsar left a deeper impress upon his age than any of his contemporaries, for he understood better than they the trend of his country's politics and shaped his course accordingly; but all the deep-souled eloquence of Demosthenes could not preserve Greek independence. A single will may influence, may in a measure direct or control; but human society is too complex an organism to be built up or destroyed by an individual.

Political institutions are the incarnations of ideas, which, implanted in the race, are developed according to circumstances. Like a living organism they have periods of growth, maturity, and decay. They have a reason of being, a mission; when this is fulfilled, they crumble and disappear and live only in results. They are the outcome of efforts, more or less unconscious, toward the adjustment of the relations of men with

one another as members of a common body, or natural group, toward the adjustment of life with its surroundings. They take shape in accordance with the tendencies and needs of the society in which they originate. The study of political institutions is important and fruitful; for thereby may be sought out the principles that underlie and condition their origin and destiny. Hence may be drawn useful lessons for the throbbing political life of to-day. This is especially the case with those institutions that had their originative impulse in the desire of a people to achieve self-government; for in the civilized portions of the world the trend of States has long been towards democratic forms.

The political history of the race may be summed up as the gradual realization of the idea of freedom. Antiquity unfolded the conceptions of man and of society, developed art, literature, philosophy, law. She elevated man intellectually and æsthetically, just so far freeing him from the superstitious fears of his own nature and the influences of his surroundings. Thus she prepared the way for Christianity, which regenerated men morally and emphasized the dignity of the individual, and hence cast its influence on the side of personal and polit ical liberty. But of modern times the great political fact has been the development of democracy, and the recognition of it as the predominant element in the State. Equality of rights, by which all stand on a like footing before the law; civil liberty, which grants to every man not fool nor traitor the privileges of citizenship and a voice in the government; representation, the means by which the individual will is exercised through delegated powers-these three elements distinguish the complex tendencies of modern political life from those of the past.

Could there be equality of rights in antiquity, when every people made its captives slaves, and the bondmen outnumbered the free? Even Aristotle taught that slavery exists by nature; while Plato recognized in it a natural and just institution when slaves were of other birth than Greek. The sublime teachings of Stoicism regarding the brotherhood of men might soften, but could not eradicate, this curse of ancient society. And many Christian centuries must pass before inequality of rights could more than begin to disappear. In the time of