THE-REAL WEAKNESS OF FREE TKADE. 24-5
Here is the weakness of free trade as it is generally advocated and understood.
Tlie working-man asks the free trader: " How will the change you propose benefit me ? "
The free trader can only answer: "It will increase wealth and reduce the cost of commodities. "
Bat in oar own time the working-man has seen wealth enormously increased without feeling himself a sharer in the gain. He has seen the cost of commodities greatly reduced without finding it any easier to live. He looks to England, where a revenue tariff has for some time taken the place of a protective tariff, and there lie finds labor degraded and underpaid, a general standard of wages lower than that which prevails here, while such improvements as have been made in the condition of the working classes since the abolition of protection are clearly not traceable to that, but to trades-unions, to temperance and beneficial societies, to emigration, to education, and to such acts as those regulating the labor of women and children, and the sanitary conditions of factories and mines.
And seeing this, the working-man, even though he may realize with more or less clearness the hypocrisy of the rings and combinations which demand tariff duties for u the protection of American labor," accepts the fallacies of protection, or at least makes no effort to throw them off, not because of their strength so much as of the weakness of the appeal which free trade makes to him. A considerable proportion, at least, of the most intelligent and influential of American working-men are fully conscious that "protection " does nothing for labor, but neither do they see what free trade could do. And so tliev regard the tariff question as one of no practical eon-