can be got more cheaply by trade.  English manufactures flourished in the nineteenth century because they were well established, had excellent coal supplies, great stores of iron ore, and low-paid labor which did not have the opportunity of better alternatives, as did the American workman.  If America had imported more (it would not have been all) of her iron and coal, the English mines would have begun to shown signs of exhaustion earlier, and America’s advantage surely would have asserted itself in time.  Her iron manufactures undoubtedly were hastened—­they cannot truly be said to have been created—­by the protective tariff.

The peculiar advantages of a new country attract labor and enterprise into a few lines.  Industries are forced into an earlier diversification by tariffs.  Which is the better economic situation?  Contrast Iowa, Dakota, and Minnesota, or Kansas, if you please, with New York and Pennsylvania.  Is it so certain that a dense population congested in cities and crowded in factories and mines is a more ideal social aggregation than is a community of prosperous farmers?  The smoky industrialism fostered by protection often puts a premium on a low grade of immigrants, crowds then into city slums and into forlorn mill towns, and keeps them aliens to the American spirit.  It would be surprising if Americanism on the Western plains were not as sound as in the crowded cities.  But the infant-industry argument appeals strongly to the enterprise and the speculative spirit of Americans, who like to do all things rapidly and on a large scale.  Every village aspires to be a great industrial center.  Americans are impatient of the suggestion that things “will come in time”; they like things to come at once.

It must, however, be recognized that in a new country there is often a certain monotony and poverty of life because of the lack of diversified industries.  There are not sufficiently varied avenues for the expression and use of the manifold talents of the nation.  There are unused materials and opportunities, but the initial expense of experimentation, the initial difficulties of gathering and training a working force, are discouraging to individual enterprise, prices being as they are.  A protective tariff is not necessarily and always the best way, but it is one way of helping private enterprise to establish and conduct such industries through their initial period.  But as has been pointed out by many writers, the infant-industry argument is self-limiting, and involves always the assumption that the industries selected as fit for protection are such as ultimately, and within a moderately short period, can grow into self-dependence.  The infant must sometime grow to be a man and stand on his own legs, or he is either a chronic invalid or a degenerate.