were nowhere prosperous, and great numbers of them, both in the East and in the West, were ruined.  At the same time a high tariff on nearly everything the farmers needed to buy was the political spoil obtained by the Eastern and Middle states.  This further depressed the condition of the farmers and forced them or their sons into urban industries.  A slower development would have occurred without the waste of national resources in such conflicting policies of artificial stimulation.

Sec. 12. #Harm of sudden tariff reductions.# It is rarely appreciated how great is the tactical advantage which the advocates of a high tariff enjoy in popular political discussion.  They can so easily impress the popular judgment with the evident fruits of their own policy and with the immediate dangers of the policy of their opponents.  When a protective rate is first applied or is increased, it calls into existence something visible and tangible, which can be measured in terms of factories built, men employed, and products turned out.  The increased cost of these results is diffused among many consumers and reaches them in such indirect ways and in such small increments of price that they are quite unaware of the way they are affected.[12]

On the other hand, reduction of the tariff works in a direction the reverse of the enactment.  It may cause local crises and may even bring on general crises.  The benefits of the lower prices are diffused and lost to view; the immediate injury is concentrated and strikingly evident.  Factories are closed, investments depreciate, laborers are thrown out of employment.  The organic nature of local industry causes these evils to be felt by many classes.  Merchants, professional men, servants, and skilled laborers, that are tributary to the depressed industry, suffer.  The effects are transmitted to commercial and financial centres and often credit is much shaken.  Then follows a slow and painful process of readjustment.

The low-tariff advocates in America undoubtedly have underestimated these immediate effects.  They have been too abstractly doctrinaire, have argued too absolutely for the merits of free trade to be applied instantly regardless of the existing distribution of investments and of occupations.  They have opposed one extreme system by another, with no thought of the inexpediency and injustice of sweeping changes.  There is a strong feeling among business men that any tariff, be it high or low, is better than a shifting policy.  Despite the great preponderance of domestic production over foreign trade, it is perhaps too much to say that the tariff is unimportant in our present conditions.  It can, however, be truly said that business can adjust itself in large measure to any settled conditions and that radical changes, especially sudden and large reductions, are fraught with evils.  Long before a new tariff law goes into effect, even months in advance of its passage, while it is merely