Oh, no; not at all.  The manufacturer.  The American manufacturer, who says that while he can’t sell goods as low as the foreign manufacturer, all good Americans ought to buy of him and pay him a tax on every article for the privilege.  Perhaps we ought.  The original idea was that, when he was just starting and needed support, we ought to buy of him, even if we had to pay a higher price, till he could get on his feet.  Now it is said that we ought to buy of him and pay him a price 15 to 120 per cent. higher than we need pay the foreign manufacturer, even if he is a six-foot, bearded “infant,” because the cost of production is necessarily higher here than anywhere else.  I don’t know why it should be.  The American workingman used to be able to do so much more and better work than the foreigner that that more than compensated for his higher wages and made him a good bargain at any wage.

Of course, if we are going to agree to give any fellow-citizen who takes a notion to go into some business or other for which the country is not especially adapted,—­if we are going to give him a bonus on every article he produces big enough to make up for the handicap he labors under because of some natural reason or other,—­why, we may indeed gloriously diversify our industries, but we shall beggar ourselves.  On this principle, we shall have in Connecticut, or Michigan, or somewhere else, miles of hothouses in which thousands of happy American workingmen, with full dinner-pails, will be raising bananas,—­to be sold at a quarter apiece.  Some foolish person, a benighted Democrat like as not, might timidly suggest that bananas were a greater public blessing when they came from Jamaica and were three for a nickel, but what patriotic citizen would listen for a moment to the criticisms of a person without any conception of the beauty and glory of the great American banana industry, without realization of the proud significance of the fact that Old Glory floats over the biggest banana hothouses in the world!

But that is a matter on one side.  What I am trying to point out to you now is that this “protective” tariff, so-called, has become a means of fostering the growth of particular groups of industry at the expense of the economic vitality of the rest of the country.  What the people now propose is a very practical thing indeed:  They propose to unearth these special privileges and to cut them out of the tariff.  They propose not to leave a single concealed private advantage in the statutes concerning the duties that can possibly be eradicated without affecting the part of the business that is sound and legitimate and which we all wish to see promoted.