But what we intend to do, what the House of Representatives has been attempting to do and will attempt to do again, and succeed in doing, is to weed this garden that we have been cultivating.  Because, if we have been laying at the roots of our industrial enterprises this fertilization of protection, if we have been stimulating it by this policy, we have found that the stimulation was not equal in respect of all the growths in the garden, and that there are some growths, which every man can distinguish with the naked eye, which have so overtopped the rest, which have so thrown the rest into destroying shadow, that it is impossible for the industries of the United States as a whole to prosper under their blighting shade.  In other words, we have found out that this that professes to be a process of protection has become a process of favoritism, and that the favorites of this policy have flourished at the expense of all the rest.  And now we are going into this garden and weed it.  We are going into this garden and give the little plants air and light in which to grow.  We are going to pull up every root that has so spread itself as to draw the nutriment of the soil from the other roots.  We are going in there to see to it that the fertilization of intelligence, of invention, of origination, is once more applied to a set of industries now threatening to be stagnant, because threatening to be too much concentrated.  The policy of freeing the country from the restrictive tariff will so variegate and multiply the undertakings in the country that there will be a wider market and a greater competition for labor; it will let the sun shine through the clouds again as once it shone on the free, independent, unpatronized intelligence and energy of a great people.

One of the counts of the indictment against the so-called “protective” tariff is that it has robbed Americans of their independence, resourcefulness, and self-reliance.  Our industry has grown invertebrate, cowardly, dependent on government aid.  When I hear the argument of some of the biggest business men in this country, that if you took the “protection” of the tariff off they would be overcome by the competition of the world, I ask where and when it happened that the boasted genius of America became afraid to go out into the open and compete with the world?  Are we children, are we wards, are we still such puerile infants that we have to be fed out of a bottle?  Isn’t it true that we know how to make steel in America better than anybody else in the world?  Yet they say, “For Heaven’s sake don’t expose us to the chill of prices coming from any other quarter of the globe.”  Mind you, we can compete with those prices.  Steel is sold abroad, steel made in America is sold abroad in many of its forms, much cheaper than it is sold in America.  It is so hard for people to get that into their heads!