Ida M Tarbell

The Tariff In Our Times Ida M Tarbell

If there was any public question on which the minds of the people of the United States were made up fifty years ago, it was that of the tariff. They had not been made up in a day. On the contrary, it had taken nearly seventy years of experimenting to bring them where they were seventy years in which all forms of taxation on imported goods had been tried, from the supposed 81/2 per cent of the first Congress to the 43 per cent of the "tariff of abominations" in 1828. Some of their experiments had been good and some bad, but out of them all they had struck a mean which was something like this: As a nation we intend to raise money to carry on our business by putting a duty on certain raw and manufactured goods brought from foreign countries. If we find we are getting too large a revenue we will cut down the duty, if too small we will raise it. In placing these duties we will do as Alexander Hamilton advised that is, if there is a young industry in the country trying to produce something which is essential to war or on which our daily living depends, we will protect it from foreign competition until it is established but no longer.