Farmers, Mechanics, and Laborers need Protection Capital can 
 
 take care of itself, 
 
 SPEECH 
 
 OP 
 
 HON, WILLIAM D. KELLEY, 
 
 OF 
 
 DELIVERED 
 
 IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 
 
 MARCH 25, 1870. 
 
 WASHINGTON: 
 
 F. & J. RIVES & GEO. A. BAILEY, 
 
 REPORTERS AND PRINTERS OF THE DEBATES OF CONGRESS. 
 
 1870.
 
 DCSB LIBRARY 
 
 Farmers, Mechanics, and Laborers need Protection Capital can 
 
 take care of itself 
 
 The House being in the Committee of the Whole, 
 and having under consideration the bill (II. R. No. j 
 1068) to amend existing laws relating to the duties 
 on imports, and for other purposes 
 
 Mr. KELLEY said : 
 
 Mr. CHAIRMAN : I presume that gentlemen 
 who have listened to the course of this debate 
 expect me to apologize for having been born in 
 Pennsylvania and adhering to my native State. 
 From what has been said it seems that her 
 people are regarded by free traders as a dis- 
 creditable community, and she, in her cor- 
 porate capacity, as an object of odium. 
 
 Sir, I am proud of dear old Pennsylvania, 
 my native State. She was the first to adopt 
 the Federal Constitution, and was in fact the 
 key-stone of the Federal arch, holding together 
 the young Union when it consisted of but thir- 
 teen States, and she is to-day preeminently the 
 representative State of the Union. You cannot 
 strike her so that her industries shall bleed with- 
 out those of other States feeling it, and feeling 
 it vitally. She has no cotton, or sugar, or rice 
 fields ; but apart from these she is identified 
 with every interest represented upon this floor. 
 
 Gentlemen from the rocky coast of New 
 England and the gentlemen who are here from 
 the more fertile and hospitable shores of the 
 Pacific, especially the gentlemen from the beau- 
 tifully wooded shores of Puget sound, com- 
 plain that their ship-yards are idle. Hers, alas ! 
 are also idle, although they are the yards in 
 which were built the largest wooden ship the 
 Government ever put afloat, and the largest 
 sailing iron-clad it ever owned. She has her 
 commerce and sympathizes with young San 
 Francisco and our great commercial metrop- 
 olis, New York. She was for long years the 
 leading port of entry in the country. She still 
 maintains a respectable direct commerce and 
 imports, very largely through New York, for 
 the same reasons that London does through 
 Liverpool and Paris through Havre. 
 
 Are you interested iu the production of 
 fabrics, whether of silk, wool, flax, or cotton? 
 If so her interests are identical with yours, for 
 she employs as many spindles and looms as 
 any New England State, and their productions 
 are as various and valuable. Are your inter- 
 ests in the commerce upon the lakes ? Then go 
 with me to her beautiful city of Erie and be- 
 hold how Pennsylvania sympathizes with all 
 your interests there. Are your interests identi- 
 fied with the navigation of the Mississippi and 
 seeking markets for your products at the mouth 
 of that river and on the Gulf? I pray you to 
 remember that two of the navigable sources of 
 the American " Father of Waters " take their 
 rise in the bosom of her mountains, and that for 
 long decades her enterprising and industrious 
 people have been plucking from her hills bitu- 
 minous coal and floating it down that stream 
 past the coal-fields of Ohio, Kentucky, Ind- 
 iana, Illinois, Missouri, and other coal- bearing 
 States, to meet that of England in the market 
 of New Orleans and try to drive it thence. 
 Gentlemen from the gold regions, where were 
 the miners trained who first brought to light, 
 with any measure of science and experience, 
 the vast resources in gold and silver-bearing 
 quartz of the Pacific slope? They went to you 
 from the coal, iron, and zinc mines of Penn- 
 sylvania. There they had learned to sink the 
 shaft, run the drift, handle the ore, and crush 
 or smelt it. It was experience acquired in her 
 mines that brought out the wsalth of California 
 almost as magically as we were taught in child- 
 hood to believe that Alladin's lamp could con- 
 vert base articles into that precious metal. 
 
 Nor, sir, are. the interests of Pennsylvania 
 at variance with those of the great agricultural 
 States ? Before her Representatives in the two 
 Houses of Congress had united their voices with 
 those of gentlemen from the West to make 
 magnificent land grants for the purpose of con- 
 structing railroads in different directions across 
 the treeless but luxuriously fertile prairies,
 
 
 Pennsylvania was first among the great agri- 
 cultural States. And to-day her products of 
 the field, the garden, the orchard, and the 
 dairy equal in value those of any other State. 
 Gentlemen from Ohio, notwithstanding the 
 statement of the gentleman from Iowa, [Mr. 
 ALLISON,] that you alone manufacture Scotch 
 pig iron and suffer from its importation, as 
 you alone have the black band ore from 
 which it is made, is it not true that when 
 Pennsylvania demands a tariff that will pro- 
 tect the wages of her laborers in the mine, 
 quarry, and furnace, she does but defend the 
 interest and rights of your laborers and those 
 of every other iron-bearing State in the Union. 
 Gentlemen from Virginia, Maryland, and North 
 Carolina, Pennsylvania is denounced because 
 she pleads for a duty on coal that will enable 
 you to develop your magnificent tide- water coal- 
 fields in competition with Nova Scotia. The 
 coal of your tide-water fields is far more avail- 
 able than that of the inland fields of Pennsylva- 
 nia, which depend on railroads for transport- 
 ation. On the banks of the James, the Dan, 
 and a score of other navigable rivers, lie coal- 
 beds to within a few hundred feet of which the 
 vessels which are to carry the precious fuel away 
 may come, and they lie nearer to the markets of 
 New England than those of your colonial rivals 
 at Nova Scotia ; and when you were not here 
 and Virginia and North Carolina were voiceless 
 on this floor, I pleaded with the Thirty-Ninth 
 Congress for the duty of $1 25 per ton in order 
 that Virginia and North Carolina, soon to be 
 reconstructed, should be able to produce fuel 
 for New England better and cheaper than Nova 
 Scotia does, and that it should be carried in 
 New England built vessels, so that the thou- 
 sands of people employed in producing and 
 transporting it should constitute a market for 
 the grain of the western farmer and the pro- 
 ductions of American workshops. I might, Mr. 
 Chairman, extend the illustration of the iden- 
 tity of the interests of Pennsylvania with those 
 of the people of every other State, but will 
 not detain the committee longer on that sub- 
 ject. In leaving it I however reiterate my 
 assertion that you cannot strike a blow at 
 her industries without the people of at least 
 half a score of other States feeling it as 
 keenly as she will. She asks no boon from 
 Congress. Her people, whether they depend 
 for subsistence upon their daily toil, or have 
 been so fortunate as to have inherited or ac- 
 quired capital, seek no special privileges from 
 the Government. They demand that we shall 
 legislate for the promotion of the equal welfare 
 of all. They know that they must share the 
 common fate, and that their prosperity depends 
 upon that of their countrymen at large. 
 
 PROTECTION CHEAPENS COMMODITIES. 
 
 Mr. Chairman, many gentlemen have spoken 
 since this bill was made a special order, and a 
 great deal has been said upon the general sub- 
 ject of free trade and protection, and but little 
 about the provisions embodied in the bill before 
 the committee. I am probably expected to 
 
 proceed at once to reply to the i-emarks of 
 my colleague on the Committee of Ways and 
 Means, [Mr. ALUSOX,] who has just closed 
 his remarks. But I may as well before pro- 
 ceeding to do so take a shot into the flock gen- 
 erally. The birds all have sung the same song. 
 My colleague has gone more fully into the 
 details of the bill than any of the others. But 
 his statements are all in harmony with those 
 of the several gentlemen who have given us the 
 doctrines of the chief of the Bureau of Statistics, 
 D. A. Wells, in their own admirable way. I 
 propose to allude to some of their remarks. 
 
 The gentleman from New York [Mr. BROOKS] 
 in opening the debate promised to mount a ped- 
 dler's wagon and ride through the agricultural 
 districts of the country exhibiting hoes, shovels, 
 axes, chains, knives and forks, cottons, and 
 woolens, and demonstrate to the people the 
 unjust and enormous taxation imposed on them 
 by the existing tariff. If the gentleman will 
 redeem this promise, making candid statements 
 of facts to the people I will contribute toward 
 his expenses and pray for the success of his 
 mission. 
 
 Mr. BROOKS, of New York. How much? 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. I will contribute 25 per 
 cent., and what may be more effective, will try 
 to make an arrangement bj which the proprie- 
 tors of Flagg's pain exterminator will give the 
 gentleman a seat in their wagons while going 
 through the country. By no other means could 
 he so perfectly demonstrate the fact that duties 
 which are really protective are never a tax, and 
 that protection invariably cheapens commodi- 
 ties. So invariably is this true that protective 
 America, France, and Germany are crowding 
 free-trade England out of the markets of the 
 world with the articles named bythegentleman, 
 while purchasing the materials of which they are 
 made from her and paying protective duties on 
 every pound of it. This is not mere declama- 
 tion. It is truth demonstrated by experience. 
 The starving mechanics of England know it, 
 and have at length succeeded in bringing it 
 officially to the knowledge of Parliament. I 
 have before me the report of a parliamentary 
 commission which proves, that notwithstanding 
 our duties on iron and steel, our knives aaid 
 forks, horseshoe nails, &c., are crowding Eng- 
 land out of general markets, that our hoes, 
 shovels, and axes are bought by the people 
 of all her colonies; and that our locks, sew- 
 ing-machines, and other productions of iron 
 and steel are underselling hers in the streets 
 of London and Birmingham. There is the 
 "report from the select committee on scientific 
 instruction, together with the proceedings of 
 the committee, minutes of evidence, and ap- 
 pendix," ordered by the House of Commons 
 to be printed 15th July, 1868. It is a ponderous 
 volume and replete with instruction. 
 
 I find on page 479 a paper handed in by 
 Mr. Field, containing a "list of some articles 
 made in Birmingham and the hardware dis- 
 tricts, which are largely replaced in common 
 markets of the world by the productions of
 
 other countries." The author states that "this 
 list might be immensely extended by further 
 investigation, which the shortness of time has 
 not permitted." Among the articles enumer- 
 ated are hoes and I ask the attention of the 
 gentleman from New York [Mr. BROOKS] 
 
 "Hoes : for cotton and other purposes, an article of 
 large consumption." 
 
 On this article the report remarks: 
 
 "The United States compete with us, for their own 
 u=u and to some extent for export." 
 
 Then we have the following: 
 
 "Axe;-: for felling trees, tc., an article of large con- 
 sumption. The United States supply our colonies 
 j \vorld with the best article." 
 
 Then there are: 
 
 "Carpenters' broad-axes; carpenters' and coopers' 
 adzes; coopers' tools, various sorts; shoemakers' 
 hammers aud tools." 
 
 With regard to these " Germany and the 
 United States" are mentioned as the countries 
 "whose products are believed to have replaced 
 those of England." 
 
 Speaking of cut nails, the report says : 
 
 " United States export to South America and our 
 colonies." 
 
 And, with regard to horseshoe nails, which 
 we protect by a duty of 5 cents per pound, and 
 the manufacture of which under that ample 
 protection has been cheapened and so perfected 
 that this parliamentary report announces that 
 they exclude the English from common mar- 
 kets because they are 
 
 "Beautifully made by machinery ia the United 
 
 States." 
 
 Mr. WINAXS. Will the gentleman allow 
 me to ask him a question? 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. Not at present. I will be 
 glad when I have got a little further into my 
 subject to answer, but not at this point. 
 
 Mr. WI XAX3. My question comes in prop- 
 erly here. 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. I will hear the gentleman. 
 
 Mr. Vv'lXAXS. I understand that the pur- 
 port of what the gentleman has been reading 
 is to show that the United States, notwith- 
 standing the high tariff 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. I do not yield to the gentle- 
 man for a speech. If he has a question to put, 
 let him put it squarely. 
 
 Mr. WINANS. I merely wished to make 
 a preliminary remark. But, without any pre- 
 liminaries, my question is this: if, under the 
 operation of our tariff, American manufacturers 
 could compete with British manufacturers in 
 British markets, why should the high tariff be 
 maintained to oppress our own people? 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. The gentleman's question 
 will be abundantly answered as I proceed. 
 But I may remark here that if by protection 
 you secure to your capital and industry a cer- 
 tain market, capitalists will invest in the erec- 
 tion of workshops, purchase of machinery, 
 and by high wages will induce skilled and ingen- 
 ious workmen to leave their homes and accept 
 employment on better terms among strangers. 
 Thusunder protection capital hasbeen invested, 
 
 and skilled laborers gathered, and our inventive 
 genius has improved the methods of production , 
 until we have come to be able to make the arti- 
 cles mentioned in this list cheaper than free- 
 trade England. But withdraw this protection, 
 and you will enable foreigners, with the im- 
 mense accumulations of capital they possess, 
 to combine and undersell our borne manufac- 
 turers for a few years, and thus destroy them. 
 The purpose of a protective tariff is that of the 
 fence around an orchard in a district where 
 cattle are permitted to run at large. I believe 
 I have answered the question of the gentleman. 
 
 The gentleman from New York [Mr. BROOKS] 
 said that his heart glowed with pride when in 
 a distant foreign land he saw a camel robed in 
 American muslin. The value of the kind of 
 muslin used for sach a purpose is almost all 
 in the cost of the raw material ; it is woven of 
 the coarsest yarn. I wish he had been ia 
 Abyssinia in 1867 ; how his pulse would have 
 quickened and his heart expanded as he saw 
 that while England was wreathing the latest 
 glory around her brows by moving an army 
 into the heart of Abyssinia for the relief of a 
 few of her subjects, the ingenuity and protected 
 industry of the United States was providing 
 that army with water from day to day. 
 
 For proof of this I turn again to the Parlia- 
 mentary report. It says : " Pumps of various 
 sorts largely exported from the United States." 
 Note, "an American pump finding water for 
 the Abyssinian expedition." Those pumps, 
 unlike the coarse cotton, the sight of which so 
 rejoiced the gentleman, involved a preponder- 
 ant percentage of labor labor for the digging 
 and carrying of the coal, ore, and limestone, 
 and on through successive grades of labor to 
 their completion, so that probably 90 per cent, 
 of their cost was labor. I submit the list en- 
 tire for the gentleman's consideration. 
 
 Appendix No. 22 to the report from the select Committee 
 on Scientific Instruction, together with the proceedings 
 of Hie committee, minutes of evidence, and appendix. 
 
 [Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed 
 15th July, 1868.] 
 
 PAPER HANDED IS BY MR. FIELD. 
 
 List of some articles made in Birmingham and the 
 hardware district which are largely replaced in 
 common markets of the world by the productions 
 of other countries: 
 
 Articles or class of arti- 
 cles. 
 
 Carpenters' tools: 
 
 As hammers, plyers, 
 pincers, compasses, hand 
 and bench vises. 
 Chains: 
 
 Of light description, 
 where the cost is more_ in 
 labor than in material, 
 as halter chains and bow- 
 ties, and such like. 
 
 Frying-pans of fine fin- 
 ish. 
 
 Wood-handled spades 
 and shovels, an article of 
 very largo consumption. 
 
 Country whose products 
 are believed to hare 
 replaced those of this 
 district, in whole or in 
 part. 
 
 Germany chiefly. 
 
 Germany. 
 
 ! Franco. 
 
 I United States exports 
 > them to all our colo- 
 ) nies.
 
 6 
 
 LIST Continued. 
 
 LIST Continued. 
 
 Articles or class of arti- 
 cles. 
 
 Country whose products 
 are believed to have 
 replaeed those of this 
 district, in whole or in 
 part. 
 
 Articles or class of arti- 
 cles. 
 
 Country whoso products 
 are believed to have 
 replaced those of this 
 district, in whole or in 
 part. 
 
 noes: 
 
 For cotton and other 
 purposes, an article of 
 large consumption. 
 
 Axes: 
 
 For felling trees, Ac., 
 an article of large con- 
 sumption. 
 Carpenters' broad- 
 axes. 
 Carpenters' and coop- 
 ers' adzes. 
 Coopers' tools, various 
 sorts. 
 Shoemakers' hammers 
 and tools, 
 llachetes : 
 For cuttingsugar canes, 
 an important article. 
 
 Nails: 
 Cut . 
 
 [United States compete 
 with us for their own 
 1 use and to some extent 
 I for export. 
 
 I United States supply our 
 colonies and the world 
 with the best article. 
 
 Germany and the United 
 States. 
 
 ) Believed to be now Ger- 
 j many. 
 
 (United States export to 
 < South America and 
 ( our colonies. 
 Belgium. 
 (French and Belgian 
 < largely supersede 
 ( English. 
 (Beautifully made by 
 < machinery in the Uni- 
 l ted States. 
 
 Largely exported by 
 United States. 
 [NOTE. An American 
 pump finding water 
 for the Abyssinian cx- 
 . pedition.] 
 
 Mnny articles similar to 
 these are exported by 
 United States to com- 
 mon markets. 
 
 United States. 
 
 The United States pe- 
 troleum lamps sup- 
 plant the English in 
 India and China. 
 'French even imported 
 to England. 
 
 [France. 
 
 L United States, France, 
 j and Germany. 
 
 } United States exports to 
 f Camada. 
 /United States and 
 I 1 France. 
 
 \ United States export to 
 / Canada. 
 ( United States export to 
 < Canada and probably 
 (. elsewhere. 
 
 These articles, in great 
 variety, are now ex- 
 tensively exported 
 from France and Ger- 
 many. 
 
 Brass-foundery stamped : 
 As curtain pins and 
 bands, cornices, gilt 
 beading, and a great 
 variety of other brass- 
 foundery. 
 Needles: 
 
 An article of large con- 
 sumption. 
 
 Fish-hooks 
 
 These articles, in great 
 variety, are now ex- 
 f tensively exported 
 from Germany and 
 Franco. 
 
 Mostly Germany,(Rhen- 
 > ish Prussia.) even iin- 
 I ported to England. 
 Believed Germany. 
 
 Now exported largely 
 from Lidgo, Belgium, 
 and Etioune, France. 
 
 } United States. 
 
 Switzerland and France 
 import into England, 
 United States, and 
 France, 
 
 Guns: 
 A great variety of 
 sporting guns, articles of 
 large consumption, for- 
 merly entirely from Bir- 
 mingham. 
 Breech-loading mus- 
 kets and revolver pistols. 
 
 Watches and clocks 
 
 Wrought 
 
 in the United States 
 interchangeable by 
 machinery.] 
 Belgium. 
 
 1 Belgium supplants ours 
 f in our own colonies. 
 
 (Believed to be Belgium 
 \ and France. 
 Prussia and Belgium. 
 
 (Franco and Germany. 
 These articles are even 
 imported into Eng- 
 land. 
 
 France and Germany. 
 Many of those even 
 imported into Eng- 
 land. 
 
 Austria, Franco, and 
 Itussia. Wo believe 
 about all these arti- 
 cles sold in England 
 are imported. 
 
 Vienna, imported to 
 England. 
 France, imported to 
 England. 
 France entirely super- 
 seded English. n,ndim- 
 ported to England 
 largely. 
 
 France. 
 Germany. 
 
 France. 
 Germany. 
 Germany. 
 
 France and Prussia. 
 
 Franco, Austria, and 
 Prussia, 
 
 | Prussia and France. 
 
 Point de Paris (wire 
 nails.) 
 
 Hor.o-nails 
 
 Glass: 
 For windows, an arti- 
 cle of large consumption ; 
 spectacle and all other 
 glass. 
 
 Table glass 
 
 Pumps: 
 Of various sorts 
 
 
 Agricultural implements: 
 Plows, cotton gins, cul- 
 tivators, kibbling ma- 
 chines, corn-crushers, 
 churns, rice-hullers, 
 mowing machines, hay 
 rakes. 
 Sewing machines 
 
 Jewelry : 
 
 Gold, gilt, and fancy 
 steel, in very great vari- 
 ety. 
 
 Small steel trinkets: 
 As bag and purse 
 clasps, steel buttons, 
 chains, key rings, and 
 other fastenings, and 
 many others in great 
 variety. 
 
 Leather bags, with 
 clasps, purses, aad cour- 
 ier bags, &c. 
 
 Buttons: 
 Mother of pearl 
 
 Lamps : 
 
 For use with petro- 
 leum, now an article of 
 ve,ry large consumption. 
 
 Lamps for the table 
 
 Tin-ware : 
 Tinned spoons, cooks' 
 ladles, and variouscnlin- 
 ary articles of fine man- 
 ufacture and finish. 
 Locks : 
 ' Door locks, chest locks, 
 drawer locks, cupboard 
 locks in great variety. 
 Doer latches in great 
 variety. 
 
 Curry-combs 
 
 Ilorn 
 
 Porcelain, (formerly 
 Minion's of Stoke.) 
 
 Steel buttons, (formerly 
 Bolton & Watts.) 
 Florentine or lasting 
 boot-buttons. 
 Steel pens.pen-holders, 
 brass scales and weights. 
 Iron gas-tubing 
 
 Traps : 
 Hat, beaver, and fox,..j 
 
 Qimlcts and augers, 
 (twisted.) 
 
 Brass-found cry, cast: 
 As hinges, brass hooks', 
 and castors, in great va- 
 riety; door buttons, 
 sash fasteners, and a 
 great variety of other 
 articles. 
 
 Elastic belts with 
 matal fastenings. 
 Brass chandeliers and 
 gas-fittings. 
 Harness buckles and 
 furniture. 
 German-silver spoons, 
 forks, &c. 
 Locks: 
 Best trunk, door, and 
 cabinet locks.
 
 LIST Continued. 
 
 Articles or class of arti- 
 cles. 
 
 Country whose products 
 arc believed to have 
 replaced those of this 
 district, in whole or in 
 part. 
 
 Umbrella furniture 
 
 Horn combs 
 
 Pearl and tortoise shell 
 articles. 
 
 Iron wire 
 
 Iron and brass hooks 
 and eyes. 
 
 Bronzed articles 
 
 Uollow wares, enam- 
 eled. 
 
 Optical instruments. 
 
 Mathematical instru- 
 ments. 
 
 Japanned wares 
 
 Bits and stirrups 
 
 Coach springs and axle- 
 trees. 
 
 Electro-plated wares; 
 (customers preferring 
 French goods.) 
 
 Gas-tittings 
 
 Weighing machines 
 
 Plumbers' brass found- 
 ery. 
 
 Table glass-ware 
 
 Door locks 
 
 Machines for domestic 
 purposes, as sausage ma- 
 chines, coffee-mills, and 
 washing machines. 
 
 Nuts and bolts 
 
 Penknives and scissors- 
 Stamped brass ware, 
 (certain kinds) 
 
 American"notions,"as 
 buckets, clothes-pegs, 
 washing and agricultural 
 machines. 
 Cutlery: 
 
 In great variety ; scis- 
 sors, light-edge tools, 
 such as chisels, &c. 
 
 Pins for piano-strings 
 and other small fittings 
 for pianos. 
 
 Silver wire for binding 
 the bars, strings of pia- 
 nos. &c. 
 
 This list might be immensely extended by further 
 investigation, which the shortness of time has not 
 permitted. * 
 
 THE IXTEBKAL REVENUE SYSTEM IT IS EXPENSIVE 
 AND INQUISITORIAL. AND SHOULD BE ABOLISHED AT 
 THE EARLIEST POSSIBLE DAY. 
 
 At a later stage of the debate the gentleman 
 from Ohio [Mr. STEVENSON] presented his 
 views on the general subject. He had pre- 
 viously denounced the protectionists of the 
 House as a faction, and now deplores the fact 
 that "the beautiful idea," free trade, "cannot 
 be wholly realized until the commercial millen- 
 nium. 1 ' He will, however, do all he can to hasten 
 its triumph. In this direction he goes further 
 than Calhoun or any southern leader ever went. 
 His is a manufacturing and agricultural dis- 
 trict, yet he not only echoes the demand of the 
 gentleman from the free-trade commercial city 
 of New York for free coal, iron, salt, and lum- 
 ber, and a general reduction of the tariff, but 
 leaps beyond him, and proposes to give perma- 
 nence to the system of internal taxes, which 
 
 France and Prussia. 
 Prussia. 
 
 j- France and Austria. 
 Prussia and Belgium. 
 { Prussia and France. 
 Prussia and France, 
 j- France and Prussia. 
 
 (France, Austria, and 
 f Bavaria. 
 
 (rermany and France. 
 B elgium and France. 
 
 I France. 
 
 France. 
 
 United States. 
 United States. 
 
 [ United States. 
 
 United States. 
 United States. 
 
 United Slates. 
 
 United States. 
 United States. 
 
 United States. 
 United States. 
 
 ^Germany. 
 
 France. 
 
 was established as a temporary war measure, 
 and which costs annually over $8,000,000, 
 maintains an army of tens of thousands of 
 office-holders, and makes inquisition into the 
 private affairs of every citizen, and would 
 simply remove from it "irritating, petty, 
 useless, and vexatious elements." Sir, the 
 gentleman cannot be ignorant of the fact that 
 every dollar drawn from the people by these 
 taxes is so much added to the cost of. the 
 productions of the farm and workshop, and 
 operates as a bonus to the foreign competitors 
 of our farmers and mechanics in common mar- 
 kets. But even this will not content him. He 
 grieves that other and more onerous taxes can- 
 not constitutionally be levied on the farms, 
 workshops, and homes of the people of Ohio 
 and the rest of the country. On this point he 
 gives forth no uncertain sound. He hopes the 
 Constitution will yet be so amended as to con- 
 strain every owner of a farm or cross-road's 
 blacksmith shop to make the acquaintance of 
 a collector of United States taxes. On this 
 point he said : 
 
 " In fact, I incline to the opinion that one of the 
 errors committed by our forefathers in framing the 
 Constitution and since we have amended it ia such 
 material matters lately, we can aiford to say that 
 they did commit some errors in framing it was in 
 not permitting direct taxation upon property accord- 
 ing to its value. And some day I trust the Consti- 
 tution will permit the Government to levy taxes upon 
 property according to its value. But until that day, 
 as long as the debt remains a material burden, we 
 must, in my judgment, retain the less objectionable 
 and burdensome parts of both systems of taxation." 
 
 Mr. STEVENSON. I want to know whether 
 the gentleman does not consider that the mate- 
 rial part of the internal revenue taxes must be 
 continued while the debt remains? 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. No, sir. I believe that if 
 gentlemen will adopt the tariff bill now under 
 consideration, extended as is its free list and 
 great as are the reductions in rates of duties, 
 we can take the internal taxes off all but eight 
 articles by a law of this session and go still 
 further in that direction during the next ses- 
 sion. 
 
 Mr. STEVENSON. What articles are they ? 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. I will come to that in the 
 course of my remarks. I have a note of them. 
 While on this subject let me say that I believe 
 further, that in the interest of the farmers of 
 the country we should hasten the day when we 
 can take the tax off distilled spirits. 
 
 Sir, the West has grain for which she can 
 find no market. The Governments of Great 
 Britain and France, cooperating with our in- 
 ternal tax system, deprive them of what would 
 be a generous market. Take the tax of 65 
 cents a gallon off whisky, and the grain now 
 rotting in the granaries of the West would be 
 distilled into alcohol and shipped to the coun- 
 tries of South America, the West India Islands, 
 Turkey, and elsewhere. I have now answered 
 the gentleman as far as I propose to at pres- 
 ent. I have, however, not yet done with 
 him. 
 
 Mr. STEVENSON. The gentleman ia crit-
 
 8 
 
 icising what was drawn out of me by a question 
 from himself. I ask him in fairness to permit 
 me to put a question to him. 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. Well, go on. 
 
 Mr. STEVENSON. I want to know whether 
 the gentleman is not in favor, before reducing 
 the tariff on coal and iron, of taking the internal 
 revenue tax off whisky and abolishing the tax 
 on incomes entirely? 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. I am in favor of abolishing 
 at the earliest possible day a system that makes 
 inquisition into the private affairs of every man 
 and women in the country, and has cost us for 
 the three last years an average of $8,509,532 77 
 per annum, and taken probably 10,000 persons 
 from industrial employments and fastened them 
 as vampires upon the people. That is what I 
 am in favor of. But I hold the floor for another 
 purpose than a mere controversy with the gen- 
 tleman. 
 
 Mr. STEVENSON. Then the gentleman 
 declines to answer my question. 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. I have answered the gen- 
 tleman's question, and every gentleman present 
 will, I think, say I have answered it frankly. 
 
 FREE TRADE MEANS LOW WAGKS AND A LIMITED MARKET 
 FOB GRAIN. 
 
 Mr. Chairman, I am not specially familiar 
 with the gentleman's district. Though I have 
 visited Cincinnati several times and ridden 
 through Hamilton county, I have but few ac- 
 quaintances within their limits; yet I know 
 something about them. The last annual report 
 of the Cincinnati Board of Trade informs us 
 that during the year ending March 31, 18G9, 
 there were produced in the gentleman's district 
 and the adjoining one, in about 3,000 sepa- 
 rate establishments, 187 distinct classes of 
 manufactured articles, of an aggregate value 
 of $104,057,612. The cash capital invested 
 in these establishments, the report says, is 
 $49,824,124, and they give employment to 
 55,275 hands. 
 
 Mr. Chairman, I venture the remark that 
 there is not among these 55,275 working peo- 
 ple one who will indorse the opinions advanced 
 by the gentleman. 
 
 Mr. STEVENSON. Will the gentleman 
 yield to me for a moment? 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. No, sir; I must decline. 
 
 Mr. STEVENSON. The gentleman holds 
 the floor without restriction by the courtesy of 
 the House. 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. I will yield further to the 
 gentleman during the course of my remarks, 
 but not at present. 
 
 Many of the laboring people of his district are 
 immigrants and know how small are the wages 
 of workmen on the other side of the Atlantic, 
 and how humble the fare on which they live. 
 They know that free trade means low wages. 
 Buy labor where you can buy it cheapest is the 
 cardinal maxim of the free trader. More than 
 85 per cent, of the cost of every ton of coal, 
 salt, and pig iron is in the wages of labor, and 
 when the gentleman shall have stricken the 
 
 duties off these articles, the 1,500,000 peo- 
 ple who are now earning good wages in their 
 production must compete with the cheap labor 
 of Turk's Island, England, Wales, and Ger- 
 many. Thrown out of remunerative employ- 
 ment in the trades to which they have devoted 
 their lives, as they will be, they must compete 
 with workmen in other pursuits, even though 
 they glut the market and bring down the gen- 
 eral rate of wages throughout the land. He 
 who advocates protective duties pleads the 
 cause of the American laborer. I will not 
 amplify this proposition. I regard it as a tru- 
 ism, and beg leave to illustrate it by inviting the 
 attention of my colleague [Mr. ALLISON] from 
 Iowa, and the gentleman from Ohio, to a state- 
 ment of the wages and subsistence of families 
 of laborers in Europe, on page 170 of the 
 monthly report of the Deputy Special Commis- 
 sioner of the Revenue, No. 4 of the seres 1869- 
 70. It refers specially to Germany, and was 
 translated and compiled from Nos. 10-12 of 
 the publications of the royal Prussian statisti- 
 cal bureau, Berlin, 1868. 
 
 This paper, gentlemen will remark, was not 
 prepared for or by American politicians, or by 
 a faithless officer of this Government, or by 
 any representative of a free- trade or protective 
 league. Its facts are most significant. 
 
 The wheat-growers of Iowa and the West 
 are suffering from the want of a market for 
 their grain. Too large a proportion of our 
 people are raising wheat. We want more 
 miners, railroad men, and mechanics, and our 
 present rates of wages are inducing them to 
 come to us. Half a million people tempted 
 by these wages will come this year. Our 
 working people are free consumers of wheat, 
 beef, pork, and mutton. But could they be, 
 under free trade or reduced duties? These 
 articles are luxuries rarely enjoyed by the 
 working people of England or the continent, 
 with whom anti-protectionists would compel 
 them to compete. The official paper to which 
 I refer tells us that "rye and potatoes 
 form the chief food, of the laboring classes ; 
 that the wives and daughters of brick-makers, 
 coal and iron miners, and furnace and rolling- 
 mill men aid them in their rough employ- 
 ments ; that the regular wages of workingmen 
 average in summer and winter from 16^ to 
 24 cents per day, and those of females from 8J 
 to 14J cents per day ; that miners at tunneling 
 are sometimes paid as much as 72 cents (1 
 thaler) per day, and that a brick- maker, aided 
 by his wife, averages 80 cents per day ; that 
 wages for female labor are more uniform, and 
 that 18 cents per day can be earned by a skill- 
 ful hand ; that juvenile laborers in factories 
 begin with 48 cents per week for ten hours 
 daily, and rise to 72 cents per week ; that the 
 general average of daily wages is as follows : 
 males, for twelve hours' work per day in the 
 country, 19J cents ; in cities, 24 cents ; and that 
 the wages of master-workmen, overseers, &c., 
 are at least $172 per year." That gentlemen 
 and theirconstituents may study this instructive
 
 9 
 
 paper I beg leave to submit it entire to the 
 reporters. 
 
 Wages and subsistence of families of laborers in Europe. 
 
 Lower Silesia, translated and compiled from No. 
 10-12ot' thepublicationsof the Hoy al Prussian Sta- 
 tistical liureau, Berlin, 1868. 
 
 The regular wages ofworkingmcn average in sum- 
 mer arid winter from 16.8 cents to 24 cents (gold) per 
 day ; of females, from 08.4 to 14.4 cents per day, more 
 nearly approaching the higher rate. During the short 
 winter days workingmen receive for 8 hours' labor 
 from 10 to 14.4 cents; the females, 7.2 cents; while in 
 summer, for 12 to 13 hours' labor the relative wages 
 are from 19.2 to 28.8 cents, and from 14.4 to 19.2 cents, 
 respectively. The wages of those working in the 
 royal forests are so regulated as to average 24 cents 
 per day for males, and 14.4 cents per day for females; 
 in some mountain countries the latter receive but 12 
 cents. 
 
 In larger cities wages rise above these rates, espe- 
 cially for skilled labor. Men working on railroads 
 receive in summer from 28.8 to 36 cents per day ; and 
 women from 16.8 to 26.4 cents. In the larger cities 
 ordinary female help in housekeeping is paid from 
 24 to 26.4 cents. 
 
 Work done by the piece or by contract is paid about 
 one third more than the customary wages. A com- 
 mon laborer expects in contract work from 36 to 48 
 cents; at railroad work even more. 
 
 When work is scarce the wages often fall to about 
 16.8 cents per day for males, and 9.6 cents for females. 
 
 Iiabor is often paid by the hour, at from 01.4 to 3 
 cents for males, and 0.4 to 2 cents for females; 2.4 
 certs per hour are the wages of an able field laborer 
 in the mountains. 
 
 During the summer especially, opportunities for 
 work are offered to children, who receive from 6.11 to 
 7.2 cents per day, and in winter about 4.8 cents. 
 
 Wherever the work rises above mere manual labor 
 in a trade or factory, the daily wages of men are 
 from 30 to 48 cents, and often rise to 60 cents. Miners 
 at tunneling are frequently paid 72 cents, (1 thaler;) 
 in the district of Gb'rlitz, a brick-maker aided by his 
 wife, averages 80 cents per day; in the district of 
 Fauer from $5 76 to $7 20 per week. Skilled work- 
 men of large experience receive from $360 to $432 
 per annum. The wages of the molders and enamel- 
 ers in iron founderies, of the locksmiths and joiners 
 in mauhine-wqrks, in piano factories, amount to from 
 72 cents to $1 08 per day; the same in manufactories 
 of glass, silverware, watches, and hat factories.^ The 
 highestwages paid to a very skillful joiner in a piano- 
 forte factory were $12 24 per week. 
 
 Wages for female laborare more uniform through- 
 out; 18 cents per day can be earned by a skillful hand, 
 24 cents per day very rarely. 
 
 Juvenile laborers in factories begin with wages of 
 48 cents per week, for 10 hours' work daily, and rise 
 to 72 cents per week. The law prohibits the employ- 
 ment of children under 12 years of age ; from 12 to 14 
 years it permits 6 hours', and from 14 to 16 years, 10 
 hours' daily labor. 
 
 The general average of daily wages is as follows: 
 Males, for 12 hours' work per day, in the country, 
 19.2 cents; in cities, 24 cents; harder labor, 30 cents; 
 in cities, 36 cents; skilled labor, 60 cents. 
 
 The wages of master workmen, overseers, &c., are 
 not included in the above average, but are at least 
 $172 per annum. 
 
 In regard to the time of work, laborers in factories 
 are employed 11 to 12 hours per day, (exclusive of 
 time for meals;) where work is continued day and 
 night, the hours for the day are from 6 to 12 a. m.. 
 and 1 to 7 p. m.; for the night, from 7 p.m. to 6 a. m., 
 with i hour recess; in a few disiricts 10 hours con- 
 stitute a day's work. In many cloth factories and 
 wool spinneries, males and females work 12 to 13 
 hour?, and some even 16 hours per day. As an ex- 
 ampin, a cloth factory employs firemen and machin- 
 ists 16 hours, spinners and dyers 14 hours, all others 
 12hours, exclusive of time fprmeals. In glass-works, 
 the nature of the work requires from 16 to 18 hours for 
 meltcrs, 13 to 15 hours for blowers; but then one 
 
 party rests while the other works. Rye and potatoes 
 form the chief food of the laboring classes. 
 
 Savings, 
 
 Although but few worldngmcn can save any por- 
 tion of their earnings, still there are some who pur- 
 chase a little piece of land, a house, or a cow, and 
 the latest accounts from fifteen districts in Lower 
 Silesia show deposits in savings-banks from house 
 servants of $428,455; of apprentices and mechanical 
 workmen of $124,522. No statistics of savings of fac- 
 tory workers were obtained. In some factories the 
 workmen have established savings-banks, some of 
 which have deposits of from $8,000 to $10,000. 
 
 DETAILED STATEMENTS OF THE \VAGES AND COST OP 
 LIVING IN DIFFERENT DISTRICTS OF LOWER SILESIA. 
 
 1. District of Bolkenhain. 
 
 The annual expenses of a family of about 5 per- 
 sons, (3 children,) belonging to the working class, 
 were as follows : 
 
 Provisions, (per day, 0.144 to 0.163,) per year $60 00 
 
 Rent, (8 thalers.) 5 76 
 
 Fuel 3 60 
 
 Clothing, linen, &c 14 40 
 
 Furniture, tools, &c 7 20 
 
 Taxes: StateO.72; church 12; cominunc36, $1 20 
 
 School for 2 children 2 50 
 
 370 
 
 Total $94 66 
 
 The expenses of a laborer's family being 24 to 26.4 
 cents per day, the earnings should be 28 to 30.8 cents 
 per day, which the head of the family cannot earn. 
 While his earnings are from 17 to 19 cents, the wife 
 earns 8 to 10 cents, and the children must help as 
 soon as old enough. Miners in this district have 24 
 to 29 cents daily wages ; factory men from 19 to 29 
 cents; mechanics receive 48 to 54 cents per week, 
 besides board; male house servants $17 to $30, and 
 female $12 per annum, exclusive of board and lodg- 
 ing. 
 
 2. District of Landeshut. 
 
 Expenses of a family: 
 
 In the country. In a city. 
 
 Rent per annum $5 76 $10 72 
 
 Provisions (per week, 90 cents,) 
 
 per annum 46 80* 66 10 
 
 Fuel and light per annum 14 40 16 42 
 
 Taxes, &c.. per annum 3 60 4 32 
 
 Clothing, &c., per annum 8 56 10 00 
 
 Other expenses per annum 7 20 8 57 
 
 Total $86 32 
 
 $10613 
 
 The income of laborers' (weavers') families does 
 generally not reach these amounts. Many are per- 
 mitted to gather their wood from th e royal forests, and 
 spend little for clothing, which they beg from chari- 
 table neighbors. A weaver earns here from 48 to 72 
 cents, $1 and $1 50 per week; most weavers have 2 
 looms in operation, and together with their wives 
 earn from $1 50 to $2 16 per week. The average earn- 
 ings of weavers are given at 96 cents per week, or 
 about $50 per annum. 
 
 3. District of HirscJiberg. 
 
 The lowest cost of living for a laborer's family is 
 given at $64 80 to $72 per annum, of which are ex- 
 pended for provisions $43 30, for clothing $17, taxes 
 $3 16, fuel $3 60, rent $4, &c. In the summer the 
 wages for 12 hours' daily work, for males, are from 15 
 to 39 cents; for females 5 to 17 cents per day; in win- 
 ter from 3 to 7 cents less. A male farm hand receives 
 $12 to $22 per year; a boy $9 to $14; a maid-servant 
 $12 to $18 per annum, with board. 
 
 The annual expenses of a laborer's family, living 
 in a comfortable manner, without luxuries, would be 
 nearly double the amount actually expended above. 
 
 * Per week, $1 08.
 
 10 
 
 The following is an estimate : 
 
 Rent, (one room, alcove, and bed-room,) $8 6i 
 
 Fuel and licht 14 40 
 
 Provisions, (breakfast, coffee; at noon, pota- 
 toes, dumpling 10 cents; evening, bread, 
 a little brandy 5 cents; supper, soup, bread, 
 
 vegetables 6 cents.) 75 00 
 
 Clothing, (husband $6 48, wife $5 70, children 
 
 $7 20; soap 72cents.) 20 16 
 
 Taxes, <tc 2 10 
 
 Schooling of children. (2i cents per week per 
 
 child.) 360 
 
 School books 72 
 
 To lay by for sickness, ic 8 68 
 
 Unforeseen expenses 8 5S 
 
 Total $14184 
 
 4. District of Schijnau. 
 
 The ordinary yearly wages, in addition to board, 
 paid to servants in this rural district, were as fol- 
 lows: Man-servant, $14 40 to $21 60; boys. 8 64 to 
 $1296; maid-servants, $8 64 to $17 28; children's 
 nurses, $o 76 to $12 96. 
 
 During tho harvest tho daily wages' for 14 hours' 
 work are as follows : Mowers, from 19.2 to 28.8 cents ; 
 laborers, (malcs.)from 19.2 to 24 cents; females, from 
 14.4 to 17 cents. 
 
 In other seasons males receive for 10 hours' daily 
 labor from 14.4 to 19.2 cents, and females 12 to 14.4 
 cents per day ; and in winter males receive 12 cents, 
 and females 7.4 to 9.6 cents. A laborer in the cities 
 receives 24 to 28.8 cents per day; tho "fellows" 
 (journeymen) of trades receive from 60 cents to $1 20 
 per wec-k. and board. 
 
 A laborer's family of 5 persons requirei for its 
 subsistence durinst tho year the following amount : 
 For provisions, 372 to $85 72; rent of 1 room and 3 
 bedroom?. 4 32; clothing, Ac., 810 80; fuel, &c., 
 $3 60: tMxe?, 4c., S3 60. Total, 8103 04. 
 
 5. District of Goldberg. 
 
 The cost of living of a laborer's family, (husband, 
 wifo, and two children.) in this district is thus given : 
 Provisions, $75 00; rentJJ4 32; fuel, 87 20; clothing, 
 $10 02; furniture, tools, &c.. 72 cents ; taxes, &c., 82 28. 
 Total. 8100 14. In less expensive times provisions 
 hnvo been estimated at?20 less. 
 
 In the rural portion men receive 21.6 cents, women 
 14.4 cents for a day's work; this average includes 
 higher wages for skilled labor. 
 
 On a form a man-servant receives $17 20 per year, 
 in addition to board, &c., which may be estimated at 
 S43 20; a maid-servant receives $14 40, besides board. 
 
 Laborers in stone-quarries earn from 24 to 43.2 
 cents per day; in cloth factories 1.8 to 2.2 cents per 
 hour, while tho daily wages of carpenters are from 
 33.6 to 38.4 cents : masons, 33.6 to 45.6 cents ; roof- 
 si aters,38.6 to 45.6. 
 
 Shoemakers and tailors receive from 9 to 10 cents, 
 besides their board and lodging, which is valued at 
 12 cents. 
 
 6. District of Liiteenberg. 
 
 Tho yearly expenses of a family with 3 children are 
 estimated at from 893 60 to 103. namely: 
 
 In city. In country. 
 
 Rent 81060 
 
 Provisions, (81 20 per week,) 62 40 
 
 Fuel and light 12 66 
 
 Taxes, school, <tc 3 60 
 
 Clothing, &c 12 85 
 
 Otherexpenses 5 76 
 
 84 32 
 5572 
 1080 
 
 360 
 1285 
 
 576 
 
 Total $107 87 $93 05 
 
 Wages areas follows: 
 
 Men, day laborers, fwm 14.4 to 28.8 cents per day; 
 women 12 to 18 centdprday; men, with board, 9.6 to 
 14.4 cent-: per day ; women , with board, 7.2 to 12 cents 
 per day. From 10 to 14 hours constitute a day's labor ; 
 more hours, and harder work secure higher wages. 
 
 Male servants per year, 814 40 to 836, and board ; 
 female., peryear, 88 57 to 821 60, and board. 
 
 Journeymen in trades obtain the following: 
 
 Wages per week, (with 
 board and lodging.) 
 
 Smiths 
 
 Wheelwrights ... 
 
 Shoemakers 
 
 Tailors 
 
 Cabinet-makers. 
 
 In cities. 
 
 Mini- 
 mum. 
 
 Cents. 
 54 
 54 
 54 
 54 
 54 
 
 Maxi- 
 
 Cents. 
 72 
 72 
 60 
 72 
 72 
 
 In the country, 
 
 Mini- 
 mum. 
 
 Cents. 
 42 
 42 
 42 
 30 
 42 
 
 Maxi- 
 mum. 
 
 Cent*. 
 
 72 
 72 
 72 
 60 
 72 
 
 7. City of Grcifenberg. 
 
 The subsistence of a workingman's family, consist- 
 ing of 5 man, wife, and 3 children is thus given : 
 
 Income. 
 
 A mason receives 33.6 cents per day, regular work, 
 32 weeks in a year- S64 52 
 
 Weaving or other work, 4 months, at 48 to 60 
 cents per week, say 
 
 Yearly earnings of wife 7 20 
 
 Total 8T9 72 
 
 A day laborer receives 24 cents per day, or 81 44 
 per week, regular work 40 weeks $57 60 
 
 During the rest of tho year he and his wifo 
 may earn 14 40 
 
 Total $72 00 
 
 A carpenter earns a littlo more than a mason, his 
 chances for winter labor being bettor. A weaver, 
 working at home, makes less than tho day laborer; 
 those in tho factory earn per year 72. 
 
 Expenses of a fam ily. 
 
 Rent. 83 64; clothing, 14 40, (shoes being a large 
 item;) light, $1 41; fuel, 85 01; repairing tools, 7- 
 cents; taxes, 81 44; school for three children, 1 44. 
 Total, "833 12. 
 
 Provisions. The meals consist of potatoes and 
 bread, their means not being sufficient to allow 
 moat; potatoes, 20 bushel?, 10 03; bread, (6 cents 
 per day,) 821 90; coffee, (chiccory, 4 pounds per day.) 
 82 88; butter, (i pound perweek,)lard. herring, salt, 
 (24 cents per week.) 812 48. Total. 847 26. Aggregate 
 expenses, 880 38. 
 
 Note. If the work is not regular, the demands of 
 the family must be curtailed, and suffering often takes 
 place. 
 
 8. District of Gorlilz. 
 
 Here the condition of tho laborer appears more 
 comfortable, since work can bo found throughout 
 the year. 
 
 Masons and carpenters earn 36 to 43.4 cents per day ; 
 railroad laborers, 26.4 to 28.8; field laborers, 21.6 to 
 23.8, and females, 14.5 to 24. 
 
 The lowest expenses for a family consisting of 4 or 
 5 persona are thus computed: 
 
 Provisions-...". 857 60 to $85 72 
 
 Rent, lights, and fuel 11 52 to 21 10 
 
 Clothing 13 57 to. 18 00 
 
 Tools, &c 144 to 288 
 
 School 1 44 to 2 88 
 
 Taxes.... 72 to 1 44 
 
 Total $86 29 to 8132 52 
 
 By careful inquiries it has been reliably ascer- 
 tained that a family can earn from 893 60 to 8144 a 
 year, so that some lay up small savings. 
 
 For the city of Gb'rlitz the averngo income of a 
 laborer's family is estimated at $95 to 8144 a year:
 
 11 
 
 the expenses for 4 or 5 persons, from $115 to $172 80, 
 uainely : 
 
 Rent, lisht., and fuel $22 72 to $32 15 
 
 Clothing, &e 14 40 to 21 60 
 
 Tools, furniture, <tc 1 44 to 5 76 
 
 School 4 32 to 5 04 
 
 Provisions 72 00 to 10825 
 
 Total $114 88 to $172 80 
 
 9. District of Glognu. 
 Farm laborers' income : 
 Males weeks in harvest, at 30 cents per 
 
 day $10 80 
 
 14 weeks, (sewing and haymaking,) at 
 
 24 cents per day 20 16 
 
 15 weeks, fall and spring, at 18 cents 
 
 per day 16 20 
 
 15 weeks, winter, at 1-1.4 per day 12 96 
 
 Total, 50 weeks 60 12 
 
 Females 6 weeks, at 12 cents per day (5 days 
 per week) $3 60 
 
 14 weeks, at 9.6 cents per day... 672 
 
 15 weeks, at 8.4 per day 6 30 
 
 15 weeks, at 7.2 per day 5 40 
 
 2202 
 
 Total, 50 weeks $82 14 
 
 Expenses of a family with. 3 children : 
 
 16sbeffBls*rye. at$l 32 $21 12 
 
 2 sheffels wheat, at 61 80 '... 3 60 
 
 2 sheffels barley, at SI 20 2 40 
 
 2 sheffels peas, at SI 44 2 88 
 
 2 sheffels millet, at $1 44 2 88 
 
 24 bags potatoes, at 38.4 cents 9 22 
 
 52 pounds butter, at 19.2 cents 9 98 
 
 18-t quarts milk, at .24 cents 440 
 
 Meat, (.2quarters mutton, $3 60,lpig, $10 80).. 14 40 
 
 52 pounds salt, at .024 1 25 
 
 Rent. $5 76, light, $1 52 7 28 
 
 Fuel, (wood, $9 72, coal, $3 18) 12 90 
 
 Clothing 18 72 
 
 Taxes, and other expenses 8 00 
 
 Total .$119 03 
 
 As, according to these statistics a man and wife can 
 earn but $82 14 per year, a deficiency of $36 89 must 
 bo made up by the work of the children or by extra 
 labor in the summer, especially at harvest time. 
 
 15. District of Leignitz. 
 Expenses of a family with 3 children: 
 Provisions 
 
 Bread, 1 pound flour per head daily $26 52 
 
 Potatoes, i bag or 75 pounds per week at 18 
 cents 9 36 
 
 Carried over $35 
 
 "1 sheffel equals 1.56 bushel, United States. 
 
 Brought over $35 88 
 
 Barley,2 sheffels, at9G cents 98 
 
 Peas, 1 sheffel, at SI 08 1 OS 
 
 Butter, 1 to If pound per week, 7H pounds 
 
 peryear, at 19 cents 13 73 
 
 Milk, 4 quarts daily, at 4 cents 5 84 
 
 Meat, 1 swine for fattening, or 1 pound per 
 
 week 5 56 
 
 Salt, 1 pound per week, at 2.4 cents 1 25 
 
 Coffee, chiccory, sugar 432 
 
 Wheat flour for cake on holidays 1 32 
 
 Beer 90 
 
 Rent, for a room, a garret-room and small 
 
 space, per annum 7 20 
 
 Light, oil for 26 to 39 weeks, i to i pound at 6 
 
 cents 2 54 
 
 Fuel, during 6 winter months, 20 cents summer, 
 
 10 cents per week 8 00 
 
 Clothing- 
 Husband: 2 shirts, at 72 cents $1 44 
 
 1 pair boots 2 88 
 
 pantaloons,(3pairsin2years) 72 
 coat, &c 72 
 
 Wife : 
 
 Children : 
 
 2 chemises $1 44 
 
 1 pair shoes 1 20 
 
 Dress, &c 2 
 
 5 76 
 
 5 28 
 
 2 shirts, at 36 cents each.. 2 16 
 
 3 pairs shoes 2 16 
 
 clothing 2 16 
 
 Soap for washing. 
 
 648 
 120 
 
 18 72 
 
 Tools, for repair of. 1 43 
 
 Taxes income, 72 cents; communal, .384cents; 
 school, including books, $2.556 3 60 
 
 Total expenses $112 13 
 
 Income of a family with two children : 
 
 Husband averages 305 days, at 21.6 cents $65 88 
 
 Wife averages 250 days, at 10.4 cents 26 00 
 
 Oldest child averages 60 days, at 7.2 cents 4 32 
 
 Every married workman receives : 
 
 1 sheffel wheat $1 8 
 
 2 sheffels rye 2 16 
 
 2 sheffels barley 1 92 
 
 1 sheffel peas 1 06 
 
 C96 
 
 Ho can raise on a patch of land 10 bags pota- 
 toes, valued at - 2 88 
 
 And glean at harvest 3 sheffels of rye or barley 3 06 
 
 For extra work through the year 8 64 
 
 For a fat pig 5,76 
 
 Total income ..$123 60 
 
 In the city f Liegnitz the average expense of a 
 laborer's fanvly is estimated at $141 84 per year.
 
 12 
 
 9 
 
 Q 
 
 o 2 
 
 ^5 a 
 ^ S 
 
 la 
 Un 
 
 1 * 
 
 i 
 
 
 1 
 
 
 M 
 
 3 Cl 
 
 ,,,.., , , , . ,2 i > < . . 2 < > 
 
 s 
 
 1 t 
 
 
 3 
 
 
 
 <N t> 
 
 90 
 
 
 
 
 o 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 3 
 
 S 
 
 a 
 
 S 
 
 8 
 
 S! 
 
 
 a 
 
 | 
 
 .,2.2- 
 
 2 
 
 , 2 i . . i i i . . i i i ii *> i i 
 
 1 1 1 
 
 , , 
 
 to 
 
 1 
 
 V 
 
 PH 
 
 O 00 
 
 C4 
 
 f-H 
 
 - I 
 
 o 
 
 
 is 
 
 
 
 
 <M OO 
 
 
 
 
 S 
 
 CJ5C 
 1-C 
 
 >oto 
 
 OM 
 
 
 ss s s 
 
 
 I 
 
 COO .OOOOO 
 TTO1 ' O " * J **** 
 
 o o ocjn o o-" o o oc^ onoo o o oo o oo o 
 i o -i* *ij co oc ~tj *^ 03 o 50 o o *$ or op co 
 
 s s 
 
 r,^? 
 
 s l 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 : : : 
 
 : 
 
 
 = : 
 
 
 
 ! 
 
 
 
 
 
 : 
 
 
 
 
 
 j 
 
 
 : : 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 00 
 
 a 
 
 
 
 
 
 m j : 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 o 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 3 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ; ; 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 i 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 B 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 a 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 o 
 2 
 
 
 : 
 
 
 
 
 : | 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Branches and c 
 
 arthcnware, &c. : 
 potter-turners 
 
 Glass-works, polisher 
 melters 
 
 painters and gilder, 
 skilled hands 
 
 g^j 
 
 35 
 
 C!- 3 
 
 O hi t 
 ^D O 1 
 
 Laborers 
 Assistant millers 
 Firemen 
 Machinists 
 
 i Hi 
 
 a.^OOJ c^H^^r^Hr 
 
 L g 
 
 iil 
 
 i 
 
 o 
 
 1 
 
 si 
 
 .s| ^ 
 
 ^g s 
 
 ...S.S i 
 
 ipor mil!.-: 
 Ordinary laborers 
 (hittnrs 
 
 V 
 
 C 
 
 'E 
 
 - 
 i 
 
 ^ 
 = 
 
 | 
 
 1 
 
 Machinists 
 Bookbinders 
 
 
 W 
 
 ^ 
 
 1 C?3 M h3 3 Oft- 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 a 
 
 
 
 52 o 3 
 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 iiii, 
 
 . . i 
 
 oo 11,1 i2 i 2 ' i ' ' ' 
 
 1 I 1 I 
 
 , . 
 
 
 n5 
 
 
 
 ^^O -* *O 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 J3 
 
 
 
 *"""' 
 
 
 
 o 
 
 . 
 
 CO 
 
 
 000 - 00 ? 
 
 
 
 XI 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 0, 
 
 
 o 
 
 .OO ,O (OO.O... OiO . . O . . C , O 
 1 ' _ _ '*- ' ^-t *J 1 *J ^^il t *-' ll *-'^J 
 
 -r 
 
 
 -4et 
 
 
 -*o ^c o-** oo -t 1 -? 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 r- 
 
 M 
 
 1 ?=l 
 
 *"* 
 
 
 
 
 
 * 
 
 ' 
 
 o?eo'*coc? 
 
 "f C^3C 
 
 C^CO^I 
 
 oo <p -* 5 - 1 c 
 
 ^^2}% 
 
 33 
 
 
 
 OOOOO 
 
 OOOOO OCocO ^JO ^r ,c^'i ct! ^ oir30 C -t *-* OOOOOOO O 
 
 
 a 
 
 w^gwjj 
 
 ssss? 
 
 SS 5 85 7i Si^cS^S S S'" 57 
 
 ST!;?!? 
 
 3S 
 
 
 
 
 
 i~ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 : i 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 i 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 : : 
 
 : : 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 j 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 i 
 
 : : 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 I 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 O 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 
 
 : : 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 S 
 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 : : 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 M 
 
 
 .* 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 : 
 
 I 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 
 i 
 .1 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 | 
 
 
 
 
 
 s 
 
 
 
 >, 
 
 
 : 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 * 
 
 : : 
 
 
 
 
 a 
 
 o 
 
 
 
 a 
 
 
 t 
 
 
 S 
 
 M 
 
 L 
 
 
 
 Jtd ' w S 
 
 *i 
 
 
 
 
 3 
 Je 
 
 o : -2 
 
 | 
 
 
 
 
 o 
 M 
 
 S^ c 
 
 GO= 
 
 Untifrlers 
 ''oromen 
 
 -r 
 
 t~ 
 
 % S 
 
 i i|i| 
 
 S - 
 
 On 
 
 a h> 
 
 Si 
 
 -gj 
 
 2S = 
 
 3 i s 
 
 3 S ' 
 
 LI 
 
 'o J 
 
 
 
 .S 
 2 
 
 a 1 
 | 2 S2 S 
 
 r oc2 a 
 i- = C 
 O'C'S eS r 3 
 
 ' : o 2 - 
 
 mil 
 
 Stoneware, o 
 turners .... 
 
 painters .... 
 Pur/vaLain. cL 
 
 biirn-ui*..... 
 gilders 
 
 " 
 
 S5 C5K 
 
 
 ^<5 O S CiQ 
 

 
 13 
 
 SSi-iiS 
 
 CMOS to 
 
 OOCM 
 3 r-l 
 
 oo 
 
 O O QQ , 
 
 CO rH Oi r-l i-H O4 
 
 , ,1,00000 o,, 
 
 CO CN) # CJS <M o 
 r-ii li-H T-H r-l 
 
 In two iron founderies, same district, aver 
 daily wages, respectively . 
 Iron-bridge establishment 
 Safe factory, average yearly earnings 
 Zinc establishinents.average wages, first-c 
 
 hfituls 
 
 Second-class hands 
 Other laborers 
 Cotton factories, average wages per hand, 
 eluding children 
 Cotton spinning, average wages per ha 
 (mostly young persons) 
 Average weekly wages paid in the cot 
 Plauen, Saxony : to miners, $3 10; to labc 
 and to boys 40 cents. 
 
 OO 
 ?M OOO C-TMCCtOO tOOOO 
 
 o ocooooooo ooS 
 
 CM C^J CO OJ CM r-H i 1 CO r-l CO to 
 
 i 
 
 a 
 
 Ji 
 
 S 
 
 |fe 
 
 fc 
 
 o 
 j"S 
 
 Wa! 
 
 3-gSS 
 if?J 
 s*fc 
 
 2 02 
 
 
 
 ;''.> ; - : ; 
 ;::::: (_, : '. 
 
 3ll 
 
 2 ccHH 
 
 2 88 to 3 60 
 1 44 to 2 16 
 
 the chambers of commerce 
 ng labor statistics are col- 
 
 cnish-Prussia, average daily 
 
 5, witu lamiiies 01 ,o<z per- i 
 SO 04 
 g,)average wages per 
 Go to 72 
 icu 54 
 43 
 smiths 58 
 
 
 
 Cabinet-makers 
 Cloth-weavers 
 
 From the reports of 
 of Germany the follow! 
 lected: 
 In the coal mines of Rh 
 
 wages ot o.ubl laborer 
 sons, males 
 Ironfoundery, (Duisbur 
 dav, founders 
 Other skilled workn 
 Laborers 
 Machinists and lock 
 
 s .5 
 
 5 Si 
 
 d CM 
 
 5 (MCO O O O !M <g O O O O 
 
 CM ~1 00 'M -vi CM -M -J- ^ 
 
 3 5? 
 
 -* 
 
 T3 ^ OOr-iCN 
 
 rt $<f? 
 
 *~ n 
 
 a 
 o 
 
 s 
 
 all- 
 
 3sJH 
 
 n'Scat 
 
 H 
 
 
 The wages of journeymen in the following t 
 including board and lodging, are as follows : 
 Per 
 Jjakers 
 
 Hi 
 
 5^c- 
 
 
 
 NiMH 
 
 Jia Mj 1 j L 
 
 3 ^ *j " o5 ^ D ^ ''' 
 
 i i : : j :g 
 m i : : 5 
 
 _tji : I^Q Jj.9 
 3^ 3 
 
 rn ^-T3 tirn O CD 
 
 B a .j=> r " 
 fP=OMeHooS
 
 14 
 
 
 , , , ,83, , ,83,8 
 
 O 
 
 , S . . , . S3 . , - 83 , , 
 
 
 
 ^00 I I I I 
 
 , ,38 , S.SS.S 
 
 8050 
 I I I I I I I CIO 
 
 woo oo <M on 
 
 I CO I I (NS> I i- I C'-l- I 
 
 fj 
 
 II 
 
 eococeci-ii-HCOeoo 
 
 o<M^-i35'ri-o)r-iao 
 eCNPlW COCCM 
 
 o -* o- 
 S5 10 i i i 
 
 HCO O (Nr 
 
 * i-faooooo 
 
 i o i o * oo o 06 i-t 
 
 w 
 
 fi 
 
 I 
 
 3 
 
 t> 
 
 =: 
 
 a 
 
 Ol-<r-l^C-U~i I'-S 
 
 o 
 
 ft 
 
 lie, 
 
 ra : 
 
 Ml| 
 
 : :*% 
 
 goC 
 
 es ujja fe&iisii 
 
 iSE c : c: r ; 5 72 a.!<< fi - m 2 
 
 ll 
 
 tj o 
 
 3* 
 
 o o o 
 a S S 2 
 s2 
 
 g 
 
 el!
 
 15 
 
 I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I O 
 
 , , , , ,3 
 
 ,8 
 
 ,8, ,! 
 
 to 3* oc 3 T c-J vi ic o i ICOCNCO -3- -v o co 03 irt Ci i 111 i os'-*-* tDC&C23iooc;5t6oooO'Cito4 : Ji-H6o->j<o-*rc6o6tOi-HTf<c 
 CO i-HCM CM rH CO i-H CM rH CO-VCO"* CM CM rH "< -* IN rH CMCM to CM rH i-H CM CM lO COt-CM CMrHrHCMCMSMi-HCMCMCNI 
 
 * CM CO t-O tOOoOO C5C-1 
 
 IM i ICO I i-KO T-crOO I lOOS 
 
 CO C^i-H COCO <MC<lr-l) rH 
 
 st-OltOOOO 
 <MT-(rH<NH 
 
 toooootpot 
 
 CM CM i-l CM CN) 
 
 -^<C^O;O oo (Mco 
 
 CMCOr-ld2 00 i-(55 
 
 MIMCOO4iO<MiMi 
 
 OOtOoOOC^JOO--^ OO-^OO -fC v lO'>ltOOOO M^COCNJOOIMCO O ^ CO '> C-l O - 1* Tt"M '-> H< "O tC OD O OO CO 00 CM COtO'V 
 
 i-H CM rH CM CO CO Cl CS n CMCOCOCM rH CM rH CM CO CM CM U5 * CM CM CO rH CM COrHi-H CM rH rH rH CM CO CM CO CM i-H i-H rH CM rH CM CMCMCO 
 
 COOCOtDCM tOCCCO CM -^ O O OO tpOO CMOOC'lOtOOO O tp DO-^~OOOOO^OCOtOOOOGCtOCNJCOsO (M tO GO 
 
 OCOOrHtO I I-H O i I O CSrH C4 ICO ICir-iO I CO^lOCOrHOOrH tOOOOOrHOOCMCMOOOirHCOCiC^OOi*OOrH IkOrHOO 
 
 f-HrHi-HCMCM CMrHCM CM COOJ rH rH COCMCM * * CM CM CM t-H CM COrHi-H CM rH rH i-H rH CO H CO rH i-H rH CNrHIN CMCMCM
 
 16 
 
 My colleague [Mr. TOWXSEXD] bands me a let- 
 ter containing a statement of American wages in 
 some of the same branches of labor. That gen- 
 tlemen may contrast them with the wages of 
 Germany, as set forth by the statistical bureau 
 of Prussia, I will hand the letter to the re- 
 porters : 
 
 PHENIXVILI.E, PENNSYLVANIA. 
 March '21, 1870. 
 
 DKAE Bin: Your faror of the 16th is before me. 
 
 Below I give you the prices paid per day to our 
 principal workmen, as follows: 
 
 Rolling-mill on rail* and learns. 
 
 Per day. Per day. 
 
 Heaters $4 50 Bar mill. 
 
 Helpers 1 70 Heaters $3 87 
 
 Extra helpei\? 1 60 Helpers 1 70 
 
 Finishing rollerman, 6 75 Rollers 2 12 
 
 Roughingrolleruian, 2 70 Catchers 1 55 
 
 Catchers 2 25 Hooks 1 60 
 
 Hooks 1 80 
 
 Hot straightened.... 2 50 Heavy merchant iron. 
 
 Cold straighteners... 3 60 Heaters 4 37 
 
 Stochers 2 35 Helpers 1 70 
 
 Filers- 1 50 Finishing roller 5 00 
 
 Laborers 1 50 Roughers 2 35 
 
 Engineers 2 10 Catcher 1 50 
 
 Straigh toner 1 50 
 
 Merchant iron. Mauler 1 50 
 
 Heaters- 4 37 Engineer 1 90 
 
 Helper 1 70 
 
 Extra helpers 160 Puddling. 
 
 Finishing roller 4 0-5 Puddler 3 00 
 
 Roughing roller 2 12 Puddler's helpers.... 2 00 
 
 Catchers 1 60 
 
 Roughing catcher.... 1 30 Labor. 
 
 Straightencr 1 90 Common labor 1 40 
 
 Engineers 2 80 
 
 I am unable to give the wages paid for the above 
 classes of work either in Kngland, France, or Belgium, 
 but I am satisfied from the prices, as we have had 
 them from time to time from these, that their present 
 pay is not over an average of 40 percent, of above. 
 
 Respectfully, JOHN GRIFFIN. 
 
 Oeneral Superintendent. 
 Hon. WASHINGTON TOWNSKSD. 
 
 Mr. ALLISON. Will the gentleman yield 
 to me for a question ? 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. Yes, sir. 
 
 Mr. ALLISON. I will ask the gentleman 
 whether that is not a report of wages paid by 
 a company that manufactures what are known 
 as iron beams for vessels and bridges? 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. They manufacture beams, 
 rails, and other heavy forms of iron. 
 
 Mr. ALLISON. And is it not a company 
 which with three others has agreed upon an 
 established list of prices for that class of arti- 
 cles, which prices embarce the prices abroad, 
 together with the tariff duty and a profit on the 
 cost of manufacture ? 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. I cannot answer the ques- 
 tion, because I do not know. I can, however, 
 say that I hare never heard such an allega- 
 tion. But, my dear sir, I do not care what 
 they have agreed to do, if they are thereby 
 enabling American workingraen to keep their 
 children at school, well fed and comfortably 
 clad, to maintain their seats in church, and 
 to lay by something for old age and a rainy 
 day, and not compelling them, as German 
 workmen in like employments are compelled 
 to do, to take their wives and daughters as 
 
 colaborers into iron and coal mines and 
 furnaces and rolling-mills, so that they may 
 together earn enough to eke out a miserable 
 subsistence. 
 
 Mr. ALLISON. I do not take issue with 
 the gentleman upon that question, but merely 
 desire to call his attention to the fact that this 
 is one of four establishments that have a 
 monopoly in this business. 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. A monopoly ! A v;orkmaa 
 a monopolist! A poor workman for wages a 
 monopolist ! A man who is earning daily wages 
 by hard work in a mine, a furnace, or a roll- 
 ing-mill will hardly be regarded as a monopo- 
 list, though his pay may be ten limes what he 
 could get in his native town. No, sir ; such 
 men are not monopolists, though free traders 
 constantly denounce them as such. 
 
 CINCINNATI HER WOKKSHOPS AND WORKMKN. 
 
 Mr. Chairman, 90 per cent, of the cost of 
 iron in all its forms is the wages of labor, 
 and the wages of labor go very largely into 
 wheat and pork and mutton and beef that are 
 eaten, and woolen clothes that are worn by the 
 workmen and their families. The wages of 
 well-paid laborers thus find their way to the 
 pockets of the farmer and the wool-grower. 
 
 Mr. STEVENSON. Will the gentleman 
 yield to me now for a question ? 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. Yes, sir. 
 
 Mr. STEVENSON. It seems that the gen- 
 tleman has just discovered that there are some 
 manufacturers in Cincinnati. I want to know 
 whether he has not also discovered that more 
 than half of the capital and labor and produc- 
 tion of those manufactories are in the articles 
 of wood, iron, leather, and paper, upon which 
 I want the duties reduced, and whether it is 
 not to the interest of those producers to have 
 cheap raw material? 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. It is the interest of the 
 working people of Cincinnati that the general 
 rate of wages shall be maintained at the highest 
 point. It is not for the interest of any mechan- 
 ical producer in this country to have the duties 
 on his productions, or others which involve 
 much labor, so reduced that the cheap labor 
 of France, Belgium, Germany, and Britain can 
 come in competition with them in our home 
 market. And thus I fully answer the gentle- 
 man's question. 
 
 The gentleman is mistaken. I have not just 
 discovered that there are manufactories in Cin- 
 cinnati, for as I heard the gentleman pleading 
 for a law which would inevitably check their 
 prosperity and progress and reduce the wages 
 of labor I thought of old Charles Cist, and 
 wondered whether his bones were not rattling 
 in his coffin. From almost the birth of Cin- 
 cinnati he was a champion of protection, and 
 did more than any other man to build up her 
 workshops and manufactories, and more than 
 twenty years ago devoted a day to conducting 
 me through many of the largest of them. 
 
 But I want to allude further to the remarks
 
 17 
 
 of the gentleman from Ohio, [Mr. STEVENSON.] 
 Speaking of Pennsylvania, he said: 
 
 "Ah! she is shrewd! New England heretofore has 
 had the reputation of great adroitness in taking care 
 of her own interest, but Pennsylvania carries off the 
 palm. Quietly she sits looking out for herself, wo 
 giving bounty, she appropriating it. And now, what 
 is the result ? If wo suppose, for the sake of argu- 
 ment, that the tariff on iron and coal is added to the 
 cost, then Pennsylvania received a premium on her 
 production of iron and coal in 1868 of 814,859,168." 
 
 Has the gentleman a settled opinion ou 
 the question, Is a protective duty a tax or 
 bounty? Or is he, like Bunsby, unable to give 
 an opinion for want of premises on which to 
 base it? "If so be," said Bunsby on a mem- 
 orable occasion, "as he's dead, ray opinion is 
 lie won't come back no more; if so be as he's 
 alive, my opinion is he will. Do I say he will? 
 No. Why not? Because the bearings of this 
 obserwation lays in the application on it." 
 [Laughter.] " If we suppose for the sake of 
 argument." A teacher of political economy 
 that has not yet made up his mind whether a 
 protecting duty is a tax or not comes here and 
 arraigns Pennsylvania, and holds her up to rid- 
 icule as a cormorant fattening upon public 
 bounty or plunder. But let me go on. 
 
 Mr. STEVENSON. Will the gentleman 
 give us his opinion upon that subject? 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. 1 have given it, and I will 
 give it again. 
 
 PROTECTIVE DUTIES NOT A TAX. 
 
 Mr. Chairman, I apprehend that no enlight- 
 ened student of political economy Jlfegards a 
 protective duty as a tax. Even the gentleman 
 from Iowa [Mr. ALLISON] admitted that in 
 most cases it is not ; yet influenced, as I think, 
 by a clever story which the chairman of our 
 committee, who is somewhat of a wag, tells, 
 he does not think the principle applies to 
 pig iron. I hope our chairman, who I see 
 does me the honor to listen, will pardon me 
 for referring to the anecdote. It runs thus : 
 some years ago, during the days of the Whig 
 party, when the chairman of the committee 
 [Mr. SCHEXCK] was here as a Representative 
 of that party and a friend of protection, he met 
 as a member of this House a worthy old Ger- 
 man from Reading, Pennsylvania, a staunch 
 Democrat, but strongly in favor of protection 
 on iron. The gentleman from Ohio, who is 
 fond of a joke, said to him one day, "Mr. 
 R., I think 1 shall go with the free-traders on 
 the iron sections of the tariff bill, especially 
 on pig iron." " Why will you do that?" was 
 the response. " Well, my people want cheap 
 plows, nails, horseshoes, &c." "But," re- 
 plied the old German, " we make iron in Penn- 
 sylvania ; and if you want to keep up the supply 
 and keep the price down you ought to encour- 
 age the manufacture. " "But you kn o w, " said 
 our chairman, " that a protective duty is a tax, 
 and adds just that much to the cost of the ar- 
 ticle?" "Yes, I suppose it does generally 
 increase the cost of the thing just so much as 
 the duty is ; all the leaders of our party say 
 so, and we eay so in our convention platforms 
 
 and our public meeting resolutions ; but, Mr. 
 SCHENCK, somehow or other I think it don't 
 work just that way rait pig iron." [Laughter.] 
 
 The gentleman while admitting that protect- 
 ive duties do not always or even generally 
 increase the price of the manufactured article, 
 thinks "that somehow or other it don't work 
 that way mit pig iron." Now, I think that 
 iron in all its forms is subject to every gen- 
 eral law, and that the duty of $9 per ton on-pig 
 iron has reduced the price measured in wheat, 
 wool, and other agricultural commodities and 
 increased the supply to such an extent as to 
 prove that the duty has been a boon and not a 
 tax. On nothing else produced in this country 
 has the influence of protection been so broadly 
 and beneficently felt by the people of the country 
 at large. 
 
 On the llth of January I submitted to the 
 House some remarks in the nature of a review 
 of the last report of Commissioner D. A. Wells, 
 and showed that after the production of Arner- 
 can pig iron had been without increase for a 
 decade under the stimulus of this duty we more 
 than doubled it in six years. The authentic 
 figures I exhibited were as follows: 
 
 Production of pig iron in England and the United 
 States from 1854 to 1862 inclusive. 
 
 United 
 
 England. States. 
 
 1854 3J069.838 716,674 
 
 1855 3,218.154 754,178 
 
 1856 3,586,377 874,428 
 
 1857 3,659,447 798,157 
 
 1858 .3.456,064 705,094 
 
 1859 3,712,904 840,427 
 
 1860 3,826,752 913,774 
 
 1861 3,712.390 731,564 
 
 1862 3,943,469 787,662 
 
 The Morrill tariff, which raised the duty to 
 $6, went into effect in 1861. In 1864 the duty 
 was raised to $9. The results have been as 
 follows : 
 
 United 
 England. States. 
 
 1863 4510,040 947,604 
 
 1864 4,767,951 1,135,497 
 
 1865 4.819,254 931.582 
 
 1866 4.523,897 1,350,943 
 
 1867 4,761,028 1,461,626 
 
 1868 - 1,603,000 
 
 1869 - 1.900,000 
 
 In connection with these figures I then in- 
 vited the attention of the House to the fact that 
 we built last year 65 furnaces in 15 States of 
 the Union, and that 58 more had been begun. 
 A few years more of such wonderful progress 
 and we will produce from our own coal and 
 iron our entire supply of iron and steel and com- 
 pete with England in supplying the demands of 
 the world. The vast demand created by the 
 extension of our railroad system, and those of 
 Russia and India, are exceeding the capacity of 
 England. She cannot largely increase her pro - 
 duction without largely increasing its cost. The 
 gentleman from Iowa was constrained to admit 
 yesterday that the price of English iron has gone 
 up steadily during the last year, because the de- 
 mand is in excess of her capacity to produce ; 
 yet the price of American pig iron has fallen at 
 least $6 per ton on all grades within the last 10
 
 18 
 
 months. What is the cause of this reduction ? 
 Not British competition aud that is the only 
 possible competition for the price of British 
 iron has risen. No, sir; the price of American 
 iron has gone down under domestic competi- 
 tion and the general depreciation of prices. 
 Keep your duty high enough to induce other 
 men to build furnaces and rolling-mills and 
 before 5 years you will find American iron 
 cheapened to the level of the markets of the 
 world, and that without a commensurate reduc- 
 tion of wages. 
 
 HOW TUB INTKKNAL KKVKNfE CAN HE DISPENSED 
 WITH. 
 
 But I return to my subject. The gentle- 
 man from Ohio asked from what eight sources 
 $130,000,000 of revenue can be derived. I 
 find I overstated the number re<jnired; but six 
 articles are necessary to give us all the income 
 we need this year from that source. Let me 
 state the receipts from these six sources dur- 
 ing the last year. They were as follows : 
 
 From distilled spirits $45,026,401 
 
 From tobacco 23,430,709 
 
 From fermented liquors 6,099,879 
 
 From banks and bankers 3,335,516 
 
 From incomes 34,791,855 
 
 From stamps 16.420,710 
 
 $129,104,068 
 
 Sir, month by month, since the close of the 
 last fiscal year, the receipts from each of these 
 sources have been larger than those of the 
 corresponding month of last year. There is 
 a regular monthly increase in every item. 
 Retaining but these six sources of internal 
 revenue we can mitigate their exactions at 
 least by increasing the exemption from the 
 income tax or reducing the rate, and still 
 obtain an excess over the amount that is abso- 
 lutely required. I am in favor of adopting 
 this course, and believe that in three years 
 more, or in five at most, we can wipe out all 
 our internal taxes except stamps and tobacco. 
 
 Mr. SCHENCK. And spirits. 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. No. I am anxious to make 
 spirits free as soon as we can. I would make 
 this change in the interests of the farmers of 
 the country. But I do not wish to run into a 
 digression, and will recur to this point. I pro- 
 ceed to invite the attention of the committee 
 to the coat of collecting the internal revenue. 
 In 1867 it was $8,982,686; in 1868, $9,327,301, 
 and in 1869, $7,218,610, requiring for the three 
 years the expenditure of $25,528,597. Why, 
 sir, its abolition would be equal to the pay- 
 ment of $133,000,000 of the public debt. We 
 hope to fund our interest-bearingdebtatan aver- 
 age of 4 \ per cent. This will save $18,000,000. 
 Before the end of this fiscal year there will be 
 in the Treasury $100,000,000 of our bonds, the 
 interest on which is $6,000,000 per annum, 
 which, with the other sum and the cost of col- 
 lecting the internal revenue, would make a 
 reduction of $32,500, 000 in the annual expenses 
 of the Government. If the bill under discus- 
 sion shall become a law we will, I believe, 
 although it lightens the burdens of the people 
 
 at least $20,000,000 per annum, be able in five 
 years to make even distilled spirits free, and 
 rely on stamps and the tax on tobacco. 
 Tin: UITKCTOI-' PBOTECTIONO.N PRICKS AGAIN. 
 
 The gentleman from Iowa said that pig iron 
 sells at $40 a ton and yields at least $15 profit. 
 1 have the Iron Age, a paper of the highest 
 authority among dealers in iron and hardware, 
 and I do not find it puts it at the price named 
 by the gentleman. March 12 it quotes prices 
 at Philadelphia of American pig iron, No. 1, 
 for foundery use. as $33 50 to $31 ; No. 2, 
 foundery, $31 60 to $32: gray forge, $30 to 
 $31 ; white and mottled, $28 50 to $20. There 
 is some difference between these prices and 
 $40 ; and if the gentleman was as far out of the 
 way in the profits of iron-makers as in the cost 
 of iron he has shown clearly enough that there is 
 no profit in making pig iron at this time. The 
 gentleman from Ohio [Mr. G.VUKIELD] hands 
 me a still later paper, showing a further re- 
 duction. But every business man knows that 
 the price is receding under the rapid increase 
 of domestic competition. 
 
 The English people know what would be the 
 effect of the reduction of our duty. 1 hold in 
 my hand the annual circular of a leading iron 
 firm in London advising the English iron- mak- 
 ers of the state of the trade and the prospect 
 for this year. Let me read from this circular, 
 which I may say was evidently not intended 
 for American consumption : 
 
 ^ "No. 53 OLD BROAD STRKKT. 
 
 LONDON, December 31, 1869. 
 
 "SiR: Thishasbcenaprosperousyearfor theiron- 
 masters. Our monthly advice of exports will have 
 revealed the cause. Three countries alone Russia. 
 India, and the .United States have purchased 040,000 
 tons of British rails. Under these unprecedented ex- 
 ports the price has ruled firm, and good Erio rails 
 arc now worth 6 15. net. 
 
 " Coal and pig iron. Over-production has kept 
 down the price ; but at length the demand for pigs 
 appears to have overtaken the supply, and they are 
 firm at an advance of 5s. upon the year. 
 
 "Old rails have been largely used by rail-mills, and 
 have advanced 10, also during the year. 
 
 "Wages have advanced over the whole mining 
 district. At a meeting in London this week the 
 Welsh iron-masters voted an advance of 10 per cent. 
 
 "Cost of the finished rails to the manufacturer is 
 thus settled. The buyer is, however, more interested 
 in the relation of supply to demand. 
 
 "The supply of railway bars has greatly increased; 
 many merchant bar-mills have taken to rails, and all 
 the mills have increased their make. This increased 
 product has, however, found ready sale, and will not 
 probably decrease. 
 
 "The demand for next year promises to bo good. 
 Most of the mills have orders for three, and some for 
 six months. Homo railways must buy inoro largely 
 than in I860. India will also take more rails. Rus.-i:i 
 is not so eager a buyer as at this time last year. The 
 Government, however, continues to build roads for 
 commercial and military purposes, and while the 
 English investors retain their present partiality for 
 Russian securities there will be no lack of money. 
 Yet wit.'i the present out-turn a material reduction 
 of the American duty, or something eQually signifi- 
 cant, is necessary to advance the prico aborc 7." 
 
 Yes, Mr. Chairman, a material reduction of 
 the American duty, or something equally sig- 
 nificant, is necessary to enable the British iron- 
 master to advance his price beyond 7 ; and 
 the day the telegraph announces that we have
 
 19 
 
 reduced onr duty on pig and railroad iron will 
 be the day on which the price of British iron 
 will go up. I pray you be admonished by this 
 circular. 
 
 I have also an article from the Manchester 
 Examiner and Times of January 3, 1870, re- 
 lating to cotton , as compared with the year pre- 
 ceding ; and from what I shall read it will be 
 seen that iron is not the only English interest 
 which will be improved by the reduction of our 
 duties. The organ of the cotton-spinners of 
 Manchester says : 
 
 "As compared with theyears preceding the Amer- 
 ican war, this country has received during tho past 
 few years 7,000,000 to 8,000,000 less per annum for 
 the cost of manufacturing cotton, and there can bo 
 no question that in comparison with tho cost of cot- 
 ton this country has marketed the cheapest cloth 
 ever made ; and if cotton manufacturers on the con- 
 tinent of Europe had not been protected by high tar- 
 iffs they would have been swept from the field." 
 
 Yes, repeal the protective duties ou cotton, 
 which are so abhorrent to the gentleman from 
 Iowa, says the Examiner nnd Times of Man- 
 chester, and the free-trade league and the cot- 
 ton manufactures of the country will be swept 
 from the field. 
 
 THE TARIFFS OF ENGLAND AXD FRANCE DISCRIMINATE 
 AGAINST AMERICAN FARMERS. 
 
 The gentleman from New York [Mr. BROOKS] 
 held up the English tariff to our view. Gen- 
 tlemen may have been surprised to hear me 
 say that I was very anxious to hasten the day 
 when the tax on distilled spirits should be re- 
 pealed. Gentlemen from the agricultural dis- 
 tricts of France and England discriminate spe- 
 cially against you and your constituents in their 
 tariff:;. England d&rives nearly half her cus- 
 toms from inordinate duties on the produc- 
 tions of the American farmer, or from agricul- 
 tural products with which this country could 
 supply her. Let us look at the facts. The 
 gentleman from New York held up the tariff 
 of England; said it yields 21,602,414 ster- 
 ling, or $108,000,000; but he did not invite 
 your attention to the fact that she raises over 
 $54.000,000, or more than one half, by duties 
 that discriminate against our farmers. Yet 
 such is the case. She raises from tobacco and 
 snuff, one of our leading agricultural staples 
 and its immediate product, 6,542,460, or 
 $32,712,300. The friends of free trade say we 
 do not import enough English iron; we do not 
 import enough English cotton goods ; we do 
 not import enough English woolen goods, con- 
 sidering how cheap we can buy them all. If 
 we are to reduce our duties and import more 
 I beg the Representatives of the farming States 
 of the West to demand something like reci- 
 procity on behalf of their constituents, for 
 whose grain there is no market. Every yard 
 of cotton and woolen goods and every ton of 
 iron represent the gram and meat consumed 
 by the families of the men who produced it ; 
 and while our grain goes to waste for the want 
 of purchasers, the friends of protection protest 
 against importing that grown in other coun- 
 tries, even when converted into cloth or iron. 
 The cloth and iron would be as good if made 
 
 where well-paid laborers eat freely of Ameri- 
 can wheat, butter, and meat ; and to those who 
 cannot sell their crop at any price a neighbor- 
 ing furnace, factory, or rolling-mill would be a 
 blessing, even though they could not bay cloth 
 or iron at English prices. Bull must proceed. 
 I have shown that of the $108,000,000 Eng- 
 land raises by her tariff she gets $32,712,300 
 by duties on one of our agricultural staples. 
 Her duties en tobacco are taxes, for England 
 has no tobacco-fields to develop. They are, 
 therefore, not protective duties. Like our 
 duties on tea, coffee, pepper, and spice, they 
 are taxes purely. But let us go a little further 
 into this matter. England raises $21,667,565 
 on spirits. This is an absolute discrimination 
 against our gjain. Were that duty removed 
 the farmer and distiller would be working 
 together, and instead of exporting wheat and 
 corn at prices that will not cover the cost of 
 production and transportation their produce 
 would be manufactured into alcohol, pork, and 
 lard oil; and while our own laboring people 
 would have cheaper provisions the farmer 
 would greatly reduce the cost of transportation 
 and have an ample market for his grain man- 
 ufactured into alcohol, pork, and oil. Yet 
 gentlemen representing agricultural districts 
 plead with us to admit British goods at lower 
 rates, while she gathers $54,599,865 ia a single 
 year by imposing such duties on tobacco as 
 greatly diminish its consumption and such on 
 spirits as preclude the importation of our grain 
 in the only forms in which it can be profitably 
 exported. 
 
 EXGLAXD A HIDEOUS MONOPOLY FREE TRADE SUP- 
 PORTS IT. 
 
 Mr. BROOKS, of New York. Let me state 
 that our great agricultural products cotton, 
 which is an immense product, and wheat, corn, 
 &c. are admitted duty free. 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. To that I reply that they 
 take our cotton because they cannot live with- 
 out it, and our wheat and corn when they cannot 
 buy cereals cheaper elsewhere. France has a 
 duty on wheat and flour even when imported 
 in French vessels. We are too far from the 
 sea-board, and the cost of transportation from 
 our grain-fields is too great for us to send them 
 grain in bulk at present prices. The cheapest 
 way of transporting corn is in the form of alco- 
 hol. In this form we could send it profitably 
 were their duties not prohibitory. England 
 will take raw materials from countries from 
 which she can buy cheapest. But her much- 
 lauded free trade does not offer any advan- 
 tage to the American. Gentlemen talk about 
 monopolists, and aver that protection fosters 
 monopolies. Sir, the world has never seen, 
 so heartless, BO unrelenting, and so gigantic 
 a monopoly as the British Government and 
 the manufacturing power that sustains it. It 
 is a monopoly which has desolated Ireland' 
 and swept ner factories from the face of the ' 
 earth. Ireland, less than a century ago, before 
 the union, the home of a contented people, and, 
 the seat of a busy and prosperous industry, is
 
 20 
 
 now a land whose people tire born only to be 
 watched and hunted us felons, or exiled from 
 theland they love o well. The manufacturing 
 and landed monopoly of England but a few 
 years ago huddled into their graves the decay- 
 ing bodies of more than 1,000,000 of the people 
 of Ireland, who died of starvation in a single 
 year. 
 
 It is a monopoly which has inflicted on Brit- 
 ish India wrongs even greater than these. 
 Three years ago the air of the whole wide 
 district of Orissa was fetid with the stench 
 rising from the decaying bodies of more than 
 1,000,000 people who had starved in one of 
 the richest agricultural regions in the world, 
 because under England's enlightened free 
 trade they were not permitted to diversify their 
 industries, and when their single crop failed 
 they were permitted to starve, as the Irish were 
 when the rot assailed their only crop, the po- 
 tato. This English monopoly is so absolute 
 and selQsh that it will not allow provinces and 
 colonies to diversify their industry. It binds 
 them to the culture of one product India, cot- 
 ton, and Ireland, men for exportation. Shall 
 she also hold the people of the Northwest as 
 her commercial subjects and doom them to 
 raise wheat and wheat alone? We can break 
 its power and overthrow this monstrous mo- 
 nopoly. Yes, by peaceful arts, without the 
 clash of arms, we can emancipate the hundreds 
 of millions of people England now oppresses. 
 The source ot her power is her commercial 
 and manufacturing supremacy, and thiswecan 
 and should undermine, as we are its chief sup- 
 port. With our cotton-fields, our widespread 
 and inexhaustible deposits of all the metals, 
 and our immense sheep-walks, we should sup- 
 ply all our wants. When we do this our com- 
 merce will revive, for populous nations that 
 supply their own markets always produce a sur- 
 plus which they can export at low prices. But 
 now England properly regards us as a depend- 
 ency more profitable than "all the English- 
 speaking dependencies of the empire." On 
 this point the London Times of February 25, 
 when discussing the bill now under considera- 
 tion, says: 
 
 "The fiscal policy of tho United States is for us a 
 subject of no reinoteor transient interest. Although 
 statistics may be adduced to prove that in propor- 
 tion to population the colonies are our best custom- 
 ers, yet in tho mass our trade with republican Amer- 
 ica is by far tho largest item in the balance-sheet of 
 our exports to foreign countries, and is nearly equal 
 to that with all tho English-speaking dependencies 
 of tho empire." 
 
 A. HOME MARKET A PREDICTION FULFILLED. 
 
 Gentlemen sneer at the idea of a home mar- 
 let. Sir, on the 1st of June, 1868, we had 
 tinder consideration a proposition to permit 
 table whisky to remain m bond under certain 
 conditions. In the course of the discussion I 
 urged upon gentlemen from the West who were 
 opposing it the propriety of giving effect to 
 that proposition. I pressed upon the atten- 
 tion of the House the fact that age quadrupled 
 the value bj improving the quality of fine 
 
 whisky, and that our whisky was supersed- 
 ing French brandy in general use. 1 urged 
 the importance of this to the grain-growing 
 States. Turning to my remarks i find the fol- 
 lowing prediciion, the fulfillment of which has 
 occurred even before 1 expected it: 
 
 "The people of the Northwest, it s.M-m:, to me, nro 
 specially interested in this question. They will liiid 
 that they caunot afford to expel from their inland 
 section of the country any brunch of manufactures. 
 They need tho opportunity to export their grain con- 
 centrated in the form of whisky, high-wines, or other 
 manufactures. lamii"' and they will not 
 
 believe me, but I tell them they are entering upon a 
 competition that, will exclude them froui the markets 
 of the world if they depend upon the export of their 
 KiMiu in bulk as food or mere raw material. Do you 
 mark, gentlemen of Missouri, Illinc, .nsin, 
 
 that California is loud in the expression of her grati- 
 tude for tho fact that I'M vessels have bccu added to 
 thefleetfor carrying her grain to JS'tw York and t: 
 atlantic ports? Tucy can send grain in bulk 23,000 
 miles to thesoa-boardof New England or Old England 
 at less cost for transportation than you can send yours 
 to the sea-board by rail. Ore;,-" , Tunder her 
 
 crop of wheat, and her peoplcarc fea:-ir:s,' t hat mean-; 
 of its transportation to market may p.ot bo at hand. 
 But this distant competition is not what you have 
 most cause to dread. The South, no longer your 
 customer for food for man and beast, looms up your 
 competitor. Her advantages over you are manifold 
 as they are manifest. She lies between you and the 
 ocean. Her grain-fields are upon the banks of navi- 
 gable rivers which flow to the Gulf ot the ooean. :\n 1 
 at or near the mouth of each is a sea-port. From Nor- 
 folk around to Galvcston, Texas, the grain of the 
 farmers of the several States may be floated to the 
 sea-board upon rafts and there find shipping. Ens- 
 land and western Europe are not t'uo countries to 
 which wo chiefly export grain and flour. Our chief 
 markets for these are Central and South America, 
 and tho islands to which the southern States are 
 neighbors; and I tell you that if the people of the far 
 Northwest do not take heed, and by diversifying their 
 industry convert their raw materials into more com- 
 pact productions, the day is not three years distant 
 when their crops will waste in the fields for the want 
 of a market to which they will pay the cost of trans- 
 portation." 
 
 Not two years have gone by, and you are 
 crying out that you have raised wheat in vain, 
 that there is no market for it ; that the cost of 
 getting it to a market consumes it. Ay, and 
 the gentleman from Iowa [Mr. ALLISOX] says 
 that in the face of these facts we are offering 
 inducements to thousands to go at wheat-grow- 
 ing, that the homestead law is tempting immi- 
 grants to engage in wheat-growing aud add to 
 the unsalable and unavailable stock. That is 
 true; and how would he improve matters? 
 He agrees with me that the homestead law is 
 beneficent and should not be repealed. What, 
 then, is the gentleman's proposition. It is 
 identical with those we have heard from so 
 many gentlemen reduced duties on coal, salt, 
 hides, lumber, iron, and woolen goods. 
 
 This is the burden and refrain of all the sweet 
 singers trained in the musical academy of D. 
 A. Wells, Commissioner of Revenue, and let 
 us right here test its merit. Lower the duties 
 on coal, salt, lumber, hides, iron, and woolen 
 goods. Well, how will this increase the num- 
 ber of consumers of American grain or dimin- 
 ish the number of grain-growers? There are 
 more than 1,500,000 of our people engaged in 
 or dependent on the labor of producing these 
 articles. What will become of them? They
 
 21 
 
 cannot live on "rye and potatoes," as German [ 
 workmen in the same trades do. They will 
 not even be content to get meat once a week, 
 as the workmen of England are ; and if they 
 be not work must stop. And I ask gentle- 
 men from the grain country what they suppose 
 these people will do with themselves when the 
 fire has gone out in the forge and furnace, and 
 the loom and spindle stand still, and the salt- 
 kettle rusts, and there is no work in the coal 
 mine because the manufactures that made a 
 market for it have been transferred to foreign 
 countries in which wages are low and where the 
 "working people live on rye and potatoes. 1 ' 
 
 Thank God, we cannot doom them to this 
 fate. The homestead law is their protection. 
 In a cabin on 120 acres of public land they 
 can raise wheat, potatoes, and a few sheep and 
 pigs; the old-fashioned spinning-wheel and 
 loom, easily made by skilled mechanics, will 
 convert their home-grown wool into fabrics, 
 and they can thus live till wiser legislators suc- 
 ceed us and reanimate the general industries 
 of the country by restoring the protective sys- 
 tem now in force. 
 
 Is that the remedy? Is free trade a specific 
 for all or any of our ills? No, sir, it is sheer 
 quackery, charlatanism. The only cure, the 
 evil of which western grain-growers complain, 
 is to increase the number of consumers and 
 decrease the number of growers of wheat; raise, 
 if possible, the wages of workmen so as to make 
 mechanical employments attractive ; say to the 
 farmers' sous, " There is work and good wages 
 for you in the machine-shop, the forge, the fur- I 
 nace, or the mill;" say to the men whose capital 
 is unproductive on farms, "Build mills, sink 
 shafts to the coal-bed which underlies your 
 farm ; avail yourselves of the limestone quarry 
 and the ore-bed, whether of iron, lead, copper, 
 zinc, or nickel; employ your industry and cap- 
 ital so that it shall be profitable to you, your 
 country, and mankind;" and in a little while 
 you will cheapen iron and steel and make an 
 adequate market for all the grain of the coun- 
 try. The gentleman's remedy is the theory of 
 the homeopathic physician, that like cures like, 
 which though it may be correct in physics, is 
 not an approved maxim in social science. 
 
 Mr. ALLISON. I would like the gentleman 
 to state how long it will be before that happy 
 period will arrive? 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. Well, sir, I cannot tell 
 exactly. It will depend upon the degree of 
 promptness with which the remedy is applied. 
 But if the Clerk will do me the kindness to give 
 me a little rest by reading a letter from an Irish 
 patriot, one who knew England's tenderness for 
 her laboring people experimentally at home in 
 Ireland, and who laid one of his limbs away in 
 the service of our country during the war, and 
 now lives in Quincy, Illinois, I will endeavor to 
 give the gentleman some idea. 
 
 The Clerk read as follows : 
 
 "We have a population of 5,000 or 40.000. and our 
 citizens are just commencing to awake to the neces- 
 sity of enoouraging local manufacturing. We have 
 
 2 paper mills, 10 flour mills, 5 tobacco factories; sales 
 $1.300,000; 9 machine-shops; sales 81,050.000; 5 ma- 
 chine ibunderies; 4 stove founderies turned out last 
 year 36,400 stoves, amounting to $473,200 cash sales: 
 2 boilershops, turning out$216,000 per year ; 15 wagon 
 and plow shops, with a capital of $260,000 ; 4 planing 
 mills, capital $180,000; 14 manufacturers of saddles 
 and harness.capital 233,400 ; and numerous others too 
 tedious to mention. There is a company at present 
 engaged in boring for coal, with fine prospects of suc- 
 cess. If we can only get coal here manufacturing 
 will spring up all around us. I have thought some 
 of organizing a stock company to build factories and 
 supply funds to encourage skilled workmen to enter 
 into what is called the cooperative system. I shall 
 shortly test the matter to see if it can be made to 
 work. 
 
 "If the friends of protection can hold their own 
 till after cho taking of the census the crisis will be 
 passed, for that will show such progress in the mate- 
 rial wealth of the nation that it will require a bold 
 man indeed to attack our system of labor. It is use- 
 less for us to talk of competing with England while 
 she keeps as many of her people in her poor-houses 
 as she does in her public schools a country that 
 expends seven eighths more to keep up her poor- 
 houses than she does to support her schools. Eng- 
 land and Scotland have a population of 24,599,277, 
 for the education of which she has 14,591 schools, 
 with 12,832 teachers, costing annually $4,212,500, 
 while she expends for her poor-houses annually 
 $32,595,000. Compare her with Illinois, a State sixty 
 years ago in possession of the savages, but now pos- 
 sessing a population of about 2,500,000, with 11,000 
 schools and 20,000 teachers, costing $6,500,000 an- 
 nually, more than 50 per cent, greater than England, 
 with a population ten times larger than us. The 
 free-trader says that pauperism is growing less in 
 England under her free-trade system; but I find, 
 from Purdy's Report in 1866, she had 842,860; and I 
 see by the American Cyclopedia of 1863 for that year 
 1,034,832 paupers are reported. These are facts for 
 the American people to profit by. It is reported 
 that there are now in London more than SO.OOOskillcd 
 workmen out of employment. We hear much about 
 English liberty, but I have been 9f the opinion that 
 the kind of liberty they are enjoying is that the .wolf 
 accords the lamb or the strong toward the weak in 
 all nations a liberty which, I trust, will never find 
 a place among our institutions. 
 
 ' ' The sympathizers or advocates of this English sys- 
 tem say that free_ trade will give us a market for our 
 surplus produce in Europe. But I find the more we 
 ship the less we receive. In 1868 we exported to 
 England 4,414,230 hundred weight of wheat, receiv- 
 ing therefor 17,952,850; in 1869, for the same period, 
 7.9.38,818 hundred weight, receiving therefrom only 
 517,740,770, or 211,000 less than we received for half 
 the amount the previous year. If wojvere to change 
 our policy, and instead of sending ourVhcat to Eng- 
 land induce those 80,000 skilled workmen to come to 
 us we would not then be compelled to look to Eng- 
 land for a market. They will be compelled to come 
 to us for our cotton and tobacco; but there is no 
 need of us going to them for manufactured goods. 
 We can take their surplus labor, transfer it to this 
 country, and ultimately tend to the welfare 9f both, 
 and thereby accomplish more than the sentimental 
 philanthropists of Europe and America can ever do 
 by preaching " free_ trade." We are influenced too 
 much by the political economists of Europe, who 
 write to tickle the fancy of the wealthy few, without 
 any regard to the rights of the laboring millions." 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. I desire in this connection, 
 and before turning to other topics, to present a 
 brief extract from a speech made in the United 
 States Senate by the experienced merchant and 
 enlightened statesman who represents New 
 Jersey in that body, Hon. ALEXANDER G. CAT- 
 TELL. In the course of his remarks on the 22d 
 of January, 1867, he said: 
 
 "But, Mr. President, the harmony of interests 
 which exists between agriculture and manufactures, 
 and the truth of the position I have taken, are clearly 
 shown by actual results. I am sure the Senate will
 
 22 
 
 excuse me if I draw an illustration from personal 
 observation in my own mercantile life. Twenty 
 years ago last autumn I embarked in the trade in 
 breadstuffs in the city of Philadelphia. At that time, 
 and for some succeeding years, the entire volume of 
 my business was made up of consignments of agri- 
 cultural products from the valleys of the Susque- 
 hanna, the Juniata. and theLohigh. I have not the 
 figures at command, but I am sure I speak within 
 bounds when I say that my own house and the four 
 or five others doing business from the samo points 
 must have received from this quarter 4,000,000 to 
 5,000.000 bushels of cereals per annum. Philadelphia 
 is still tho natural market for tho surplus product 
 of this territory, but for some years past there have 
 not been consignments enough received from that 
 entire section to realize commissions sufficient to pay 
 the salary of a receiving clerk. 
 
 "Do you ask, has production fallen off? I answer, 
 no; on the contrary, it has increased, but the whole 
 line of these valleys has been dotted with furnaces 
 and forges and rolling-mills and saw-mills and fac- 
 tories and workshops, filled with operatives, and the 
 consumer of agricultural products has been brought 
 to the farmer's doors. lie now finds a readier mar- 
 ket for his products at home at prices equal to those 
 ruling on the sea-board, of which ho avails himself 
 and thus saves all the cost of transportation and fac- 
 torage, equal at average prices to about 20 per cent. 
 Nay, more, sir, my own firm has frequently within 
 the past few years sold and shipped to the millers in 
 one of these valleys, that in which the iron interest 
 has been most developed, tho Lchigh, wheat drawn 
 from Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and lowato sup- 
 ply the deficiency in the consumptive want. And 
 these products of the prairies of tho West were sold, 
 too, at a price far in excess of what could havo been 
 realized by exportation to any country on the face 
 of the globe. As aconscquenceofthisstatoo_f things 
 land has risen in value through all this section, and 
 farms that could havo been boughtfiftecu or twenty 
 years ago at 840 or $50 per acre are now salable at 
 $150 or $200 per acre. Villages have grown to be 
 towns, and towns have grown to bo cities, agriculture 
 and manufactures havo clasped hands and prosperity 
 reigns." 
 
 PROTECTION STIMULATES IMMIGKATIOW. 
 
 Sir, the gentleman from Iowa asked how 
 long it would take if we shut up our machine- 
 shops and mills, and closed our coal-mines, to 
 turn 100,000 men into agriculturists. It would 
 take one season. 
 
 Mr. ALLISON. Oh no ; that was not my 
 question. 
 
 Mr. KELfcEY. That was what I was stating 
 when you interrupted me. 
 
 Mr. ALLISON. I wanted to know how long 
 it would be before iron and steel would be pro- 
 duced at a cheaper rate than it is now imported. 
 That was my question. 
 
 Mr. KELLE Y. I do not think I said cheaper 
 than it is now imported, but cheaper than it 
 can then be imported. As the price goes down 
 here it is going up in England; and under the 
 present duty we will soon be able to supply 
 our own demand, and meet England in com- 
 mon markets at equal prices. Sir, I want to 
 show gentlemen from the West what effect 
 the tariff has on immigration. I have before 
 me the tariffs from the organization of the Gov- 
 ernment down to the present time, given in ad 
 valorem percentages, and a statement of the 
 number of immigrants that arrived in each 
 year, from 1856 to 1869 inclusive. By com- 
 paring them I find that whenever our duties 
 have been low immigration fell off, and when- 
 ever our duties have been high the volume of 
 
 immigration increased. This seems to be a 
 fixed law. 
 
 Both papers are taken from the immaculate 
 report of David A. Wells, Special Commis- 
 sioner of Internal Revenue, and I therefore 
 present them with some hesitancy, and with 
 the remark that if they are incorrect it is not 
 my fault. 
 
 I find by these tables that in the nine years 
 from 1836 to 1864, inclusive, we received 
 1,403,497 immigrants; and in the four years 
 of the protective tariff, of which so many 
 gentlemen from the West whose States are 
 not overcrowded complain, wo have received 
 1,514,816, or over 111,000 more in the four 
 years of protection than in the nine preceding 
 years of free trade and low tariff. 13ut 1 had 
 better let the statement speak for itself. In 
 introducing it Mr. Wells says : 
 
 "The following is a revised and tho most acoijrato 
 attainablostatement of tho course of alien immigra- 
 tion into the United States since and including the 
 year 1856: 
 
 1856 .. 200,436 
 
 1857 2.~>l,:jOfl 
 
 1838.. 123,12(5 
 
 1859 121,282 
 
 1860 IM.lMO 
 
 1861 91,920 
 
 1862 91.987 
 
 1863 170.282 
 
 1864 1!.418 
 
 18(55 , 848,120 
 
 1866 318,551 
 
 1867 298.358 
 
 186S 297.215 
 
 1869 352,569 
 
 Total in fourteen years .2.918.213 
 
 "Total from July 1,18 x>, to Juno 30.1860. five years. 
 1,514.810." 
 
 In 185G the rate of duty on the aggregate of 
 our imports was 20.3, and the number of immi- 
 grants were 200,436 ; in 1859 the rate of duties 
 had been reduced to 14.6, and the number of 
 immigrants fell to 121, '282. In 1861, by the 
 acts of March 2, Augusts, and December 24 tho 
 rate of duties was further reduced to 1 1 2. This 
 broke the camel's back. So many men were 
 thrown out of employment and wages sunk so 
 low that none but agriculturists could come to 
 us with any prospect of improving their condi- 
 tion, and immigration sunk to a point lower 
 than it had been since the ever-to-be-remem- 
 bered free-trade crisis of 1837-40. In that year 
 but 91,920 immigrants arrived, and the depres- 
 sion continued through, the next year and the 
 number of immigrants was but 91,987. By the 
 act of July 14,. 1862 the duties were raised, so 
 that in 1863 they were up to 23.7, and the im- 
 migration nearly equaled that of the two pre- 
 ceding years, having gone up 176,282. By the 
 several acts ef 1864, 1865, and 1866 the duties 
 were increased, so that the duties on the import 
 ations of 1866 averaged 40.2 per cent., and im 
 migration went up to 318,564. Last year, when 
 the West was further oppressed by the increase 
 of duties on wool and copper, they averaged 4L 2, 
 and the number of immigrants went up to 
 35?, 569 ; and the commissioners of immigra- 
 
 :
 
 23 
 
 tion assure us that this year the number will 
 exceed 400,000. 
 
 It is thns demonstrated historically that pre- 
 cisely as we make our duties protective of high 
 wages for labor, so do we bring skilled work- 
 men from Germany, Belgium, France, and j 
 England to work in our mines, forges, fur- 
 naces, rolling-mills, cotton and woolen facto- 
 ries, and create a home market for the gram 
 of Iowa, Illinois, and the other States whose 
 farmers complain that they have no market 
 for their grain. 
 
 SKILLED WORKMEN" THE MOST VALUABLE COMMODITY 
 WE CAX IMPOIJT. 
 
 Mr. SCHENCK. We have free trade in 
 men. 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. The chairman of the Com- 
 mittee of Ways and Means [Mr. SCHEXCK] 
 suggests in this connection that we have free 
 trade in men. Yes, men are on the free list. 
 They cost us not even freight. Yet how they 
 swell the revenues and help us pay tho debt of 
 the country ! They are raised from helpless 
 infancy, through tender childhood, and trained 
 to skilled labor in youth in other lands, and in 
 manhood allured by higher wages, they come 
 to us and are welcomed to citizenship. In this 
 way we have maintained a balance of trade that 
 has enabled us to resist without bankruptcy the 
 ordinary commercial balance that has been so 
 heavily against us. We promote free trade in 
 men, and it is the only free trade I am prepared 
 to promote. 
 
 FEEXCH FEEE TKADE. 
 
 The French tariff is as inimical to us as that 
 of England. It is replete with prohibitory 
 duties and absolute prohibitions. Yet France 
 is spoken of to us by the English journals and 
 in the declamations of gentlemen as a free-trade 
 nation. Why, sir, on every article mentioned 
 in the French tariff, unless it is absolutely free, 
 the duty is so much if imported iu French ves- 
 sels, and so much more if imported in vessels 
 of other nations. Every head of acoluinn of the 
 rates of duty established by the French tariff 
 shows that you cannot import dutiable articles 
 into France at the same rate in the vessel of 
 another nation that you can in a French one. 
 They read thus : 
 
 Articles. 
 
 Mr. ALLISON. Are you in favor of that 
 rule? 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. I am. 
 
 Mr. ALLISON. So am I. 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. I am in favor of imposing 
 duties so as to discriminate in favor of American 
 shipping. I am for every form of protection 
 to American industry and enterprise. 
 
 General tariff. 
 
 Import tariff in treaty 
 with Great Britain 
 and other countries. 
 
 Imports. 
 
 In French 
 and treaty 
 vessels. 
 
 In other 
 vessels. 
 
 In 
 French 
 vessels. 
 
 In 
 other 
 
 vessels. 
 
 In the French tariff tobacco is classed as a 
 colonial product, and its importation on private 
 account is prohibited. It is a Government 
 monopoly. American grown tobacco, even in 
 the leaf, K admitted into France only when the 
 colonial supply fails ; and then if it is carried 
 in other than a French vessel it is made to pay 
 a duty of nearly 1 cent on the pound, which is 
 imposed in order to tax foreign shipping. 
 
 The gentleman from Iowa objects to the 
 schedule under which duties are to be assessed 
 under the committee's bill, and specially to that 
 of sugar. Let me invite his attention to some 
 of the provisions of the French tariff on sugar : 
 sugar from other than French possessions ; 
 sugar similar to refined powdered, above No. 
 20, from foreign countries, &c.; sugar, refined, 
 from other possessions, are prohibited. Thus 
 all sugars refined or advanced in other than 
 French possessions are prohibited, as is also 
 molasses. 
 
 Mr. SCHENCK. That has built up their 
 beet-sugar manufacture. 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. Yes ; and it is an industry 
 we should build up in the West. I want to run 
 cursorily through this tariff. The importation 
 of cast iron into France is prohibited. Wrought 
 iron in plates is prohibited. Manufactures of 
 iron of certain kinds are prohibited. All chem- 
 ical products not enumerated are prohibited. 
 All extracts of dye-woods are prohibited. Dye- 
 woods art admitted free ; but if American or 
 other labor has been expended in making ex- 
 tracts from dye-woods the extracts are prohib- 
 ited. Gentlemen of the free-trade school gen- 
 erally and the gentlemen from New York [Mr. 
 BROOKS] and from Iowa [Mr. ALLISOX] assail 
 vehemently, and as I think most unfairly, the 
 iron schedule and duties on steel proposed by 
 the committee's bill. How differently France 
 estimates the importance of these vital indus- 
 tries. Her tariff prohibits all manufactures of 
 zinc and other metals not specially named and 
 the following articles of iron and steel, in the 
 production of which we excel both her and 
 England in quality and cheapness : 
 
 "Castings, not polished: chairs for railroads, 
 plates, itc., cast in open air; cylindric tubes, plain 
 or grooved columns, gas-retorts, &R., and other 
 articles without ornament or finish; hollow-ware 
 not included above; castings, polished or turned; 
 the same, tinned, varnished, <fcc. ; household uten- 
 sils and other articles not enumerated, of iron or 
 sheet iron, polished or painted; game, enameled or 
 varnished; all articles of steel: iron, blacksmiths' 
 work; locksmiths' work ; nails, by machine; nails, 
 by hand; wood-screws, bolts, screw-nuts." 
 
 France prohibits and excludes these articles 
 that her poorly paid workmen may be protected 
 against the productions of those of Belgium 
 and Germany, who receive even less than they. 
 All tissues of cotton, except nankeens, pro- 
 duce of India, lace, manufactured by hand or 
 otherwise, and tulle, with lace-work, are also 
 prohibited. Cotton and woolen yarns are also 
 prohibited by the general tariff, though admitted 
 at high and most scientifically rated protective 
 duties from England under the import tariff 
 treaty with that country.
 
 Yes, sir, if we spin our cotton into yarn, or 
 weave it into a tissue or fabric, it is excluded 
 from the broad empire of France. If you carry 
 it there raw, with no labor in it save that of the 
 slave or the freedman, you can take it in, but as 
 yarn or a tissue it is prohibited. 
 
 THE PURPOSE OF THE FEEE LIST. 
 The committee in proposing the extended free 
 list embraced in the second section of the bill 
 hoped to accomplish two important objects, one 
 of which was to promote direct commerce be- 
 tween us and those non- manufacturing coun- 
 tries which require the productions of our shops 
 and mills, and whose raw materials we require ; 
 and the other was to give our manufacturers 
 and mechanics, free of duty, those essentials 
 which France, England, and Belgium admit free. 
 A majority of the committee believe that the 
 adoption of this will do much to revive our 
 commerce, and not only quicken established 
 industries, but lead to the introduction of 
 new ones, and thus increase the market for 
 the productions of the farm and reduce the 
 cost and price of a large range of manufac- 
 tured goods. We think it is sound policy 
 to let in free raw materials that we cannot 
 produce, and collect our revenue from articles 
 in the production of which labor has been 
 expended. This is the theory of the bill we 
 reported. It has the sanction of the sagacity 
 and experience of France and England, and 
 was framed regardless of the teachings of mere 
 theorists and school-men. 
 
 DUTIES ON WOOL AND WOOLEXS. 
 
 Mr. Chairman, although I had made some 
 preparation for its illustration, I had not 
 expected to go into so general a discussion of 
 the effect of protection upon the interests of 
 the farmer. The wide range the discussion 
 has taken must be my apology for one other 
 view of the subject. Ihe gentleman from 
 Iowa told us that the wool interest is suffering 
 from the excessive duties imposed on woolen 
 cloths by the existing tariff, and that the com- 
 mittee proposes to continue them. Sir, I may 
 be very dull, but after hearing the gentleman 
 it still seems to me that the wool interest must 
 have been benefited by the bill increasing the 
 duties on wool and woolens. We certainly have 
 more people wearing wool now than we had in 
 1860. We have, as I have shown, received over 
 2,000,000 immigrants since then, and our 
 natural increase is at least 1,000,000 per 
 annum ; yet I find by the thirteenth report of 
 the commissioners of her Britannic Majesty's 
 customs that the declared value of woolen 
 manufactures exported to the United States 
 was, in June, 1860, 3,414,050, while in 1868, 
 nearly a decade thereafter, it was 3,658,432 
 an increase of 234,382 in 8 years. 
 
 Who has grown the wool that clothes our in- 
 creased population ? Our freedmen now wear 
 ordinary woolen clothes. The "poor whites" 
 of the South now wear what they call " store 
 goods," but to which they were unused before 
 the rebellion. The cold Northwest, whose 
 
 people wear woolen goods all the year, has 
 increased its population so largely that it is 
 demanding enlarged representation on this 
 floor without waiting for the census. 
 
 Our wool-wearing population has nearly 
 doubled ; yet the amount of wool imported is 
 scarcely greater than it was eight years ago. 
 Where does the wool come from ? Dues it drop 
 gently from the heavens, like thi> dew, or is it 
 grown upon the sheep of western and southern 
 farmers ? 
 
 THE WAY TO REDUCE THE TAXES. 
 
 Sir, I am as anxious to reduce taxes as rap- 
 idly as it can be done consistently with the 
 maintenance of the public credit and the grad- 
 ual extinguishment of the debt as any man on 
 this floor. I do not make this declaration now 
 for the first time. On the 31st of January, 
 18G6, 1 saw that, the war being over, the freed- 
 men must be provided with the means of mak- 
 ing a living by other labor than that of the 
 plantation hand ; that the women of the South 
 must have employment : that there must be a 
 diversification of our industry ; that the North- 
 west would be shut out from her markets if 
 she did not diversify her industry ; and in the 
 course of some remarks I made that day in 
 favor of remitting taxes, both internal and 
 external, I described the bill now under con- 
 sideration. In stating how I would reduce the 
 burdens of the people I said : 
 
 "I have never been able to believe that a national 
 debt is a national blessing. I have seen how good 
 might bo interwoven with or educed from evil, or 
 how a great evil might, under certain conditions, be 
 turned to good account; but beyond this I have 
 never been able to regard debt, individual or national, 
 as a blessing. It may be that, as in the inscrutable 
 providence of God it required nearly five years of 
 war to extirpate the national crime of slavery, and 
 anguish and grief found their way to nearly every 
 hearth -side in the country before we would recognize 
 the manhood of the race we had so long oppressed, 
 it was also necessary that we should be invo|ved in 
 a debt of unparalleled magnitude that we might be 
 compelled to avail ourselves of the wealth that lies 
 so freely around us, and by opening market-* for well- 
 rewarded industry make our land, what in theory it 
 has ever been, the refuge of the oppressed of all 
 climes. England, if supreme selfishness buconsistent 
 with sagacity, has been eminently sagacious in pre- 
 venting us from becoming a manufacturing people; 
 for with our enterprise, our ingenuity, our freer insti- 
 tutions, the extent of our country, the cheapness of 
 our land, the diversity of our resources, tho grandeur 
 of our seas, lakes, and rivers, we should long ago 
 have been able to offer her best workmen suuh 
 inducements as would have brought them by mil- 
 lions to help bear our burdens and fight our battles. 
 We can thus raise the standard of British and conti- 
 nental wages and protect American workmen against 
 ill-paid competition. This we must do if we mean to 
 maintain the national honor. The fields now under 
 culture, tho houses now existing, the mines now 
 being worked, the men we now employ, cannot pay 
 our debt. To meet its annual interest by taxing our 
 present population and developed resources would 
 be to continue an ever-enduring burden. 
 
 " The principal of the debt must be paid; but as it 
 was contracted for posterity its extinguishment 
 should not impoverish those who sustained tho bur- 
 dens of thewar. lamnotanxioustoreduce thetotal 
 of our debt, and would in this respect follow the 
 example of England, and as its amount has been 
 fixed would not for the present trouble myself about 
 its aggregate except to prevent its increase. Mu 
 anxiety it that the taxet it involve* shall be an little 
 oppressive as possible, and be so adjueted that while
 
 25 
 
 defending our industry against foreign assault, they may 
 add nothing to the cost of those necessaries of life which, 
 we cannot produce, and for which ice must therefore 
 look to other lands. The raw materials entering into 
 our manufactures, which we are yet unable to produce, 
 but on which weunwisely impose duties, I would put into 
 the free list \oith tea, coffee, and other such purely for- 
 eign essentials of life, and would impose duties on com- 
 modities that compete with American productions, so as 
 to protect every feeble or infant branch of industry and 
 quicken those! hat are robust. I would thus cheapen the 
 elements of life and enable those whose capital is em- 
 barked in any branch of production to offer such wages to 
 the skilled workmen of all lands as would steadily and 
 rapidly increase our numbers, and, as is always the case 
 in the neighborhood of growing cities or towns of con- 
 siderable extent, increase the return for farm labor; 
 this policy would open new mines and quarries, build 
 new furnaces, forges, and factories, and rapidly in- 
 crease the taxable property and taxable inhabitants 
 of the country. 
 
 "JLet us pursue for twenty years thesound national 
 policy of protection, and we will double pur popula- 
 tion and more than quadruple pur capital and re- 
 duce our indebtedness per capita and per acre to 
 little more than a nominal sum. Thus each man 
 can 'without moneys' pay the bulk of his portion 
 of, the debt by blessing others with the ability to 
 bear an honorable burden." 
 
 My views on these points have undergone 
 no change, and I cannot more aptly describe 
 the bill before the committee, in general terms, 
 than I thus did more than four years ago. 
 
 THE DEFECTS OF THE PRESENT TARIFF AND THE EEil- 
 BDIE3 SUGGESTED BY THE NEW BILL. 
 
 Why not maintain the existing tariff, and 
 wherein dees the bill submitted by the Com- 
 mittee of Ways and Means differ from it? 
 Several gentlemen have propounded these 
 questions, and I now propose to answer them 
 briefly and rapidly. The existing law is crude 
 and contains many incongruous provisions. 
 It is not in accord with the theory of the free- 
 trader or the protectionist. It imposes the 
 heaviest duties on articles of common consump- 
 tion that we cannot produce. Thus, on chalk, 
 uot an inch of which has, so far as I have heard, 
 been discovered in our country, it imposes a 
 duty of 833J per cent. It is bought at from 
 75 cents to $1 50 per ton, and the duty is $10. 
 This onerous duty is not protective. We have 
 no chalk-fields, and produce no substitute for 
 it. It is therefore simply a tax, and one that 
 everybody feels ; the boy at his game of mar- 
 bles, or before the blackboard in school, the 
 housewife when she cleans her silver or bri- 
 tannia ware, and the farmer in the cost of putty 
 for his windows. The new bill puts chalk on 
 the free list. 
 
 Mr. ALLISON. Have we not increased the 
 duty on putty, which enters into use in the 
 house of every citizen in the land? 
 
 Mr. KELLEY. Yes, sir ; and why did we 
 doit? All our western farmers are raising 
 wheat, and many of them can find no market 
 for their crop, and this bill, it is hoped, will, if it 
 become a law, induce some of them to produce 
 other things. We import immense amounts of 
 linseed and castor-oil, and the majority of the 
 committee hoped that by raising the duty on 
 these oils, and those which may be substituted 
 for them, it would induce some of them to 
 raise flax and manufacture the oil. Again, we 
 
 import great quantities of goods made of flax 
 and substitutes for it, and we hoped that bet- 
 ter duties on the oil and on these fabrics might 
 lead to the establishment of linen and other 
 mills in the interior. And as linseed-oil is the 
 ingredient of chief value in putty, we raised the 
 duty on it to correspond with that on oil. We 
 hope thus to secure to every citizen good and 
 cheap putty, made of free chalk and American- 
 grown oil. 
 
 THE ALLEGATION THAT WE PROTECT OUR MANUFAC- 
 TURES BY DUTIES AVERAGING FORTY PER CENT. IS 
 NOT TBUE. 
 
 Mr. Chairman, I desire to call attention to 
 the unfairness, unintentional of course, of the 
 statement of the gentleman from New York 
 [Mr. BROOKS] that the existing tariff givea 
 protection equal to an average of 41.2 percent. 
 That is the percentage of duties on the aggre- 
 gate of our imports, and he will hardly claim 
 that the duty of over 833 per cent, on chalk is 
 protective of any of our industries. 
 
 Again, we collect a duty of 300 per cent, 
 on pepper. Why should black pepper pay 300 
 per cent. ? Do we grow it anywhere in this 
 country ? Is this duty protective of any of our 
 industries ? You pay 5 cents a pound for pep- 
 per and the tariff imposes a duty of 15 cents, 
 gold, equal to 300 per cent., and the gentle- 
 man includes this in his average of protective 
 duties. Do we grow cloves or clove-stems in 
 any part of the country? Is the duty on them 
 protective? It is on cloves 355 per cent, and 
 on clove-stems 386 per cent., and yet the gen- 
 tleman also includes these with his protective 
 duties. I think gentlemen perceive by this 
 time what I meant when I said that many of 
 the provisions of the present tariff are incon- 
 gruous. While many of them are high enough 
 for protection they are countervailed by higher 
 duties on raw materials that we cannot pro- 
 duce, and which rival nations admit free or 
 under very low duties. 
 
 I shall not attempt to bring all such incongru- 
 ities to the attention of the committee, but beg 
 leave to allude to a few more. On cayenne pep- 
 per, the duty is 303 per cent.; on allspice, 376 
 per cent. ; on nutmegs, 188 J per cent. ; on crude 
 camphor, 118 per cent.; on saltpeter, 77 per 
 cent.; on varnish gums, none of which are pro- 
 duced in this country, 80 per cent.; on tea, the 
 laborer's refreshing drink, 78 J percent.: on cof- 
 fee, 47 J per cent. I could largely extend this list 
 of duties, each of which is a tax on some article 
 of common consumption not produced in the 
 country, and to that extent a bonus to our com- 
 petitors. I am in favor of making all such arti- 
 cles free ; and the committee has reduced the 
 duties on them or put them on the free list. 
 When this shall be done the gentleman from 
 New York can calculate the percentage and find 
 that our duties will compare favorably with 
 those imposed by England and France. 
 
 DUTIES WHICH NEED READJUSTMENT. 
 
 Another serious fault of the existing law is 
 that so many of its duties are ad valorem. 
 Dishonest men take advantage of this and have
 
 26 
 
 goods invoiced below the proper value, and 
 thus not only defraud the Government, but do 
 wrong to both the home manufacturer and the 
 honest importer. This system of duties has 
 much to do with the decline of American com- 
 merce. The large temptation to defraud the 
 Government by undervaluation has caused 
 great houses abroad to establish agencies here 
 and to refuse to sell directly to an American 
 purchaser. This is so with all the Sheffield 
 steel-uiakers and most of the continental silk 
 houses. In this way the frauds of the steel- 
 makers and silk manufacturers have been 
 enormous, amounting to many millions of dol- 
 lars. The new bill substitutes specific duties 
 wherever it is practicable. 
 
 The duties now collected on alcoholic prep- 
 arations, and those in the production of which 
 spirits are used, such as quinine, chloroform, 
 collodion, &c., are now much too high, having 
 been adjusted to the tax of $2 per gallon on 
 distilled spirits. The new bill adjusts them to 
 the lower tax now collected. 
 
 Many of tho existing duties are so high as to 
 defeat all their legitimate objects and deprive 
 the Government of all revenue. This is espe- 
 cially true of spices. It was in evidence from 
 many sources that these are imported into 
 New York or San Francisco and immediately 
 shipped in bond to the British provinces, 
 whence they are smuggled back. The bill of 
 the committee proposes such reductions of 
 the duties as will probably give the Govern- 
 ment a handsome revenue while cheapening 
 them to the consumer. The value to the coun- 
 try of the changes proposed cannot fail to be 
 very great. 
 
 THE PRESENT LAW SHOULD BE EEVISED. NOT OVER- 
 THROWN. 
 
 Would that I could impress upon the House 
 my estimate of the value to the country of 
 these changes. I am discussing the bill in no 
 spirit of partisanship. In urging its accept- 
 ance I am pleading the cause of the farmer 
 and laborer, as 1 conscientiously believe that 
 it will, if adopted, increase the purchasing 
 power, the exchangeable value of every bushel 
 of grain grown and hour of labor performed 
 in our country. I have no general condemna- 
 tion for the existing law. It needs revision, 
 but should not be overthrown. As a revenue 
 measure it has exceeded the anticipations of 
 its friends and the most earnest friends of the 
 Government. It yielded for the year ending 
 June 80, 1867, $176.417,810 ; for the year end- 
 ing June 30, 18G8, $164,464,599 66 ; and for 
 the year ending June 30, 1869, $180,084,456 C3 ; 
 and no preceding tariff produced results com- 
 parable to these. 
 
 And, eir, notwithstanding these faults it has 
 been of great value as a protective measure. 
 By its protective influence it has added much 
 to the power of the country and the prosperity 
 of the people. Under it our production of pig 
 iron has been more than doubled, as I have 
 already shown, and its production has been 
 extended into new and large fields in States 
 
 where it was previously unknown. Thus has 
 increased value been given to all the land in those 
 States ; the increase being equal to the addition 
 of the value of the mineral lands to that of 
 the agricultural surface ; and more than that, 
 it has provided a market in the neighborhood 
 of each furnace, in which articles can be sold 
 which would not bear transportation to distant 
 points or foreign lands. The farmers of Iowa 
 and Minnesota now produce for sale little of 
 anything else than wheat and wool for export- 
 ation to the sea-board States or elsewhere. 
 When manufactories are built or mines opened, 
 villages spring up and create a market for roots, 
 as potatoes and turnips, the productions of the 
 garden and the orchard, and for hay, by which 
 the western farmer will be relieved from the 
 necessity of growing successive crops of wheat 
 to the exhaustion of the soil. These villages 
 also afford a market for lamb, veal, eggs, and 
 all the thousand things that come in as subsid- 
 iary sources of income even to those who farm 
 on a great scale. Thus have many farmers felt 
 the protective influence of the existing tariff, 
 as well as in the stimulus it has given to im- 
 migration, and the addition of the mineral to 
 the agricultural value of immense bodies of 
 land in almost every State ; and while endeav- 
 oring to improve it I renew my protest against 
 its repeal or overthrow. 
 
 TOE CAREFUL CONSIDERATION THAT HAS I'P.EN BE- 
 STOWED UPON TUB BILL BY TUB COMMIT 
 
 Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the commit- 
 tee, your Committee of Ways and Means have 
 devoted the earnest labor of a year to the con- 
 sideration of the revision of the tariff, a duty 
 you committed to them by special resolution 
 of the House. In the discharge of that duty 
 we have traveled in great part at our own proper 
 cost, relieved largely by the hospitality of rail- 
 road, steamship, and other transportation com- 
 panies, from the rocky coasts of Massachu- 
 setts, and the waters of its bay, along the long 
 coast of California and Oregon, and over the 
 beautiful waters of Puget sound, the Willa- 
 mette and the Columbia rivers ; we have list- 
 ened to merchants, manufacturers, farmers, and 
 men of enterprise, representing all the interests 
 of every section of the country ; and we have 
 been in all respects painstaking and deliberate in 
 our efforts to ascertain how the existing provis- 
 ions of the tariff can be so modified as to yield the 
 Government adequate revenue, lighten the bur- 
 dens of tho people, and stimulate all tkeir in- 
 dustries with equal hand. And I conscientiously 
 believe that if the bill we have reported should 
 be adopted without an amendment, except 
 those the committee is prepared to suggest, its 
 quickening influence would be felt in every 
 department of the productive and commercial 
 industries of the country. It would do much 
 to revivify the languishing shipping interest. 
 It would give new andgrander proportions to the 
 market for your agricultural products. It would 
 maintain in a healthy condition your manu- 
 facturing and mechanical establishments, and 
 it would say to capitalists here and abroad,
 
 27 
 
 " The protective policy of the country is con- 
 firmed ; you may safely embark in new enter- 
 prises and develop new elements of the illim- 
 itable store and varieties of wealth now lying 
 dormant within the country." 
 
 HOW IT WILL STIMULATE TUB SHIPPING IXTEBEST. 
 
 Do gentlemen ask how it will quicken com- 
 merce? Let them turn to its free list. Our 
 commerce is now with manufacturing nations 
 inhabiting the grain-growing and metalliferous 
 regions of Europe. They produce everything 
 we do except cotton, rice, tobacco, and petro- 
 leum ; other than these they want but little 
 from us, unless war or drought or excessive 
 rain prevails over so large a section as to ma- 
 terially diminish the grain crop. We should 
 cultivate an exchange of products with the non- 
 manufacturing tropical or semi-tropical conn 
 tries. We want their gums, spices, barks, 
 ivory, dye-woods, drugs, and overproductions 
 which they would gladly exchange for our grain , 
 spirits, cotton fabrics, axes, hoes, shovels, and 
 an infinite variety of our productions. These 
 countries are our natural markets, but we have 
 excluded ourselves from them by our tariff 
 laws. All other manufacturing countries admit 
 their productions free, while we impose duties 
 on them which, as I have shown, are taxes upon 
 ourselves in their consumption. But this does 
 a further wrong to the shipping interest in this 
 wise: the London merchant gets their produc- 
 tion in exchange for the shoddy cloth, low-grade 
 iron, and general "Brumanagen" wares of 
 England, and imports them free of duty. He 
 ships them to us in English steamers, and adds 
 freight to his many other profits. This trade 
 of right belongs to us, and under the commit- 
 tee's bill we will enjoy it. 
 
 Let me illustrate by a single example. The 
 cost of saltpeter is a question of importance to 
 every railroad builder, quarryman, and miner, 
 and we ought to import the raw material from 
 two countries remote from each other and 
 manufacture it more cheaply than we now 
 import it through London from India. The 
 duties on this article are higher than they 
 shouldbe, and soapportioned as to discriminate 
 against our labor. That on the crude article 
 is 25 per cent, higher than that on the par- 
 tially refined, and is at the rate of 77f per cent. 
 They are as follows : on partially refined salt- 
 peter, 2 cents per pound ; on crude, 2 cents, 
 and on refined, 3 cents. The new bill removes 
 the discrimination against ourselves and makes 
 but two grades of duty. It reduces that on the 
 crude article to I } cent, and on the refined to 
 2-J cents. But while thus reducing the duty on 
 this important article the bill of the committee 
 invites the establishment of its cheaper manu- 
 facture in our midst and the employment of 
 many ships in bringing us tho raw material in 
 equal proportions from Peru and Germany. 
 
 'If gentlemen will examine the free list they 
 will find that it embraces muriate of potassa 
 and nitrate of soda. The latter is a natural 
 product of Peru, and the former of Germany, 
 
 and from 1,000 tons of each we can produce 
 1,000 tons of saltpeter cheaper than we can 
 import it from India. This would double the 
 tonnage required for the carrying of this arti- 
 cle. I have thus presented to the committee 
 but one of many illustrations with which I 
 might detain them of the influence the bill will 
 exercise upon our commerce if it becomes a 
 law. 
 
 STEEL AD VALOREM. 
 
 I have said that one of the defects of the 
 present law is its frequent application of ad 
 valorems, which open the door to great frauds. 
 I turn for an illustration to what seems to be 
 a favorite topic of the gentleman from Iowa, 
 [Mr. ALLISON] the article of steel. The gen- 
 tleman said the duty on steel in ingots, bars, 
 sheets, and wire above a certain thickness is 2 
 cents, and that we had raised it to 3} cents, 
 while reducing the duty a little on less important 
 classes of steel. Let me state the case fairly. 
 The present duty on ingots, bars, sheet, and wire 
 not less than one quarter of an inch in diameter, 
 valued at 7 cents per pound or less, is 2J cents 
 per pound ; value 7 and not above 11 cents per 
 pound, 3 cents per pound; valued above 11 cents 
 a pound, 3 cents per pound and 10 per cent. 
 ad valorem. The gentleman attempted to dis- 
 credit the evidence which proves the magnitude 
 of the frauds persistently perpetrated by the 
 Sheffield steel makers for the last twentyyears 
 under this system ; but the Secretary of the 
 Treasury is acting upon it, and is largely increas- 
 ing the revenues of the country from steel by 
 requiring it to be honestly invoiced. 
 
 Much evidence, confirmed by the admission 
 of one of the firms engaged in it, establish the 
 fact that a combination has existed among these 
 wealthy Englishmen to sell no steel in England 
 to Americans, but send it to agents in this coun- 
 try for sale, and to so undervalue it that that 
 which should pay 3} cents and 10 per cent. 
 ad valorem has, to the extent of 9 pounds out 
 of every 10, been undervalued and brought in 
 at 3 cents, and by the same fraudulent device 
 and conspiracy the greater part of that which 
 was subject to a duty of 3 cents has come in 
 at2J. 
 
 Thus the Government has been defrauded 
 of many millions of revenue. Now, what has 
 the committee done in the premises ? We have 
 agreed to put all steel that which was below 
 and that which was above, that which paid 
 2^ cents a pound and that which paid 5J 
 cents a pound, or 3 cents and 10 per cent, ad 
 valorem under a duty of 3J cents per pound. 
 We had steel importers and steel manufactur- 
 ers and experts before us, and they all agreed 
 that there was no conceivable test by which 
 examiners and inspectors of customs could 
 distinguish between steel worth from 4 to 7 cents 
 and that worth more than 11 cents a pound; so 
 that though we may thereby for a brief time do 
 some injustice to those who use low-priced 
 steel and those who produce high qualities of 
 steel we have made a single duty, which will
 
 28 
 
 give us honest revenue and enable pur steel 
 manufacturers to live and extend their works. 
 
 In my recent remarks on Mr. Wells's report 
 I quoted the language of the senior partner of 
 a steel-making firm in Sheffield, England, in 
 which he admitted the fact of undervaluation, 
 and declared that while the law remains as it 
 is the Government will be defrauded and can- 
 not prevent it. Thus the honest men among 
 the English steel-makers implore us to close 
 the door against fraud in which they must par- 
 ticipate, or surrender our market to their less 
 honest neighbors. Yet, for our well-devised 
 effort to do justice to the Government and 
 honest importers, we are denounced as taxing 
 the people to build up monopolies ! 
 
 The gentleman from Iowa will I am sure 
 pardon me for correcting a statement of his, on 
 which he amplified somewhat to-day touching 
 steel-manufacturing in Pittsburg. The state- 
 ment he read yesterday was not that her steel- 
 makers were able to compete with England in 
 1859 ; it was that steel- making in that city first 
 became an assured success in that year. Her 
 enterprising men of capital had for many years 
 been renewing the yet fruitless experiment. 
 Man after man and firm after firm had failed. 
 Steel- works depreciated in value and new firms 
 bought the stock and premises of old ones at 
 reduced values, till, in 1859, "an assured suc- 
 cess was attained." This was the phrase the 
 gentleman from Iowa used yesterday when he 
 had the paper before him. 
 
 STEPHEN COLWELI.. 
 
 I am quite sure that he would not intention- 
 ally misstate a fact. Nobody values him more 
 highly than I do. He is as earnest on his side 
 of this gre:it question as I am on mine, and we 
 are both of a temperament that requires us to 
 have the figures before us to prevent a certain 
 measure of exaggeration in our statements. 
 There is, however, one point on which I am 
 disposed to quarrel with him, and that is that 
 he should have assumed to have found an ally 
 in my venerable friend, Stephen Colwell, and 
 by a perversion of his language made him seem 
 to plead against protection for American labor 
 when the very words he quoted were written in 
 its behalf. Sir, Stephen Colwell' s life has been 
 devoted to his country. It has been a life-long 
 labor of love with him to promote the develop- 
 ment of her vast stores of wealth and the pros- 
 perity of her farmers and laborers. He was 
 the friend and companion of Frederick List, 
 the founder of the German Zollverein, who was 
 for a few years an exile from his native land 
 and a dweller in the then undeveloped coal 
 regions of Pennsylvania. After his death Mr. 
 Colwell collected his writings and found pleas- 
 ure in editing them ; he has also written and 
 published much in defense of protection as a 
 sure means of promoting national greatness, 
 cheap commodities, and the prosperity of the 
 people ; and I confess that I was both astonished 
 and grieved that a portion of an article of Mr. 
 Colwell'a demanding the repeal of internal tax- < 
 
 ation, and" showing that it is a bonns to foreign 
 manufacturers and a burden upon our home 
 producers, should be quoted by the gentleman 
 from Iowa against the tariff bill, and to prove 
 that protective duties add to the cost of com- 
 modities. I know my friend did not think of 
 the wrong he was doing, but it is not just to 
 my venerable friend, whose life is drawing to ft 
 close, that his language should be thus perverted 
 before the nation whose interest he has done so 
 much to promote. 
 
 THE CLASSIFICATION OF IT.ON NOT SEW. 
 
 But the gentleman from Iowa asks why the 
 classification of iron found in the bill was 
 adopted by the committee. I will tell him why. 
 Sir, so far as classification of iron has been mod- 
 ified, and the changes are but few, they adopt 
 the expressed opinion of the Senate and a 
 former Committee of Ways and Means. 
 
 The Senate of the United States, on the 31st 
 of January, 18G7, passed a tariff bill. On the 
 18th of February of that year the Committee 
 of Ways and Means reported it to this House 
 with certain amendments ; and your commit- 
 tee, finding a classification indorsed by the Sen- 
 ate and House, followed it, except where they 
 thought change necessary or judicious. This 
 is the classification of which the gentleman 
 complains. 
 
 lam too weary, and too much exhausted, 
 and your patience is too far gone, fur me to 
 proceed further with the discussion at pres- 
 ent. There are points I would like to con- 
 sider ; but I must draw to a conclusion. 
 
 PROOF THAT PHOTECTION CHEAPENS G(X)D.S. 
 
 The gentleman from Indiana, [Mr. Ki:r.r..] 
 speaking of my argument on Bessemer rails, 
 said that as America produced but 80,000 tons 
 per annum, the establishment of her works 
 could have had no influence upon the price of 
 English rails, because the quantity produced 
 was relatively so small. I propose to illus- 
 trate the fallacy of that argument by the con- 
 tents of the little box I hold in my hand. So 
 long as America was unprepared to make Bes- 
 semer steel no Englishman would sell a ton of 
 rails for less than $150. I have told the story 
 to this committee once, and I will not now 
 repeat the details. But when in 18G5 the works 
 of Griswold & Co., at Troy, New York, and 
 the Freedom Works, at Harrisburg, Pennsyl- 
 vania, were ready to deliver Bessemer rails, 
 Englishmen who had been swearing that they 
 could not sell them at less than $150 a ton 
 immediately offered them at $130. And when 
 our works increased from two to six they dropped 
 their price down to $100, and if necessary they 
 will drop it to $50, or until they force the own- 
 ers of our establishments to abandon the pro- 
 duction and apply their premises and machinery 
 to some other use. 
 
 Their policy is to crowd out our works ; or, 
 as Lord Brougham advised in 1815, just after 
 the close of our war, " to spend any amount of 
 money to strangle in the cradle the infant in- 
 dustries the exigencies of the war had called
 
 29 
 
 into existence iu the United States." They 
 will spend any amount of money to crowd out 
 these five or six Bessemer-rail works, and then 
 put the price up to figures that will be satis- 
 factory to themselves. 
 
 I said I would illustrate the argument by the 
 contents of a small box T hold in my hand. It 
 contains a few very small articles- and speci- 
 mens of the material of which they are made. 
 They are gas-tips of a kind that till quite lately 
 were made exclusively in Germany. They then 
 sold in our market at from $6 to $12 per gross. 
 I cannot tell you whether this afforded so grand 
 a profit as Bessemer rails did at 150 gold per 
 ton. But, as recent events prove, it must have 
 paid splendidly. Since the close of the war 
 there was found in the interior of Tennessee a 
 deposit of talc, of which these are specimens, 
 [holding up small pieces.] This is carried not 
 in foreign ships, but by our transportation com- 
 panies to Boston, giving business to our rail- 
 road companies between the heart of Tennessee 
 and Massachusetts. There Yankee ingenuity 
 converts the talc into gas-tips which will not 
 corrode, such as the Germans make, and for 
 which they had the monopoly of our market. 
 These American men have embarked a large 
 capital in this enterprise, and employ many 
 people in Tennessee and Massachusetts. They 
 are busy making these little gas-tips and creat- 
 ing a market for western grain, and converting 
 newly-arrived laborers from Europe into well- 
 paid American workingmen. 
 
 What effect has their enterprise had on the 
 price of porcelain gas-tips? The German man- 
 ufacturers, who could not sell these gas-tips for 
 less than $G to S12 a gross, now suddenly drop 
 their price and are flooding the market with 
 them at S2 a gross. At this price they will 
 soon destroy their Yankee rival and regain their 
 old monopoly. 
 
 Now, are we wrong when we say that if 
 anybody makes a profit out of us we prefer 
 that it shall be those who feed on American 
 wheat, wear American wool, and give good 
 wages to American workmen ? The little gas- 
 tip illustrates the truth that American compe- 
 tition cheapens foreign commodities quite as 
 well as the weightier article of steel rails. 
 
 SILK. POPLINS. 
 
 Cases of this kind are continually coming 
 before us. Let me tell yon of another from 
 away up in the mountain counties of New 
 York, at Schoharie. A quiet, unpretending 
 citizen, seeing that there were a large number 
 of unemployed girls in and about the village, 
 made the experiment of manufacturing an arti- 
 cle in great demand for ladies' dresses, known 
 as silk poplins. He equaled the foreign goods 
 in quality, was underselling them, and to the 
 extent of his capacity to produce was driving 
 them out of the market, when by a change in 
 the wool tariff the duty on his goods was unin- 
 tentionally reduced, and the foreigners have 
 him at a disadvantage ; and if we do not pass 
 this bill, or give him other relief, he must 
 
 close his factory, lose the capital he has invested 
 in it, and scatter the formerly idle girls he now 
 employs at good wages. 
 
 These are the facts of the case. The wool 
 bill, in order to let coarse woolen goods in at 
 a low rate, provides that when they are over a 
 certain number of ounces to the square yard 
 they shall come in at 40 per cent. Poplins are 
 in considerable part of silk ; they are finer and 
 more valuable than any heavy woolen goods, 
 but the silk add to their weight, and it has 
 been held that the duty on them has been re- 
 duced from 60 to 40 per cent. Unless the relief 
 proposed in this bill be given, Mr. Barr is likely 
 to be ruined and his factory closed. 
 
 TIX AXD NICKEL. 
 
 The present law puts a duty of 15 per cent, 
 on tin in pigs or bars. We produce no tin, 
 though I believe they have recently discovered 
 a bed of ore in California, and it is thought to 
 exist in Missouri. I hope it does, and that it 
 may soon be developed. We cannot make tin- 
 plates by reason of the duties on block tin and 
 palm-oil. This bill of the committee proposes 
 to put palm-oil, an African product, and block 
 tin on the free list ; so that we may begin the 
 manufacture of sheet tin, for which we export 
 annually $8,000,000 in gold. 
 
 While we have no well- ascertained deposits 
 of tin ore the country abounds in deposits of 
 nickel. Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia, Penn- 
 sylvania, New Jersey, and Connecticut have 
 large deposits of it ; yet when the law of 1861 
 was passed its manufacture had not been at- 
 tempted ; and a duty of 15 per cent., the same 
 as that on block tin, was put on nickel. Our 
 bill proposes to enable the men of Missouri 
 to work the vast deposits of mine La Motte; 
 the men of Kentucky to work the large deposits 
 in that State, and the people of Connecticut to 
 establish nickel works in the immediate vicinity 
 of their great factories of Britannia and other 
 white-metal wares by putting the same rate of 
 duty on nickel that we have on copper, zinc, 
 lead, iron, and other metals. 
 
 THE EFFECT OF PROTECTING NICKEL. 
 
 Now let me show you what will be the effect 
 of this measure. I hold in my hand a letter from 
 Evans & Askin, the great nickel manufacturers 
 of England. They tell us how they will punish 
 us if we increase the tariff on nickel ; and I 
 hope you will join me in invoking their pun- 
 ishment. But let them speak for themselves, 
 as they do in this letter. It reads thus : 
 
 BIRMINGHAM, March 18, 1863. 
 
 DEAR SIR : Although it is now some time since we 
 had the pleasure of corresponding wo hear from time 
 to time of the progress you are making in the nickel 
 trade in America, and we trust you find the business 
 a remunerative and successful one. 
 
 We hear that attempts are being made to influence 
 Congress to increase largely the import duties on 
 refined nickel, and although perhaps we might at 
 first regret that the duties should be raised, wo arc 
 not quite sure it would not ultimately be to our ad- 
 vantage; for, if the duties are so raised as to render 
 the import of nickel almost prohibitory we shall at 
 once adopt measures to send out one of the junior 
 members of our firm and erect a nickel refinery ID
 
 UUOP LI uivnn i 
 
 30 
 
 the State*. In fact from thelargo quantities of nickel 
 and cobalt ores offered to us by mine La .Motto, the 
 llaley Staclting Company, and several other?, we 
 are almost disposed to do so at ouce, as we think it 
 might answer pur purpose better than forwarding 
 the refined nrticle from this country. Wo are not, 
 of course, selfish enough to wish a monopoly of the 
 nickel trade in America, but we hope and intend to 
 have a share of it, either by shipment to or refining 
 in the State?. 
 
 Should we decide upon erecting works in your 
 country may wo reckon on any supply of ore troin 
 your mine, in addition to other sources? 
 
 We are, dear sir, your.s, faithfully, 
 
 EVANS & ASKIX. 
 Mr. JOSEPH WHABTON. 
 
 Let them come on with their skilled nickel- 
 makers; letthem bring their capital by millions ; 
 let them, if they can, bring 100,000 people to 
 consume the grain of Missouri ; and we will 
 give them all welcome. By increasing the duty 
 on nickel from 16 to 40 per cent, mine La Motte 
 will thus become a great manufacturing center, 
 and there will be a new market, not dependent 
 on long lines of railroad or ocean transporta- 
 tion, for the grain and wool of the valley of the j 
 Mississippi. 
 
 Now, Mr. Chairman, in conclusion, I plead 
 with the gentlemen of the committee to forget 
 their sectional feelings, to put aside party strife, 
 to remember that the glory and the power of 
 
 their country depend on the prosperity, intel- 
 ligence, and aspiring hopes of the laboring 
 people and their children. I beg them, as I 
 know they all love their country, to stand by her 
 industries, and to aid the poor and oppressed 
 laborers of other lands to escape from a diet 
 of "rye and potatoes" to a land of free schools 
 and liberal wages, in which the duily lure of 
 the family will be of wheat, mutton, beef, or 
 pork, with the vegetables and the fruits of all 
 the Statesof ourbroadaml then assuredly pros- 
 perous country. 
 
 Finding that space permi's it. I append the 
 following statement showing the revenue col- 
 lected each year from 1780 to 1868, the amount 
 of dutiable imports and free goods imported 
 annually, and the average rate of duty on im- 
 ports annually. It war. carefully prepared and 
 appears as one of the appendices of the last 
 annual report of the Special Commissioner of 
 the Revenue. It is very .d to 
 
 those who remember the financial condition of 
 the country from 1837 to 1812, and from ISoG 
 to 18G1, the price of grain and the suffering 
 endured by the laboring people at all commer- 
 cial or manufacturing centers will prove con- 
 clusive on many points : 
 
 The tariffs of the United States. 
 
 Dates. 
 
 Tariff*. 
 
 Custom?. 
 
 
 Imports. 
 
 
 a 
 
 
 
 
 
 Free. 
 
 Dutiable. 
 
 Total. 
 
 ~ 2 
 t* 
 
 i. - 
 
 From March 4, 
 1789, to Dee. III. 
 1790 August 10... 
 
 General 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 1791 March :; 
 17' i' May 2 
 
 Spirit* 
 
 .473 09 
 
 070 So 
 
 - 
 
 - 
 
 0.000 
 idO.OOO 
 
 - 
 
 8J 
 11 
 
 1793 
 
 
 i.:', 5,306 56 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 :;], 100.000 
 
 
 131 
 
 1794 June 7. . . 
 
 General 
 
 
 _ 
 
 _ 
 
 
 . 
 
 It 
 
 1795 January '^.. 
 1796i 
 
 Supplementary 
 
 
 - 
 
 - 
 
 81.4 
 
 - 
 
 9 
 8* 
 
 1797 Muri-h 3 
 
 General 
 
 7.54! i 
 
 _ 
 
 . 
 
 
 _ 
 
 10 
 
 1793 
 
 
 7.1<A>,OGlWJ 
 
 . 
 
 _ 
 
 
 _ 
 
 10* 
 
 179J 
 
 
 001 ' 
 
 _ 
 
 . 
 
 
 . 
 
 M 
 
 1800-March 13.... 
 1801.... 
 
 Sugar and van en 
 
 O.OWi I 
 1075 ' 
 
 - 
 
 - 
 
 91.2 
 111,363,511 
 
 - 
 
 0} 
 
 9 
 
 1802..... 
 
 
 12 4.> 
 
 
 _ 
 
 
 . 
 
 16 
 
 1803 
 
 
 10.479,417 01 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 . 
 
 16 
 
 1804 Marcli L<i 
 1805 March LT 
 
 Mediterranean t'ui;d. 
 Light money 
 
 ll.O.tS.^SJ 
 1_".>'I5,*87 04 
 
 - 
 
 - 
 
 
 - 
 
 14 
 lOi 
 
 1803 
 
 
 14 067 69S 17 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 . 
 
 114 
 
 1807 
 
 
 ">21 01 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 111 
 
 
 
 I'i.SdS.ooO 53 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 30 
 
 1809 
 
 
 7 *9T. 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 . 
 
 12 
 
 1810..... 
 
 
 : [ M :>1 
 
 
 m 
 
 
 _ 
 
 10 
 
 1811 
 
 
 !'' 3'". 
 
 _ 
 
 _ 
 
 
 . 
 
 25 
 
 1812-July 1 
 1813-Juiy 13 
 1814 
 
 Wnr. double duties . 
 Suit 
 
 5/1W5.772 08 
 
 - 
 
 - 
 
 
 - 
 
 lit 
 
 00 
 47 
 
 1815 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 lil&-Aj<ril 27 
 1817 
 
 Min. Ibr protection.. 
 
 ..S74 88 
 
 - 
 
 - 
 
 117, 
 
 
 ;7 
 
 1818 April 20 
 1819 March 3 
 
 Iron nuJ alutn 
 Wiues 
 
 vj 00 
 
 - 
 
 - 
 
 121.7 
 
 87.1 
 
 - 
 
 11 
 
 1820 
 
 
 15 COJ C12 15 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 1821 
 
 
 18,475,703 57 
 
 $10082313 
 
 52,503 411 
 
 
 
 
 1822 .. 
 
 
 
 7 ,... 
 
 75 94? 833 
 
 
 
 
 is-'S 
 
 
 
 y 048,288 
 
 08.530,979 
 
 
 
 
 1824 May 22 
 
 General rise 
 
 
 12,563,773 
 
 67,985,234 
 
 
 
 
 1825 .. . 
 
 
 
 10947510 
 
 85.'; 
 
 
 
 
 1821... . 
 
 
 :.S61 1'7 
 
 1215671709 
 
 
 84,97 
 

 
 31 
 
 
 The tariffs of the United States Continued. 
 
 Dates. 
 
 Tariffs. 
 
 Customs. 
 
 
 Imports. 
 
 
 a . 
 
 
 
 *>3 
 
 C ci 
 gw 
 
 a . 
 
 o e 
 
 it 
 
 g 
 
 
 
 
 Free. 
 
 Dutiable. 
 
 Total. 
 
 u 
 
 PL, 
 
 o So 
 Pk * 
 
 1827 
 
 
 27,948,956 57 
 
 11,855,104 
 
 67,628,964 
 
 79,484,068 
 
 41.3 
 
 35.1 
 
 1828-May 19 
 
 Min. extended 
 
 29.951,251 90 
 
 12,379,176 
 
 76,130,648 
 
 88,509.824 
 
 39.3 
 
 33.8 
 
 1829 
 
 
 27,688,701 11 
 
 11,805,501 
 
 62,687,026 
 
 74,492,527 
 
 44.3 
 
 37.1 
 
 1830 May 20 
 
 
 28,389,505 05 
 
 12,746,245 
 
 58,130,675 
 
 70,876,920 
 
 48.8 
 
 40 
 
 1831 
 
 
 36,596,118 19 
 
 13,456,625 
 
 89,73-4,499 
 
 103,191,124 
 
 40.8 
 
 35.4 
 
 1832 July 14 
 
 Modifications 
 
 29.3-tl.175 65 
 
 14,249,453 
 
 86,779,813 
 
 101,029.266 
 
 33.8 
 
 29 
 
 1833 March 2 
 
 Compromise 
 
 24,177,578 52 
 
 32,447.95u 
 
 75,670,361 
 
 108,118,311 
 
 31.9 
 
 22.4 
 
 1834 
 
 
 18,900,705 98 
 
 68,393,189 
 
 58.128,152 
 
 126,521,332 
 
 32.6 
 
 15 
 
 1835 
 
 
 25,890,726 66 
 
 77,940,493 
 
 71,955,249 
 
 149,895,742 
 
 ;>6.o 
 
 17.2 
 
 1836 
 
 
 30,818,327 67 
 
 92,056,481 
 
 97,923,554 
 
 189,980,035 
 
 31.6- 
 
 16.2 
 
 1837 
 
 
 18,134,131 01 
 
 69,250,031 
 
 71,739,186 
 
 140,989,217 
 
 25.3 
 
 12.4 
 
 1838 
 
 
 19,702,825 45 
 
 60,860,005 
 
 52,857,399 
 
 113,717,404 
 
 37.8 
 
 17.3 
 
 1839 
 
 
 25,554,533 96 
 
 76,401,792 
 
 85,690,340 
 
 162,092,132 
 
 29.9 
 
 15.8 
 
 1840 
 
 
 15,104,790 63 
 
 57.196,204 
 
 49,945,315 
 
 107,141,519 
 
 30.4 
 
 14.1 
 
 1841 Sept. 11 
 
 Free list tax 
 
 19,919,492 17 
 
 66,019,731 
 
 61,926,446 
 
 127,946,177 
 
 32.2 
 
 15.6 
 
 1842 August 30... 
 1843 
 
 General rise 
 
 16,662,74(3 84 
 10,208,000 43 
 
 30,627,486 
 35 574 584 
 
 69,534,601 
 29,179,215 
 
 100,162,087 
 64,753,799 
 
 23.1 
 a5.7 
 
 16.6 
 15.7 
 
 ]S44 
 
 
 29,236,357 38 
 
 24.766.8S1 
 
 83,668,154 
 
 108,435,035 
 
 35.1 
 
 26.9 
 
 1845 
 
 
 30 952 416 21 
 
 99 147 840 
 
 % 106 724 
 
 117 254 564 
 
 32.5 
 
 26.4 
 
 1846-August 6 
 
 Revenue tariff 
 
 26,712,668 00 
 
 24,767,730 
 
 96,924,058 
 
 121,691,797 
 
 26} 
 
 21.9 
 
 1847 
 
 
 2-3,747,865 00 
 
 41,772 636 
 
 104,773,002 
 
 146,545,638 
 
 22i- 
 
 1fi. 
 
 1848 
 
 
 31,757,071 00 
 
 22,716,603 
 
 132.282,325 
 
 154,998,928 
 
 24 
 
 20.4 
 
 1849 
 
 
 28,346,739 00 
 
 22 377 665 
 
 125,479,774 
 
 147,857,439 
 
 23 
 
 19.2 
 
 1850 
 
 
 39,668,686 00 
 
 22,710 382 
 
 155,427,936 
 
 178,138,318 
 
 25.2 
 
 22.3 
 
 1851 
 
 
 49,017 568 00 
 
 25 103 587 
 
 191,118345 
 
 216,224,932 
 
 26 
 
 22.6 
 
 1852 
 
 
 47,339,323 00 
 
 29,602,934 
 
 183,252,508 
 
 212.945,442 
 
 26 
 
 22.2 
 
 1853 
 
 
 58,931 865 06 
 
 31,383534 
 
 23f>,595 113 
 
 267,978,617 
 
 25 
 
 22 
 
 1854 
 
 
 61,224,190 03 
 
 33,285 821 
 
 271,276,560 
 
 304,562,381 
 
 23.5 
 
 21.1 
 
 1855 
 
 
 53 025 794 00 
 
 40,090 336 
 
 221,378 184 
 
 261,468 5?0 
 
 23 
 
 20.3 
 
 1856 
 
 
 64,022,863 00 
 
 56,955,706 
 
 257,684,236 
 
 314,639,942 
 
 25 
 
 20.3 
 
 1S57 March 3 
 1858 
 
 General 
 
 63,875,905 00 
 41,789,621 00 
 
 66,729,306 
 80,319,275 
 
 294,160.835 
 202,293 875 
 
 360,890,141 
 282,613.150 
 
 21.5 
 20 
 
 17.7 
 14.8 
 
 1859 
 
 
 49 565 84 00 
 
 79 721 116 
 
 259 017 014 
 
 338 768 130 
 
 19 
 
 14.6 
 
 1800 
 
 
 53,187,511 00 
 
 90,841,749 
 
 279,872,327 
 
 362,166,254 
 
 19 
 
 14.7 
 
 (March 2) 
 1861^ August 5^ 
 
 
 39,582,186 00 
 
 *134,559,196 
 
 218,180,191 
 
 352,739 387 
 
 18.1 
 
 11.2 
 
 (Dec. 24J 
 1862-July 14 
 1863 March 3 
 
 General 
 
 49,05fi,398 00 
 69,059,642 00 
 
 '01,003,491 
 
 44 8 9 6 6'*) 
 
 183,843,458 
 208 093 891 
 
 275,446,939 
 252 919 I'JQ 
 
 26.7 
 33.2 
 
 17.7 
 23.7 
 
 1864 June 30 
 1865 March 3 
 
 General 
 
 102,316,153 00 
 81,928.260 00 
 
 *54,244,183 
 54 329 583 
 
 275,320,951 
 194,226 C64 
 
 329.565.134 
 248 555 652 
 
 37.2 
 43.7 
 
 31 
 34.2 
 
 (March H) 
 1866^ May 1 : 
 
 
 179,046 633 00 
 
 69 728 618 
 
 375 783 540 
 
 415512158 
 
 47.06 
 
 40.2 
 
 (July 28J 
 1867 March 2 
 1868 
 1869 Feb. 24 
 
 Wool and woolens... 
 Copper increased 
 
 176,4] 7,811 00 
 164,461,599 53 
 180,048,426 63 
 
 39,105,708 
 29,804,147 
 41,179,172 
 
 372,627,601 
 343,605,301 
 395,847,369 
 
 411,733,309 
 373,409,448 
 437,026,541 
 
 47.34 
 47.86 
 45.48 
 
 ' 42.8 
 44 
 41.2 
 
 *In these amounts are included imports into the southern ports durine the war, from which no revenue 
 was derived, namely, in 1861, 17,089,2:34 ; in 1862, $90,789, and in 1864, $2,220.