We have enacted a tariff law under which during the past few years the country has attained a height of material well-being never before reached. Wages are higher than ever before. That whenever the need arises there should be a readjustment of the tariff schedules is undoubted; but such changes can with safety be made only by those whose devotion to the principle of a protective tariff is beyond question; for otherwise the changes would amount not to readjustment, but to repeal. The readjustment when made must maintain and not destroy the protective principle. To the farmer, the merchant, the manufacturer this is vital; but perhaps no other man is so much interested as the wage-worker in the maintenance of our present economic system, both as regards the finances and the tariff. The standard of living of our wage-workers is higher than that of any other country, and it can not so remain unless we have a protective tariff which shall always keep as a minimum a rate of duty sufficient to cover the difference between the labor cost here and abroad. Those who, like our opponents, “denounce protection as a robbery” thereby explicitly commit themselves to the proposition that if they were to revise the tariff no heed would be paid to the necessity of meeting this difference between the standards of living for wage-workers here and in other countries; and therefore on this point their antagonism to our position is fundamental. Here again we ask that their promises and ours be judged by what has been done in the immediate past. We ask that sober and sensible men compare the workings of the present tariff law, and the conditions which obtain under it, with the workings of the preceding tariff law of 1894 and the conditions which that tariff of 1894 helped to bring about.