Of course, if our opponents are not sincere in their proposal to abolish the system of a protective tariff, there is no use in arguing the matter at all, save by pointing out again that if on one great issue they do not mean what they say, it is hardly safe to trust them on any other issue. But if they are sincere in this matter, then their advent to power would mean domestic misfortune and misery as widespread and far-reaching as that which we saw ten years ago. When they speak of protection as “robbery,” they of course must mean that it is immoral to enact a tariff designed (as is the present protective tariff) to secure to the American wage-worker the benefit of the high standard of living which we desire to see kept up in this country. Now to speak of the tariff in this sense as “robbery,” thereby giving it a moral relation, is not merely rhetorical; it is on its face false. The question of what tariff is best for our people is primarily one of expediency, to be determined not on abstract academic grounds, but in the light of experience. It is a matter of business; for fundamentally ours is a business people—manufacturers, merchants, farmers, wage-workers, professional men, all alike. Our experience as a people in the past has certainly not shown us that we could afford in this matter to follow those professional counselors who have confined themselves to study in the closet; for the actual working of the tariff has emphatically contradicted their theories. From time to time schedules must undoubtedly be rearranged and readjusted to meet the shifting needs of the country; but this can with safety be done only by those who are committed to the cause of the protective system. To uproot and destroy that system would be to ensure the prostration of business, the closing of factories, the impoverishment of the farmer, the ruin of the capitalist, and the starvation of the wage-worker. Yet, if protection is indeed “robbery,” and if our opponents really believe what they say, then it is precisely to the destruction and uprooting of the tariff, and therefore of our business and industry, that they are pledged. When our opponents last obtained power it was on a platform declaring a protective tariff “unconstitutional”; and the effort to put this declaration into practice was one of the causes of the general national prostration lasting from 1893 to 1897. If a protective tariff is either “unconstitutional” or “robbery,” then it is just as unconstitutional, just as much robbery, to revise it down, still leaving it protective, as it would be to enact it. In other words, our opponents have committed themselves to the destruction of the protective principle in the tariff, using words which if honestly used forbid them from permitting this principle to obtain in even the smallest degree. * * * * *