American manufactories are of American production. The manufacturing establishments tend steadily to migrate into the heart of the great agricultural districts. The centre of the manufacturing industry in 1900 was near the middle of Ohio, and it is moving westward at the rate of about thirty miles in every decade; and this movement is invariably accompanied by a marked increase in the value of farm lands. Local causes, notably the competition between new farm lands and old farm lands, tend here and there to obscure what is happening; but it is as certain as the operation of any economic law that in the country as a whole farm values will continue to increase as the partnership between manufacturer and farmer grows more intimate through further advance of industrial science. The American manufacturer never could have placed this Nation at the head of the manufacturing nations of the world if he had not had behind him, securing him every variety of raw material, the exhaustless resources of the American farm, developed by the skill and the enterprise of intelligent and educated American farmers. On the other hand, the debt of the farmers to the manufacturers is equally heavy, and the future of American agriculture is bound up in the future of American manufactures. The two industries have become, under the economic policy of our Government, so closely interwoven, so mutually interdependent, that neither can hope to maintain itself at the high-water mark of progress without the other. Whatever makes to the advantage of one is equally to the advantage of the other. * * * * * So it is as between the capitalist and the wage-worker. Here and there there may be an unequal sharing as between the two in the benefits that have come by protection; but benefits have come to both; and a reversal in policy would mean damage to both; and while the damage would be heavy to all, it would be heaviest, and it would fall soonest, upon those who are paid in the form of wages each week or each month for that week’s or that month’s work. Conditions change and the laws must be modified from time to time to fit new exigencies. But the genuine underlying principle of protection, as it has been embodied in all but one of the American tariff laws for the last forty years, has worked out results so beneficent, so evenly and widely spread, so advantageous alike to farmers and capitalists and workingmen, to commerce and trade of every kind, that the American people, if they show their usual practical business sense, will insist that when these laws are modified they shall be modified with the utmost care and conservatism, and by the friends and not the enemies of the protective system. They can not afford to trust the modification to those who treat protection and robbery as synonymous terms.