A second effect of this monopoly (as of all monopolies) is to worsen the quality of the goods sold in an artificially restricted market. The historian Gibbon noticed this fact more than a century ago, and said: "_The spirit of monopolists is narrow, lazy and oppressive. Their work is more costly and less productive than that of independent artists; and the new improvements so eagerly grasped by the competition of freedom, are admitted by them with slow and sullen reluctance._" Alfred Lapoint, United States consul in Peru, warned the State Department at Washington in 1883 of this poor quality of our manufactures, which were then trying to find a South American market. He wrote: "_It is my duty to indicate that great carelessness prevails with our manufacturers; for instance, I was called upon to purchase in the United States a steam pump and boiler, which I ordered from one of the most famed manufacturers, and when it arrived, not alone was the boiler inadequate for the pump, but actually after two months' work the upper tube sheet split in three parts, a proof of its bad quality and construction._" As men are, a natural competition among buyers and sellers is just as needful to keep up the quality of goods as to keep down their price. Good quality always costs more of effort and skill and capital than bad quality: why should producers continue to furnish good quality to a market from which a free competition in good qualities is excluded by law? Every tendency of human nature, as well as every relevant fact in history, attests, that poor wares at high rates invariably attends upon tariff-monopolies. Shoddy takes the place of wool. Cheaper crowds out better material. Skilled workmanship is displaced by unskilled. Processes of manufacture are hastened in time, and left incomplete to the damage of the goods in order to save capital. Monopoly is always and everywhere the foe of excellence.