And then there is the tariff. You, Mr. Steffens, are a man who has both the ability and the honesty to think, and you know what the tariff is. You know that it is a device to keep out foreign competition and thus enable home manufacturers to charge higher prices. You know that in the early days its effect was to make manufacturing possible by keeping prices at a level where a fair profit was paid. Above this level they could not go, because there was free domestic competition. The tariff was thus a tax, self-imposed by every man in the country, for the purpose of building up the country’s home industries; exactly as if the owner of a sugar-plantation should conclude it would pay him to grind his own cane, and should set aside his gains for a few years to buy the machinery. Now I might stop to argue the socialistic implications of such a procedure—involving as it does the doctrine that the manufactures are the interest and concern of the whole people, to the advantages of which, when completed, they all have a right. (No plantation master, I take it, would expect to furnish himself with machinery out of the wages of his hands.) Continuing, however, to discuss facts and not theories, you see that these industries which we have “encouraged” have now become the mightiest power in the land. It is they who have accomplished the revolution and set up the “System”; it is they who use the money which the people have turned over to them, to maintain and perpetuate the old arrangement—an arrangement which now enables them, since they have become monopolies, to charge for their products from thirty to fifty per cent. more than a fair price, as is proven by what they charge abroad. The workingman, you know, Mr. Steffens, has all this justified to him by the fact that he gets his share of this “prosperity”; but of late the workingman has been finding that he does _not_ get his share. He has brought the industrial machinery of the country to such a pitch of perfection that he produces more than the country needs; and so when foreign markets fail he is out of work part of the time; and the mass of unemployed labour operates by the “iron law” to beat down wages and to break strikes, and to make his share less and less. And all the time, to pay interest on the constantly increasing capital of the country, the prices of trust products are being raised yet higher, and the cost of living is rising, year by year. In the cotton mills of Alabama and Georgia little children six and eight years of age are working twelve hours for a wage of nine cents a day. And how do you think they fare in this fearful race for profits—what do you think is the effect upon them of the continued operation of the “System”? You may remember that I said a little way back that there were people in this country to whom the difference between to-day and to-morrow is simply a difference between life and death. It was such people as these I had in mind.