Protective Tariffs II.

The large audience which listened last evening to Prof. Thompson's lecture on Protection was amply repaid by the eloquent and convincing discourse which they heard. It was a presentation of historical evidence which seems to indicate the wisdom of our present tariff policy. There is no better way of arriving at the truth of a theory than by studying its workings in the past, it has given use to the Historical School of Economists. England, the champion of industrial economics, first demands our attention. She was for a long time, in the very early stages of development, a free trade country. She raised wool and sent it abroad to be manufactured. Not until the time of Edward III. when her industries began to be protected, did the era of prosperity open before her. For five hundred years she did not relinquish an industry which she found adapted to her country. Then came Free Trade. Her manufacturing industries were too firmly rooted to die out immediately, but agriculture languished. A country which ought to have exported food, was now forced to import in large quantities. England has neglected her agricultural for her manufacturing interests. Turn to India, a country which before English rule, wove the finest cloths known to the world. She had been protected by the policy of the East India Company. Now, thanks to free trade, she has no manufactures at all. When crops fail, then comes famine. Famines only occur in countries which produce food and nothing else.

The speaker grew eloquent as he discussed the unhappy condition of Ireland. The trouble there is not in a bad land system, but in the absence of every industry except. agriculture. She, too, had manufactures once, but England strangled them, when the potato famine came, the effects were terrible. The population had nothing to which they could turn their hands, starvation was the result. The absence of alternative occupation is the true cause of the poverty of Ireland. A country which is without some alternative occupations cannot create them in the face of open competition. Protection, she must have. The lecture then closed, after a rapid glance at tariff legislation in the United States.