This question of tariffs has, for seventy years now, been the great issue, next to slavery, between the North and South.  More debates have taken place on this question than on any other in our Congressional history, and it still remains unsettled, like most other questions of political economy.  The warfare has been constant and uninterrupted between those who argue subjects from abstract truths and those who look at local interests, and maintain that all political questions should be determined by circumstances.  When it seemed to be the interest of Great Britain to advocate protection for her varied products, protection was the policy of the government; when it became evidently for her interest to defend free trade, then free trade became the law of Parliament.

On abstract grounds there is little dispute on the question:  if all the world acted on the principles of free trade, protection would be indefensible.  Practically, it is a matter of local interest:  it is the interest of New England to secure protection for its varied industries and to secure free raw materials for manufacture; it is the interest of agricultural States to buy wares in the cheapest market and to seek foreign markets for their surplus breadstuffs.  The question, however, on broad grounds is whether protection is or is not for the interest of the whole country; and on that point there are differences of opinion among both politicians and statesmen.  Formerly, few discussed the subject on abstract principles except college professors and doctrinaires; but it is a most momentous subject from a material point of view, and the great scale on which protection has been tried in America since the Civil War has produced a multiplicity of consequences—­industrial and economic—­which have set up wide-spread discussions of both principles and practical applications.  How it will be finally settled, no one can predict; perhaps through a series of compromises, with ever lessening restriction, until the millennial dream of universal free trade shall become practicable.  Protection has good points and bad ones.  While it stimulates manufactures, it also creates monopolies and widens the distinctions between the rich and the poor.  Disproportionate fortunes were one of the principal causes of the fall of the Roman Empire, and are a grave danger to our modern civilization.

But then it is difficult to point out any period in the history of civilization when disproportionate fortunes did not exist, except in primitive agricultural States in the enjoyment of personal liberty, like Switzerland and New England one hundred years ago.  They certainly existed in feudal Europe as they do in England to-day.  The great cotton lords are feudal barons under another name.  Where money is worshipped there will be money-aristocrats, who in vulgar pride and power rival the worst specimens of an hereditary nobility.  There is really little that is new in human organizations,—­little that Solomon and Aristotle had not learned.  When we go to the foundation of society it is the same story, in all ages and countries.  Most that is new is superficial and transitory.  The permanent is eternally based on the certitudes of life, which are moral and intellectual rather than mechanical and material.  Whatever promotes these certitudes is the highest political wisdom.