same necessity calls again for the same remedy.  But this remedy is arbitrary, capricious, and unsatisfactory.  Some will not enter into the combination at all.  Others will secretly violate the agreement from the beginning.  Others still, when their surplus stock has been sold, and before the general price has risen, will begin to manufacture again.  There is no power to enforce any bargain they have made, and they find the plan only imperfectly curing the difficulty.  They remain uncertain what to do, embarrassed and doubtful as to the future.  They have through protection violated the natural laws of supply and demand, and human regulations are powerless to relieve them from the penalty.

Take, as an illustration of the operation of the system, the article of paper.  One of the first effects of the general tariff was to increase the price of nearly every thing the manufacturer required to make the paper.  Fifteen mil-lions of dollars a year through the protection are taken from the consumer.  The manufacturer himself is able to retain but a small part of it, as he is obliged to pay to some other protected industry for its products, they in turn to some others who furnished them with protected articles for their use, and so on to the end.  The result is that nominal prices are raised all around; the consumers pay the fifteen millions, while nobody receives any substantial benefit, because what one makes in the increased price of his product he loses in the increased price he is obliged to pay for the required products of others.  The consumer is the loser, and though competition may occasionally reduce prices for him to a reasonable rate, it never to any appreciable extent compensates him for the losses he sustains through the enhanced price which the protective system inevitably causes.

It is not to be disputed that many of the protected manufacturers have grown rich.  In very many cases I think it can be demonstrated that their wealth has resulted from some patent which has given them a monopoly in particular branches of manufacturing, or from some other advantage which they have employed exclusively in their business.  In such cases they would have prospered without protection as with it.  I think there are few, except in the very inception of a manufacturing enterprise, or in abnormal cases growing out of war or destruction of property, or the combinations of large amounts of capital, where protection alone has enriched men.  The result is the robbery of the consumer with no ultimate good to most of the protective industries.

At a meeting of the textile manufacturers in Philadelphia the other day, one of the leading men in that interest said:  “The fact is that the textile manufacturers of Philadelphia, the centre of the American trade, are fast approaching a crisis, and realize that something must be done, and that soon.  Cotton and woollen mills are fast springing up over the South and West, and the prospects are that we will soon lose much of our trade in the coarse fabrics by reason of cheap competition.  The only thing we can do, therefore, is to turn our attention to the higher plane, and endeavor to make goods equal to those imported.  We cannot do this now, because we have not a sufficient supply either of the culture which begets designs, or of the skill which manipulates the fibres.”