Industries-Home Protection-Is it robbery.

No. 431.-I cannot sympathize with those who denounce protection of home industries as a species of robbery. The argument in favor of protection rests upon the great principle of the advantage of diversified production. Every industry is stimulated and benefited under a wellregulated tariff law. It keeps the currency in circulation among our people instead of draining our country of it and sending it abroad to purchase products manufactured in foreign countries and thus avoids financial distress. It brings the consumer and producer together and saves the cost of transportation. Fifty men composing a community all engaged in agriculture would each only have one consumer for his products. Diversify their interests by placing them in groups of ten, and each group of producers would have his home market increased fivefold. If each engaged in a separate industry, each would have fifty consumers for his product, and they together would become a self-sustaining and independent community. Sound economic principles require that so far as may be practicable, every section and locality in our country shall have diversified interests, numerous enough to be self-sustaining. Economically considered, it is the development of that political idea which has made the New England township the model political organization of the world, a little republic in itself. And as the great Frenchman, De Tocqueville said, while it exists the Republic will flourish.

So while this protective theory is maintained our country will go on in its marvelous accumulation of wealth and prosperity.

-HOPKINS, Illinois, Record, 4036.

Industries, progress of, in United States.

No. 432.—Mr. Chairman, men have almost recklessly invested their money in manufacturing enterprises during the last twenty-five years. They have done so because of their belief that they would have not so much a high market to sell in as a fair and steady market, and that their Government would stand over them with the shield of protection by which at no time could designing capital of Europe crush them by a combined movement. Under this benign influence millions of dollars have been invested and millions of men employed directly and indirectly. One invention has been added to another, waste and loss have been reduced to a minimum, and by the progress of invention every particle and fragment have been utilized for some beneficent purpose. Competition has sprung up on all sides. Wages have gone up and prices of goods have gone down. As a manufacturing people we are to-day making such rapid strides that unless some untoward misfortune, such as is implied in the Mills bill, overtake us we shall within a decade lead all the nations of the earth.

-SYMES, Record, 4317.

Industries protected-How many benefited from them? No. 433.-Gentlemen talk of the protected industries, and the President says but 2 per cent. of our seventeen millions of laborers enjoy the fruits of protection; that is, they are not engaged in protected industries. What a narrow and absurd view on the subject. The protec tion and maintenance of one industry helps all other industries. It not only increases the market for their products, but every avocation discontinued must send out its employes to compete with workingmen in other avocations, or into idleness and poverty. Hence every industry is interested that every other industry should live and flourish.

Why, suppose our manufacturing should cease to exist, as the Mills bill provides, where would the millions of men employed in it go? Some

other avocations would have to be crowded with them or support them in the poor-houses of the country. And yet this debate has developed the fact that our manufactories are the chief objects of attack in this bill. -MILLIKEN, Record, 4253.

Internal Revenue. (See No. 192.)

Internal Revenue-Amount collected.

No. 434.-The sources from which was derived this $118,837,301.06 of "internal revenue can be classified as follows:

Spirits.........

Fermented liquors........

Tobacco, in different forms...

Oleomargarine

723,948.04

Penalties

220,204.83

29,283.49

4,288.37

$118,837,301.03

Internal Revenue.

-MACDONALD (Dem.), Record, 3942.

No. 435.-I am free to confess that the bill presented does not meet my unqualified approval. I believe that duties upon imports should be levied and collected at all times to meet the current ordinary expenses of the Government, and that extraordinary expenses should be met by the collection of internal revenues so far as can be reasonably done. Holding these views, if left untrammeled, I would retain our present internal system of taxation, or so much thereof as might be necessary, until the last obligation growing out of the late war was paid.

-BYNUM, Record, 3518. Internal revenue and Democratic party. (See No. 185.) Internal revenue an odious system.

No. 436.-Personally, Mr. Chairman, I would be glad, if we are to reduce the revenues to current expenses, to see the whole internal-revenue system abolished. It is a system of taxation, pure and simple, and direct in its character, and one that has never been resorted to in this country except in emergencies. It is odious in its burdens and odious in the methods of its collection. Under it the tax-gatherer can enter and invade the privacies of homes and have admission to business men's most valued secrets. It accomplishes its end, and in many cases can only do so, by a system of espionage calling to its aid spies and emissaries.

The repeal of this system would dispose at once of the whole question of a supposed surplus. That surplus is estimated at $113,000,000. The income derived from the internal revenue last year was $118,000,000, which, less the expense of its collection, $4,000,000, would leave the reduction almost precisely equal to the surplus.

-WICKHAM, Record, 4699.

Internal revenue arbitrary and rigorous.

No. 437.-Just after the meeting of this Congress I addressed a reply to a very kind letter from friends in Tennessee, which was published, and from which I beg to quote. I said:

"With Albert Gallatin I have regarded the excise of internal-revenue taxes as offensive to the genius of our people, and tolerated by the

framers of the Constitution only as a measure of necessity in the emergency of war, and that just as soon as the occasion for them had passed away they should cease to exist. He and Thomas Jefferson, as the very first act of Jefferson's administration, secured a repeal of internal taxes. and relieved the people from their inequality, inquisitorial annoyances and hordes of officials clothed with dangerous powers. Only in these latter days have I heard men calmly claim these war taxes are still necessary-a generation after the war which gave rise to them had closed. And it is a very suggestive and suspicious feature of the affair that those upon whom the tax is laid clamor loudly against its being taken off, regarding it no doubt as a protection against competition to the large monopolies."

To substantiate the ground taken by me in that letter, I will refer to two authorities. I will read first from Blackstone's Commentaries (book 1, pages 317-318) to show excise as a war tax:

"But at the same time the rigor and arbitrary proceedings of excise laws seem hardly compatible with the temper of a free nation. For the frauds that might be committed in this branch of the revenue, unless a strict watch is kept, make it necessary, wherever it is established, to give the officers the power of entering and searching the houses of such as deal in excisable commodities at any hour of the day, and, in many cases, of the night likewise. And the proceedings in case of transgression are summary and sudden."

If this internal-revenue system were abolished to day we would have no surplus revenue to scare us, while the administration of public affairs would be rendered purer and better.

—RANDALL, May 6, 1886.

Internal revenue–Burdening vice with office-holders.

No. 438.-But it is said by the supporters of this bill that this would be leaving the burdens upon the necessaries of life and taking it off from the vices. It is interesting to note, in this connection, that this is the first time in the history of the Democratic party that they have been solicitous to keep burdens upon vice and relieve the necessaries. They are so anxious to place burdens upon vice that they are willing to burden the people with four millions of expense to do it. As is somtimes the case with other new converts, their zeal has got the better of their sense. If the Democratic party in its new-born zeal to reduce the cost of the necessaries, wishes to remove the burdens therefrom, why does it not admit sugar, that article of prime necessity that enters into the consumption every day of the poorest in the land, to the free-list? It pretends to be anxious to warm the poor man's body; why not also be anxious to sweeten his cup? The answer is too plain. It is for political reasons that this unjust discrimination is made. No Democrat can, or has attempted to, explain it. It is not the only respect in which this bill is truckling, dishonest, cowardly, and sectional.

-WICKHAM, Record, 4699-4700.

Internal revenue-Can North Carolina trust them?

No. 439.-It is well understood that the people of North Carolina, whom I have the honor in part to represent on this floor, are intensely opposed to the present internal-revenue system, and that their plan of revenue reduction is to begin with the repeal of that system.

Time and again the Legislature of that State has passed resolutions denouncing this system, and instructing the members of Congress from that State to advocate its repeal.

Similar resolutions have been passed by at least two Democratic State conventions. There is therefore no doubt that the Democratic part of

the people of that State are heartily tired of this system, and anxious to be rid of it. With this feeling I confess myself to be in entire and cordial sympathy.

-SIMMONS, (Dem.), Record, 4399.

Internal revenue-Crocodile tears over the farmers.

No. 440.-But the advocates and defenders of the whisky ring, with its enormous protection and colossal monopoly, whenever anything is said in favor of abolishing the internal revenue or curtailing the profits of the whisky ring, shed many crocodile tears over the poor unfortunate farmers of this country, who are so heavily taxed by the heartless manufacturers. In other words, it will not do to repeal the internal revenue laws and interfere with the profits of the whisky ring, as they say that would leave no room for a repeal or reduction of the tariff, which they say is necessary for the relief of the farmers of this country, as they are at present unprotected. Now, the truth is that nine-tenths of the farmers of this country would never know they paid a dollar of revenue into the Treasury of the United States (and they pay very little) if they were not very kindly reminded of it by the low-tariff orators who seek office. -Senator BROWN, (Dem.), Record, 2149. Internal revenue-Democratic conversion under Presidential influence.

No. 441.—It is surprising to me that the Democratic party has so solidly arrayed itself under the leadership of its amateur statesman, the President of the United States, in defense of the internal-revenue system. It seems strange to me that suddenly the Democratic party has become the special champion of such a system. For twenty years the gentlemen representing the Southern States of the Union in Congress, and speaking for those outside, have not only denounced the general system of internal-revenue taxation, but have denounced all the efforts of the Government to enforce the law, and so thoroughly had they educated the masses of the people in many sections of the South into the idea that the internal-revenue system was oppressive and tyrannous, that they had brought the people of the South to endeavor to destroy the internal-revenue system by fraud, violence, murder, and bloodshed. They had brought them to assert the right of revolution against the so-called tyrannous enactments that were being forced by the Government against the people of the South. It was a conspicuous argument all over the South why Mr. Cleveland should be elected, to the end that the internalrevenue laws should be repealed, or if not, then not enforced. -GROSVENOR, Record, 4647.

Internal revenue-Democratic opposition to it.

No. 442.-When Mr. Jefferson came to the administration of public affairs quite a surplus for the time had gathered in the Treasury and continued to increase.

We find in his first annual message to Congress these words:

"Other circumstances combined with the increase of numbers have produced an augmentation of revenue arising from consumption in a ratio far beyond that of population alone, and, though the chances of foreign relations now taking place so desirably for the world may for a season affect this branch of revenue, yet, weighing all probabilities of expense as well as of income, there is reasonable ground of confidence that we may safely dispense with all internal taxes, comprehending excises, stamps, auctions, licenses, carriages, and refined sugars, to which the postage on newspapers may be added to facilitate the progress of information, and that the remaining sources of revenue will be sufficient to

provide for the support of Government, to pay the interest of the public debt, and to discharge the principals in shorter periods than the laws or the general expectation has contemplated."

The Democratic platform adopted at Chicago arranged the Republican party for not relieving the people of "crushing war taxes."

And further on it pronounces that

"The system of direct taxation known as the 'internal revenue' is a water tax, and so long as the war continues," etc.

Internal revenue-Abolition of.

-COWLES, Record, 4332.

No. 443.—In another Democratic platform of the same year, that of my own State, there is no such uncertain sound. It says:

Resolved, That we are in favor of the unconditional and immediate absolution of the whole internal-revenue system, as an intolerable burden, a standing menace to freedom of elections, and a source of great annoyance and corruption in its practical operation."

Only last session we were called upon to add to this system of taxation the "butter bill," which was done, and this session we are called upon to pass the "lard bill," which I am afraid will be done, and when we set a bad thing or principle in motion, with a downward grade and as greasy a track as these two articles make, who can say where it will stop? The principle of these taxes is all wrong, and if I know what constitutes Democracy, it is undemocratic.

-COWLES, Record, 4332-3.

Internal revenue-How Democrats regard it.

No. 444.-A convention held at Chicago nearly four years ago, coming from the people direct, and whose explicit declarations are and must continue to be, until the next convention, the supreme law and the infallible political creed of this side of the House as members of a political party-that convention singled out the system of internal taxation for the opprobrious designation of " war tax," and intimated that the present law might not continue by pledging the proceeds of that tax for a certain purpose "so long as the law continues." No one speaks of a law in that way that is considered to be permanent. In marked contrast to this, the members of that convention forcibly and explicitly declared their adherence to the other systems of taxation, asserting that

"From the foundations of the Government taxes collected at the custom-house have been the chief source of federal revenue-such they must continue to be."

The members of that convention recollected doubtless how obnoxious the internal system had been. They recalled how it had only existed twice before, and then for brief periods only. They remembered the fact that the wisest statesmen, of whom Thomas Jefferson, the founder of the Democratic party, was a conspicuous exemplar, demanded and accomplished its repeal in the past.

—WILKINSON, (Dem.), Record, 4280.`

Internal revenue-Past and proposed reductions.

No. 445.-Republicans and a few high-tariff Democrats propose to reduce taxation by the repeal of the internal taxes on tobacco and distilled and malt liquors. For a quarter of a century the Republican party was in power, and during that time called into existence the income, the railroad, and bank taxes; also the internal tax, all of which were claimed to be war taxes. The first-mentioned taxes were repealed while a war debt of over $2,000,000,000 was hanging over the country. and now it is proposed to repeal the internal taxes while a war debt of.