“Free foreign trade admits the foreigner to equal privileges with our own citizens. It invites the product of foreign cheap labor to this market in competition with the domestic product, representing higher and better paid labor. It results in giving our money, our manufactures and our markets to other nations, to the injury of our labors, our trades people and our farmers. Protection keeps money, markets and manufactures at home for the benefit of our own people. It is scarcely worth while to more than state the proposition that taxation upon a foreign competing product is more easily paid and less burdensome than taxation upon the noncompeting product. In the latter it is always added to the foreign cost, and therefore paid by the consumer, while in the former, where the duty is upon the competing product, it is largely paid in the form of diminished profits to the foreign producer. It would be burdensome beyond endurance to collect our taxes from the products, professions and labor of our own people.
“There is no conflict of interests and should be none between the several classes of producers and the consumers in the United States. Their interests are one, interrelated and interdependent. That which benefits one benefits all; one man’s work has relation to every other man’s work in the same community; each is an essential part of the grand result to be attained, and that statesmanship which would seek to array the one against the other for any purpose, is narrow, unworthy and unpatriotic. The President’s message is unhappily in that direction. The discussion had on this floor takes that turn. Both have been calculated to create antagonisms where none existed. The farmer, the manufacturer, the laborer, the tradesman, the producer and the consumer all have a common interest in the maintenance of a protective tariff. All are alike and equally favored by the system which you seek to overthrow. It is a National system, broad and universal in its application; if otherwise, it should be abandoned. It cannot be invoked for one section or one interest, to the exclusion of others. It must be general in its application within the contemplation of the principle upon which the system is founded. We have been living under it for twenty-seven continuous years, and it can be asserted with confidence that no country in the world has achieved such industrial advancement, and such marvelous progress in art, science and civilization, as ours. Tested by its results, it has surpassed all other revenue systems.