502. Difficulties in the way of a tariff reduction in the United States. Even if it were agreed that a reduction in our protective tariff would be beneficial, certain practical difficulties would still have to be met.1

In the first place, it is necessary to remember that the federal government must secure a large revenue from tariff duties, and that in consequence the question which we are discussing is not one of protection versus free trade, but of protection versus freer trade. In the second place, the economic importance of the whole controversy has unquestionably been exaggerated. We find a country like England prosperous under free trade; we find countries like France and the United States prosperous under protection. It is of real but not of vital importance. Our internal trade vastly exceeds our foreign trade in every way. The domestic trade of the Mississippi Valley alone is far greater than our entire foreign commerce. In the third place, the American tariff is a historical growth, and bad as it may be in many respects it has taken deep root. During the last century it has become part of our life, and cannot be suddenly eradicated with impunity. If it is true that American labor would be better off without it, it does not follow that it ought to be removed suddenly in the interests of American labor. If the industrial growth is abnormal, it is none the less true that adjustment to normal conditions is a painful process and should be conducted cautiously. Displacements of labor and capital cause suffering and loss, and it is clear that any reform of the tariff must be conservative and careful, a movement toward freer trade, not the sudden withdrawal of protection.

503. Reasons for the legal regulation of labor. Some of the reasons why governmental regulation of labor has replaced the earlier laissez-faire policy are stated in the following:

Unorganized workmen do not bargain on terms of strict equality with employers. That this is the case when the workers are children will scarcely be questioned by any one. Employers of such labor stand to it in a relation half paternal, and have it in their power to make or mar the young lives that are devoted to their service. It might be thought that considerations of common humanity would lead employers of children to fix hours and other conditions of employment that would not be injurious to them. Unfortunately this is not the case. In every country labor laws have been found necessary to protect children from the rapacity and cruelty not only of employers, but even of their own parents.

1 Copyright, 1908, by The Macmillan Company.

It is generally, although not universally, conceded that protective labor laws ought to extend to women as well as to minors. Such extension is defended by those who think the activity of women should be confined as far as possible to the domestic circle, on the ground that women are unfitted for the rough and tumble of industrial competition and if permitted to work for wages at all, should do so on conditions marked out for them by law. A reason less open to objection is the simple fact that women have not yet learned to organize unions or to protect themselves in other ways and are therefore the prey of unscrupulous employers when the law fails to protect them.

If the second of the above reasons is accepted as a justification for laws protecting women wage earners, there seems no reason why such laws should not be extended to men in those trades in which they do not bargain on equal terms with their employers. This view appears to be gaining ground and has, as we shall see, already found expression in connection with legislation affecting the so-called sweating trades.

Another reason for protective labor laws, than inequality between employers and employees, is the ignorance and carelessness of the latter. Ignorance often leads workmen to assume risks and undertake tasks on terms that they would not with full knowledge accept. Once committed, the inertia that is characteristic of all men prevents them from repudiating their bargains. Carelessness is an even more common cause of contracts of employment that are socially undesirable. This is conspicuously the case in dangerous trades. The natural optimism of workmen leads them to feel that whatever the dangers may be, they themselves will escape. The result is that they accept risks, even certainties, of disease and death on terms that compensate neither them, their families, nor society at large for the waste of life which such employments entail. It is on this account that special legislation in reference to the conditions of employment in dangerous trades has been found necessary, and on it also are based the laws in reference to employers' liability for injuries to their employees and industrial insurance.

504. Public education. The importance of public education in democratic states is suggested in the following:

Governments now recognize that the common people are intelligent creatures worthy and capable of indefinite intellectual improvement. In past centuries rulers regarded their subjects principally as taxpayers, laborers, and soldiers; but education has now been declared an indispensable part of the advancement of public welfare, the avowed aim of all modern governments. The success of democratic experiments depends

upon the intelligence of the average citizen; the competition for markets requires skilled workmen and managers; and the widening interests of mankind demand the means of acquiring knowledge.

The recognition of these facts has induced almost all the European governments to establish elementary schools, technical institutes, and universities, and to compel even the poorest child to acquire at least the rudiments of knowledge. In England the government appropriates over seventy-five million dollars a year for elementary education alone, and France spends almost fifty million dollars. Illiteracy, once regarded as the natural and inevitable state of the people, has now become a national disgrace which all countries are laboring to remove. Their success may be measured by the decline of illiteracy in the armies. It was the exceptional soldier, in the eighteenth century, who could read and write; now it is the exceptional one who cannot. Less than one per cent of the recruits for the German army are illiterate, and only one in twenty in France cannot read and write.

The work of the schools is reënforced by the newspapers and magazines. The invention of the steam printing machine and the mechanical typesetter has reduced the cost of the newspaper from ten or twenty cents a copy to from one to three cents. Editions of ten thousand copies, considered enormous at the opening of the nineteenth century, have grown into editions of hundreds of thousands scattered broadcast throughout the land by the express train. The telegraph gathers the news every moment from the four corners of the earth; the conduct of rulers and statesmen, the schemes of reformers, the current political issues are the subject of hourly criticism and discussion, and public opinion can thus be aroused as never before in the history of mankind.

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