streets full of the idle and suffering poor, but the cost of the goods we do make will be very considerably increased. I am not deceived at all by the popular delusion touching wages here and abroad. I know very well that the most efficient labor is the cheapest and that the lowest cost of production is sometimes accompanied by the highest rate of wages, so that in some lines of business, for example, the manufacture of steel rails, no tariff at all is needed because of the labor cost, but it is very important to protect our markets against the importation of large quantities of foreign goods when the foreign demand may be small, because that utterly disarranges the running of our own mills and puts them on short time, which, as I have suggested above, not only means suffering for our people, but high cost of production. I doubt myself the wisdom of the reciprocity arrangement at this time with Canada, and for the reason that politically it seems to me a very unwise thing for a Republican President to force through a proposition which splits his own party in two. I think the proposition is, for the moment, popular with the people, but I fear that the interests affected or thought to be are likely to resent the discrimination which has been made, manifested in a willingness to legislate upon them before any investigation by the Tariff Board, when other interests are very jealously protected until they shall have been investigated by the Tariff Board. I earnestly hope that the party will not suffer, but profit by the policy which has been pursued, but I have my doubts about it.

To which Roosevelt made the following reply:

September 2d, 1911.

That is a most interesting letter of yours. It gave me some totally new ideas; and when missionary work is needed for me, it must be needed for some other people too. As regards Canadian Reciprocity, the trouble is, as you say, that to push it through at the expense of the farmers, who are restive about the tariff anyhow, tends to make them ready to favor any cut at the expense of the manufacturers. .

Upon this point of his willingness to receive suggestions, Secretary Hay wrote in his Diary, November 20, 1904:—

I read the President's message in the afternoon. ... Made several suggestions as to changes and omissions. The President came in just as I had finished and we went over the matter together. He accepted my ideas with that singular amiability and open-mindedness which form so striking a contrast with the general idea of his brusque and arbitrary character.

In his message of December, 1907, he said that the country was committed to the system of protection, but that every dozen years, or so, the tariff should be scrutinized and should compensate for the difference in labor cost; a view which, as I have said, I consider rather superficial.

Some of his other comments on the tariff will

not stand the test of analysis; for example, he once said: "I am for a protective tariff that gets past the mill offices down into the pockets of the workingman." Now, the only way that the tariff can benefit the workingman is to provide him with employment. The rate of wages is determined by other influences, and in the long run must be substantially the market rate for labor of the same sort in the same locality. To say, as Roosevelt once did, — "If the wage rate is not proper, if the conditions of life among laboring people are not proper, then we recommend that the tariff be taken off entirely," is merely another way of saying that low wages are worse than lower wages, or no wages at all. I do not know of any great protected product in the manufacture of which there is not present the element of competition. Where this is true, domestic competition insures the sale of the product at as low prices as are possible under conditions prevailing here. Roosevelt distinctly repudiated the erroneous doctrine that the trusts could be destroyed by removing the tariff.