Some co-operative method should be devised whereby the student could spend part of his time acquiring first-hand experience while the academic instruction should consist of a minimum of formal lectures and a maximum of round-table and seminar discussions. Industrial concerns might well create fellowships and send some of their promising men to be trained. Industry and the college must consequently work hand in hand.

It is not to be expected that the development along the lines outlined above will produce complete industrial peace or absolute industrial justice, but the institution of properly manned, trained, and equipped departments of industrial relations within business units together with the introduction of honest measures to give the worker greater control over the conditions of labor will undoubtedly decrease wastes and inefficiencies. Beyond doubt, absenteeism, turnover, and withheld effort will greatly decrease and the efficiency of labor be raised.

The measures discussed above do not bear upon the question of the distribution of the product nor do they involve any change in the basic structure of business. Such changes may and perhaps should come, but irrespective of the fundamentals upon which industry rests the institution of such methods and organization as outlined above would benefit both workers and management. Taken all in all the movement is one of great possibilities. It promises to aid greatly in the adjustment of labor difficulties.

PAUL H. DOUGLAS

EMERGENCY FLEET CORPORATION

PHILADELPHIA, PA.

THE PLACE OF AGRICULTURE IN MODERN INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY.

II

VIII. THE COURSE OF DEVELOPMENT IN THE UNITED STATES

In the face of all this illuminating foreign experience and experimentation the United States has pursued a course too haphazard to be dignified with the name "policy," unless perhaps we shall concede that the unconscious acquiescence of the public at large has followed the dictates of a conscious and astute neomercantilism on the part of commercial and manufacturing interests.

The mercantilist was kept well in check prior to the Civil War, though largely by the force of inward circumstance. We must not forget that it was nationalistic sentiment, forced into prominence by the unwillingness of European countries to enter into the free-trade relation which the young republic desired and by the disturbing influences of European wars and our own second conflict with England, which brought about our entrance upon a program of protective tariff-making. In working out this ideal of national self-sufficiency both high costs and great difficulties of transportation and the lack of open markets in Europe caused the directing of special measures toward the fostering of our own industries, agricultural as well as manufacturing.' The European

"The embarrassments which have obstructed the progress of our external trade have led to serious reflections on the necessity of enlarging the sphere of our domestic commerce. . . . . As to creating, in some instances, a new, and securing in all a more certain and steady demand for the surplus product of the soil, this is a principal means by which the establishment of manufactures contributes to an augmentation of the produce or revenue of the country, and has an immediate and direct relation to the prosperity of agriculture. It is evident that the exertions of the husbandman will be steady or fluctuating, vigorous or feeble, in proportion to the steadiness or fluctuation, adequateness or inadequateness, of the markets on which he must depend for the vent of the surplus which may be produced by his labor; and that such surplus, in the ordinary course of things, will be greater or less in the same proportion. . . . . The bulkiness of those commodities which are the chief productions of the soil necessarily imposes very heavy charges on their transportation to distant markets. These charges, in the cases in which the nations to whom our products are sent maintain a competition in the supply of their own

countries had not yet abandoned the effort to maintain home supplies of agricultural produce and, while such products of the southern states as could not be produced in the climate of Europe had a ready export demand, the farmers of the middle and northern states were constantly brought face to face with "restrictive regulations which in foreign markets abridge the vent of the increasing surplus of our agricultural produce."

While unquestionably industrial interests got the bit in their teeth during the decade preceding the Compromise Bill of 1833, even these most radical protection measures were supported by the farmers of the North and West, who found their interests served by the growth of manufacturing populations in the central and northeastern sections of the country. In exchange for any disadvantage they may have suffered in the way of higher prices of manufactured wares, they were able to extract from those industrial interests a much-needed support for the policies of cheap western lands and internal improvements which they regarded as the prime requirements for their prosperity. As soon, however,

markets, principally fall upon us, and form material deductions from the primitive value of the articles furnished. The charges on manufactured supplies brought from Europe are greatly enhanced by the same circumstance of distance. These charges, again, in the cases in which our own industry maintains no competition in our own markets, also principally fall upon us and are an additional cause of extraordinary deduction from the primitive value of our own products, these being the materials of exchange for the foreign fabrics which we consume."-Hamilton, "Report on Manufactures," in Taussig, State Papers and Speeches on the Tariff, pp. 1, 22, 56.

I

1 Ibid., p. 1. It may be mentioned at this point that southern producers of cotton were protected against the competition of the West Indies and Brazil by a duty of three cents a pound in the tariff of 1789. Kentucky hemp got sixty cents per hundredweight, and sugar one to three cents per pound. Wool protection began in 1824.

"The struggles of sections were centering about these three economic issues— tariff, public lands, and internal improvements. The interest of the different sections in these issues, in the order of their importance, was as follows: The Northwest-lowpriced public lands, internal improvements, a high tariff; the Southwest-low-priced public lands, a low tariff, internal improvements; the seaboard South-a low tariff, no internal improvements at federal expense, high-priced public lands; the North Atlantic states-a high tariff, high-priced public lands, internal improvements. Under these conditions the North Atlantic states, the South, and the West, needed the assistance of another section to get what each wanted most-a high tariff, a low tariff, and freedom of the public domain, respectively."-Wellington, The Political and Sectional Influence of the Public Lands, 1828-1842, p. 9.

as developments in these directions, together with a better access to European markets, caused their interests to become identified with an untrammeled export trade, their junction with the southern planters, whose interests had always pointed in that direction, effected a great curtailment in protection to industries (whose infancy had by then been quite sufficiently prolonged).

In general it may be said that from the time of the loosening of British control until the time of our Civil War the position of agriculture in our economic society was determined largely by natural forces too strong to be in any considerable degree abrogated by political interference. A few special lines of effort such as wool-growing on the one hand or iron-making on the other had been manipulated to a certain extent. But our situation and resources were such as to make us inevitably a dominantly agricultural people with, however, an increasing home supply of simple and bulky manufactures in those lines for which raw materials were readily accessible, and a not inconsiderable commerce. It is doubtless true that, in the main at least, the growth of these industries represented not a subtraction of men and capital from a more profitable agricultural employment' but an additional inducement to the migration of population and capital from Europe to the benefit of American agriculture and the development of

'Cf. Clay's remarks during the tariff controversy in 1824: "Let us suppose that half a million of persons are now employed abroad in fabricating for our consumption those articles of which, by the operation of this bill, a supply is intended to be provided within ourselves. That half a million of persons are, in effect, subsisted by us; but their actual means of subsistence are drawn from foreign agriculture. If we could transport them to this country and incorporate them in the mass of our own population, there would instantly arise a demand for an amount of provisions equal to that which would be requisite for their subsistence throughout the whole year. That demand, in the article of flour alone, would not be less than the quantity of about 900,000 barrels, besides a proportionate quantity of beef and pork, and other articles of subsistence. But 900,000 barrels of flour exceeded the entire quantity exported last year, by nearly 150,000 barrels. What activity would not this give? What cheerfulness would it not communicate to our now dispirited farming interest? But if, instead of these five hundred thousand artisans emigrating from abroad, we give, by this bill, employment to an equal number of our own citizens now engaged in unprofitable agriculture, or idle from the want of business, the beneficial effect upon the productions of our farming labor would be nearly doubled.”—Annals of Congress, 1823-24, 1972 (quoted in Bogart and Thompson, Readings in the Economic History of the United States, pp. 315-16).

an economic society whose relative proportions were fairly well balanced in view of surrounding circumstances.'

From the Civil War forward this situation has been greatly altered. The fighting disciples of mercantilism and industrial imperialism have consolidated the easy gains of the war period and the hardly less easy victories which grew out of the subsequent demoralization of agriculture. The Homestead Act and free immigration, to be sure, inflated the volume of agriculture enormously but, after the subsidence of war prices, left it with constantly diminishing prosperity. The railroads, both in their control of rates and in their intermediary services in the disposal of public lands (to say nothing of stock subscriptions and contributions of right of way on the part of farmers), waxed great at the expense of the rural class. The manufacturer, protected by a most outrageous series of tariffs, sold high in a market of poor

'Henry C. Carey, writing in 1852 under the significant title "The Harmony of Interests, Agricultural, Manufacturing, and Commercial," argues much after the manner of List in behalf of "the American system." "Adam Smith," he says, "was fully possessed of the fact that, if the farmer or planter would flourish, he must bring the consumer to his side; and that if the artisan would flourish, he must seek to locate himself in the place where the raw materials were grown, and aid the farmer by converting them into the forms fitting them for the use of men, and thus facilitating their transportation to distant lands. He saw well, that when men came thus together, there arose a general harmony of interests, each profiting his neighbor, and profiting by that neighbor's success, whereas the tendency of commercial centralization was toward poverty and discord, abroad and at home. The object of protection among ourselves is that of aiding the farmers in the effort to bring consumers to their sides, and thus carry into effect the system advocated by the great author of The Wealth of Nations, while aiding in the annihilation of a system that has ruined Ireland, India, Portugal, Turkey, and all other countries subject to it; and the object of the following chapters is that of showing why it is that protection is needed; how it operates in promoting the prosperity of, and harmony among, the various portions of society; and how certain it is that the true, the profitable, and the only means of attaining perfect freedom of trade, is to be found in that efficient protection which shall fully and completely carry out the doctrine of Dr. Smith, in bringing the loom and the anvil to take their natural places by the side of the plough and the harrow."-Preface, pp. iii-iv.

2 "The plundered, unprotected, twenty-five million of geese-like farmers permit themselves to be plucked of almost every feather by a hundred thousand 'protected' monopolists. The fabricants live focalized in the cities and plot and scheme for the promotion of their selfish interests and bring their united lobby influence to bear on members of Congress, whereas the farmers live isolated and scattered, and can't or don't combine in defence of their interests. Hence, they are unprotected, unrepre-sented and unconscious of what keeps them poor. They are captivated by the specious cry of 'protection to American industry,' tho' they get none of it; and of the value of the 'protected' home markets to them, as if protected monopolists eat any more than other men."-Joseph Medill in the Chicago Tribune (quoted in Strange, The Farmers' Tariff Manual, p. 347).