Cullom, Shelby M.; Carey, Joseph Maull; Hoar, George Frisbie; Palmer, John McAuley [1894], 'The Revenue Bill: Speech of Hon. Shelby M. Cullom, of Illinois, in the Senate of the United States, Friday, June 8, 1894' in 'The Congressional Record: Containing the Proceedings and Debates of the Fifty-Third Congress, Second Session' (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office ) Permission: Northern Illinois University.

[p. 5952]
Mr. Cullom (Republican Senator from Illinois):

The Republican policy is and always has been to dignify and benefit American labor, and that can best be done by generous protective legislation. The Democratic majority seems now determined by every effort to degrade labor and force Northern intelligent laborers into a wage competition with the negro laborer, made cheap and servile by methods long familiar to the statesmen of the South.

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Washington and Madison agreed upon the necessity and constitutionality of protection to American manufactures and American industry and labor. The very ablest men in Congress defended and advocated protection, and its constitutionality was undoubted by them. In fact, the entire and only objection made, or opposition then manifested, was by those who opposed the new government which had just been organized in place of the Confederation, then defunct.

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The first necessary characteristic of any nation is, that it must possess the power to maintain and protect itself as against the world. And the first law of any republican nation, is that it must have the power to protect its people in their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. "Blood is thicker than water," and a republic shall therefore look first to its own people, its own children, as its own blood relations, whose interests are identical with its won welfare, and whose relations with the Government are mutual and reciprocal.

I may add here that it has seemed to me throughout the discussion of this great question that our friends upon the opposite side of this aisle have seemed to be more interested in the welfare of other governments and people than our own. I think that was illustrated yesterday in the discussion of the agricultural schedule, when our friends upon the other side in charge of this bill insisted, and they continue to insist, that as between the people of this country and those of Canada the Canadians must have the advantage, which they will inevitably have under this tariff bill as it stands before the Senate to day, in competition with the agricultural people of our country.

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[p. 5954]

What I favor and hope to see yet adopted before we get through with the bill is a provision which will put this country at least upon a fair basis as compared with the other nations of the world. In other words, what I most strongly desire is that such a policy shall be adopted as will protect the great body of the laboring people of this country, so that our industries may be carried on and that the wages of American citizens shall not be reduced in order to carry them on. I have already introduced a substitute for the pending bill which I hope may yet be adopted.

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A revenue tariff, pure and simple, is a misnomer and an impossibility. It is merely a halfway house between free trade and protection, a neutral ground where cowards may meet as under a truce to concoct unholy compromises and base compacts between sugar trusts and lead trusts and questionable "combines," to the injury of legitimate commercial and agricultural and manufacturing interests. Dignified and worthy Senators console themselves with the idea that the compound of free trade and State rights is vastly more palatable when it is labeled "tariff reform" than when it was called by its true and proper designation of nullification and disunion.

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[p. 5957]

The McKinley law is not a perfect law, and when we again get control of the Congress of the United States we will revise it, unless a commission is appointed to do it in the meantime. We will revise it upon the line of reasonable protection to American industry and to the great body of the laborers in this country. I can not let the opportunity go by without saying that in this Republic we can not afford, if we mean that this Government as a republic shall endure, to adopt a policy which will result in pauperizing and degrading the great laboring population of our country. My chief end and aim in the revision of the tariff is simply to put our industries on a plane where they can live and where they will have no excuse for the reduction of wages to the great body of the laboring people of our country. Our republican institutions demand it; intelligence and schools and all that is good in society and Government demand that the wages of the great body of the people of this country shall be maintained at reasonable rates. Humanity demands it.

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The very condition of this country to-day proves it, because when the mills are shut up, when the mines are closed, when the factories are closed, when men are out of work and consequently out of money, the result is that they can not buy what they want and what they ought to have as good citizens and as freemen in this country. So, even if agricultural products have no specific duties laid upon them, I maintain that it is in the interest of the farmers that a protective tariff should be maintained upon manufactures and other articles, because men at work, getting good wages in the mills and prosperous, create a market for the products of the agriculturists surrounding them.

But I maintain at the same time that we ought to give protection to the agriculturists directly as well as to the manufacturers. My distinguished friend from Missouri [Mr. VEST] says: "Oh, protection to agricultural products is a mere myth." I say if it is a myth why should you object? He says it is a fraud. How is it a fraud? If it gives no protection it ought not to be considered a fraud. The Democratic party in their platform denounce protection as a fraud, because it did give protection, and then they turn around and say because they think protection does not give protection to wheat and other articles it is a fraud as well. I say when $15,000,000 and more of wheat and corn is coming into this country, it certainly does no harm and it may do some good to maintain a protective tariff; and so far as I am concerned I should make it so high as to prohibit the importation of foreign wheat and corn into this country from any other country.

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[p. 5962]

The aggregate number of manufacturing establishments in Illinois amount to 20,482. The aggregate capital, I think it is, amounts to $502,004,512. I will skip those figures and get on. The average number emoployed in those manufacturing establishments numbers 312,198; that is, the men at work. Adding to that the clerks, etc., connected with the establishments, the number amounts to nearly 400,000. The total wages paid to the men — last year, I suppose — amounts to $171,523,579. Adding to that amount the amount paid to the clerks, $27,086,400, it makes a sum of nearly $200,000,000 a year paid in the State of Illinois in connection with these manufacturing establishments in our State.

Now, Mr. President, while those establishments are running and the men employed in them are receiving that vast sum of wages, I desire to know whether that does not have a beneficial effect upon the farmers of that section as well as upon the men engaged in the establishments themselves. I say that it does. When my colleague says that this protective tariff is an oppression upon the farmers because, he says, they get no direct benefit from it, I say that the indirect benefit coming to them as the result of the operation of those establishments, the employment of nearly half a million men results in money being distributed which reaches the farmers, and they are benefited thereby, because the establishments are in our own neighborhood in many cases, and they would be a benefit even if they were distant. So, I believe in a protective tariff; and I do not believe that this Government can prosper unless we have a protective system such as our fathers had and such as the Republican party advocated and maintained when it had power in this country.