President Wilsons Addresses | Page 8

large circumstance of our industrial development
was what it is to-day. Our task is to square them with the actual facts.
The sooner that is done the sooner we shall escape from suffering from
the facts and the sooner our men of business will be free to thrive by
the law of nature (the nature of free business) instead of by the law of
legislation and artificial arrangement.
We have seen tariff legislation wander very far afield in our day--very
far indeed from the field in which our prosperity might have had a
normal growth and stimulation. No one who looks the facts squarely in
the face or knows anything that lies beneath the surface of action can
fail to perceive the principles upon which recent tariff legislation has
been based. We long ago passed beyond the modest notion of
"protecting" the industries of the country and moved boldly forward to
the idea that they were entitled to the direct patronage of the
Government. For a long time--a time so long that the men now active in
public policy hardly remember the conditions that preceded it--we have
sought in our tariff schedules to give each group of manufacturers or
producers what they themselves thought that they needed in order to
maintain a practically exclusive market as against the rest of the world.
Consciously or unconsciously, we have built up a set of privileges and
exemptions from competition behind which it was easy by any, even
the crudest, forms of combination to organize monopoly; until at last
nothing is normal, nothing is obliged to stand the tests of efficiency and
economy, in our world of big business, but everything thrives by
concerted arrangement. Only new principles of action will save us from
a final hard crystallization of monopoly and a complete loss of the
influences that quicken enterprise and keep independent energy alive.
It is plain what those principles must be. We must abolish everything
that bears even the semblance of privilege or of any kind of artificial
advantage, and put our business men and producers under the
stimulation of a constant necessity to be efficient, economical, and
enterprising, masters of competitive supremacy, better workers and
merchants than any in the world. Aside from the duties laid upon
articles which we do not, and probably cannot, produce, therefore, and
the duties laid upon luxuries and merely for the sake of the revenues

they yield, the object of the tariff duties henceforth laid must be
effective competition, the whetting of American wits by contest with
the wits of the rest of the world.
It would be unwise to move toward this end headlong, with reckless
haste, or with strokes that cut at the very roots of what has grown up
amongst us by long process and at our own invitation. It does not alter
a thing to upset it and break it and deprive it of a chance to change. It
destroys it. We must make changes in our fiscal laws, in our fiscal
system, whose object is development, a more free and wholesome
development, not revolution or upset or confusion. We must build up
trade, especially foreign trade. We need the outlet and the enlarged
field of energy more than we ever did before. We must build up
industry as well, and must adopt freedom in the place of artificial
stimulation only so far as it will build, not pull down. In dealing with
the tariff the method by which this may be done will be a matter of
judgment, exercised item by item. To some not accustomed to the
excitements and responsibilities of greater freedom our methods may in
some respects and at some points seem heroic, but remedies may be
heroic and yet be remedies. It is our business to make sure that they are
genuine remedies. Our object is clear. If our motive is above just
challenge and only an occasional error of judgment is chargeable
against us, we shall be fortunate.
We are called upon to render the country a great service in more
matters than one. Our responsibility should be met and our methods
should be thorough, as thorough as moderate and well considered,
based upon the facts as they are, and not worked out as if we were
beginners. We are to deal with the facts of our own day, with the facts
of no other, and to make laws which square with those facts. It is best,
indeed it is necessary, to begin with the tariff. I will urge nothing upon
you now at the opening of your session which can obscure that first
object or divert our energies from that clearly defined duty. At a later
time I may take the liberty of calling your attention to reforms which
should press close upon the