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.
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