From Sinn Féin, July 24, 1909.
The effect of the revised United States tariff on Irish exports is not likely to be far-reaching, but it slightly hurts our linen trade, which has already suffered considerably from the tariffs. Irish influence in the United States would be profitably employed in seeking to procure for Ireland a most-favoured-nation-treatment in respect of our linens. If it had been so employed in the past, there might be a considerably better state of affairs industrially in our country than there is at present. Twenty-eight years ago Ireland exported over £12,000,000 worth of goods annually to the United States. It now exports somewhere between two and three million pounds’ worth. That is, we have lost ten million pounds worth of trade with America, representing the upkeep of half-a-million people in Ireland, whilst we have been chasing phantoms and the bulk of our politicians have been bragging about American sympathy and American support. American sympathy and support is naturally and rightly for America first, but as America does not and cannot produce fine linens to equal ours, a differentiation in favour of Irish linens would not injure the United States, and would be no more than what nations from time to time accord to friendly nations under the heading of most-favoured treatment.
The Manchester economists with their formula of As-good-and-as-cheap can now set about explaining to an amused world how utterly ignorant of economics is the United States. The rigid protectionism of the new tariff if advocated by an Irishman as applied to Ireland would be derided by all the Manchester-mad Irishmen in Ireland. We produce in this country a number of people believing themselves thinkers and Nationalists who think the thoughts of third-rate Englishmen and whose nationalism begins and ends with a desire for freer political institutions in Ireland. They are sincere people; but they have been a potent Anglicising influence in this country, and it is to them we owe the great economic delusion which held, and partially still holds, Ireland in its grip.
After sixty years of Manchester economics the American tariff is thus described by the first of the English journals:—
‘The duties on about fifteen per cent of the imported merchandise have been advanced, and on rather less than ten percent they have been reduced. An examination of the schedules shows that the increases have been made wherever Mr. Aldrich believed it possible to establish a new industry, however small, in the United States, or to secure the manufacture at home of some article in the schedule which by reason of changes in manufacturing processes during the twelve years that the Dingley law has been in force, is insufficiently protected. As far as the writer has been able to ascertain, no reduction of duty has been made on any article in the manufacture of which it is possible for any other country to compete.’
The italics are ours. We italicise the sentence to impress the fact that the new American tariff policy is identical with the economic policy of Sinn Féin. The comment on it of the leading English journal is that ‘it constitutes a work of art in the international gallery of tariff legislation and deserves the place of honour. Its framers have industriously gathered in all the stray industries which Mr. MacKinley and Mr. Dingley overlooked, and when in full operation, in combination with its maximum provisions for combating hostile tariffs, its new methods of ascertaining cost to prevent under-valuation, its inquisitorial system of invoicing, and its improved administrative clauses; it will present to the foreign markets of the world the most formidable barrier that European importers have ever been called upon to scale.’
We believe the new American tariff spells the doom of Free Trade in England. The great interest behind Free Trade in England is the Transit interest—and if that be overcome by the Tariff Reformers, Free Trade, which was invented to give England control of the markets of the world, and failed in its object through the opposition of Germany, led by Frederick List, and the United States, led by List’s friends and our countryman, Henry Carey, will go to form another chapter in the history of English popular fallacies. So far as we are concerned, the change in England’s economic policy would be no benefit to us, unless we received an independent or semi-independent customs. For the present if Irishmen in Ireland studied List and Carey and Irishmen in America sought favoured-nation treatment for Irish goods we would be doing the best work to our hands in the region of high economics.