Mere party issues never counted with me. I have read too much and seen
too much. At my present time of life they count not at all. I used to
think that there was a principle involved between the dogmas of Free
Trade and Protection as they were preached by their respective
attorneys. Yet what was either except the ancient, everlasting scheme—
—“_The good old rôle—the simple plan, That they should take who have
the power And they should keep who can_.”
How little wisdom one man may get from another man’s counsels, one
nation may get from another nation’s history, can be partly computed
when we reflect how often our personal experience has failed in warning
admonition.
Temperament and circumstance do indeed cut a prodigious figure in life.
Traversing the older countries, especially Spain, the most
illustrative, the wayfarer is met at all points by what seems not
merely the logic of events, but the common law of the inevitable. The
Latin of the Sixteenth century was a recrudescence of the Roman of the
First. He had not, like the Mongolian, lived long enough to become a
stoic. He was mainly a cynic and an adventurer. Thence he flowered into
a sybarite. Coming to great wealth with the discoveries of Columbus and
the conquests of Pizarro and Cortes, he proceeded to enjoy its fruits
according to his fancy and the fashion of the times.
He erected massive shrines to his deities. He reared noble palaces. He
built about his cathedrals and his castles what were then thought to be
great cities, walled and fortified. He was, for all his
self-sufficiency and pride, short-sighted; and yet, until they arrived,
how could he foresee the developments of artillery? They were as hidden
from him as three centuries later the wonders of electricity were
hidden from us.
I was never a Free Trader. I stood for a tariff for revenue as the
least oppressive and safest support of Government. The protective
system in the United States, responsible for our unequal distribution
of wealth, took at least its name from Spain, and the Robber Barons, as
I used to call the Protectionists of Pennsylvania, were not of
immediate German origin.
Truth to say, both on land and water Spain has made a deal of history,
and the front betwixt Gibraltar and the Isle of San Fernando—Tangier on
one side and the Straits of Tarifa on the other—Cape Trafalgar, where
Nelson fought the famous battle, midway between them—has had its share.
Tarifa! What memories it invokes! In the olden and golden days of
primitive man, before corporation lawyers had learned how to frame
pillaging statutes, and rascally politicians to bamboozle confiding
constituencies—thus I used to put it—the gentle pirates of Tarifa laid
broad and deep the foundations for the Protective System in the United
States.
It was a fruitful as well as a congenial theme, and I rang all the
changes on it. To take by law from one man what is his and give it to
another man who has not earned it and has no right to it, I showed to
be an invention of the Moors, copied by the Spaniards and elevated
thence into political economy by the Americans. Tarifa took its name
from Tarif-Ben-Malik, the most enterprising Robber Baron of his day,
and thus the Lords of Tarifa were the progenitors of the Robber Barons
of the Black Forest, New England and Pittsburgh. Tribute was the name
the Moors gave their robbery, which was open and aboveboard. The Coal
Kings, the Steel Kings and the Oil Kings of the modern world have
contrived to hide the process; but in Spain the palaces of their
forefathers rise in lonely and solemn grandeur just as a thousand years
hence the palaces upon the Fifth Avenue side of Central Park and along
Riverside Drive, not to mention those of the Schuylkill and the
Delaware, may become but roosts for bats and owls, and the chronicler
of the Anthropophagi, “whose heads do reach the skies,” may tell how
the voters of the Great Republic were bought and sold with their own
money, until “Heaven released the legions north of the North Pole, and
they swooped down and crushed the pulpy mass beneath their avenging
snowshoes.” The gold that was gathered by the Spaniards and fought over
so valiantly is scattered to the four ends of the earth. It may be as
potent to-day as then; but it does not seem nearly so heroic. A good
deal of it has found its way to London, which a short century and a
half ago “had not,” according to Adam Smith, “sufficient wealth to
compete with Cadiz.” We have had our full share without fighting for
it. Thus all things come to him who contrives and waits.
Meanwhile, there are “groups” and “rings.” And, likewise, “leaders” and
“bosses.” What do they know or care about the origins of wealth; about
Venice; about Cadiz; about what is said of Wall Street? The Spanish
Main was long ago stripped of its pillage. The buccaneers took
themselves off to keep company with the Vikings. Yet, away down in
those money chests, once filled with what were pieces of eight and
ducats and doubloons, who shall say that spirits may not lurk and
ghosts walk, one old freebooter wheezing to another old freebooter:
“They order these things better in the ‘States.’”