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.'"