I am very glad indeed to have this opportunity to address the two Houses
directly and to verify for myself the impression that the President of
the United States is a person, not a mere department of the Government
hailing Congress from some isolated island of jealous power, sending
messages, not speaking naturally and with his own voice--that he is a
human being trying to cooeperate with other human beings in a common
service. After this pleasant experience I shall feel quite normal in all
our dealings with one another.[B]
I have called the Congress together in extraordinary session because a
duty was laid upon the party now in power at the recent elections which
it ought to perform promptly, in order that the burden carried by the
people under existing law may be lightened as soon as possible and in
order, also, that the business interests of the country may not be kept
too long in suspense as to what the fiscal changes are to be to which
they will be required to adjust themselves. It is clear to the whole
country that the tariff duties must be altered. They must be changed to
meet the radical alteration in the conditions of our economic life which
the country has witnessed within the last generation. While the whole
face and method of our industrial and commercial life were being changed
beyond recognition the tariff schedules have remained what they were
before the change began, or have moved in the direction they were given
when no 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 heels of the tariff changes, if not accompany them,
of which the chief is the reform of our banking and currency laws; but
just now I refrain. For the present, I put these matters on one side and
think only of this one thing--of the changes in our fiscal system which
may best serve to open once more the free channels of prosperity to a
great people whom we would serve to the utmost and throughout both rank
and file.