They are not protecting themselves from slave labor here. Barring a few
lines of industry, there are the same conditions of labor, production
and distribution both sides of the line. The only reason for a tariff
wall is their wish, or our wish, or the wish of each, to gain some
advantage at the expense of the other party. Now every business man
knows that any trade that benefits one and injures the other party to it
is bad business, as well as bad ethics, in the long run. Good business
benefits both traders all the time.

On the other hand, when it comes to protecting our labor from
competition with slave labor in other quarters of the earth, we have not
only the right, but the duty to do it. So when it is a matter of
protecting our industries from being swamped by the unloading of vast
quantities of goods, produced under the feverish and abnormal
conditions, sure to prevail in Europe after the War, we have again, not
only the right, but the duty to do it.

Finally, a still higher call is upon us: we must somehow rise to the
point of placing humanity above the nation. It is true, "Charity begins
at home," certainly justice should. One should educate one's own
children, before worrying over the children of the neighborhood; clean
up one's own town, before troubling about the city further away. Often
the whole is helped best by serving the part; but it is with national
patriotism as it is with family affection. The latter is a lovely
quality and the source of much that is best in the world; but when
family affection is an instrument for gaining special privilege at the
expense of the good of society, a means of attaining debauching luxury
and selfish aggrandisement, it is an abomination. The man who prays
God's blessing on himself, his wife and his children, and nobody else,
is a mean man, and he never gets blessed--not from God. Similarly, the