But, secondly, it is said that protection increases the number of
industries, thereby diversifying labor and making a variety in the
occupations of a people who otherwise might be confined to a single
branch of employment. This argument proceeds upon the assumption that
there would be no diversification of labor without protection. In other
words, it is assumed that but for protection our people would devote
themselves to agriculture. This, however, is not true. Even if a
community were purely agricultural, the necessities of the situation
would make diversification of industry. There must be blacksmiths,
and shoemakers, and millers, and merchants, and carpenters, and other
artisans. To each one of these employments, as population increases,
more and more will devote themselves, and with each year new demands
will spring up, which will create new industries to supply them. I was
born in the midst of a splendid farming country. The business of nine
tenths of the people of my native county was farming. My intelligent
boyhood was spent there from 1850 to 1860, when there was no tariff for
protection. There were thriving towns for the general trading. There
were woollen mills and operatives. There were flouring mills and
millers. There were iron founders and their employes. There were
artisans of every description. There were grocers and merchants, with
every variety of goods and wares for sale; there were banks and
bankers; there was all the diversification of industry that a thriving,
industrious, and intelligent community required; not established by
protection nor by government aid, but growing naturally out of the
wants and necessities of the people. Such a diversification is always
healthful, because it is natural, and will continue so long as the
people are industrious and thrifty. The diversification which protection
makes is forced and artificial. Suppose protection had come to my native
county to further diversify industries. It would have begun by giving
higher prices to some industry already established, or profits greater