recently asserted that a nation can only be paid for its exports
with its imports, it may not be amiss to make a few remarks
adapted to the understanding of the kindergarten class. Trade,
whether between the people of this republic, or those of Europe
and America, is, when reduced to the last analysis, nothing more
than an exchange of commodities. It may happen that we sell
largely to a country of which we buy but little; but the nations
that purchase of our debtor pay for our products. Our exports
usually exceed our imports, and for the simple reason that we owe
vast sums abroad, the surplus being employed in the payment of
interest and the discharge of our foreign indebtedness. When we
become a great creditor nation like England, our imports will
exceed our exports--we will begin to absorb the labor products of
foreign lands. If America received foreign gold for all her
exports it would be nothing more than a commodity weighed to her
at so much per ounce and which she might exchange at her good
pleasure for foreign goods, just as she does her cotton and corn.
Some gold crosses the sea; but it goes and comes just as go other
commodities--seeks the most advantageous market. A tariff wall,
by keeping foreign products OUT keep American products IN,
thereby narrowing our market and limiting production. If the
workman does not produce he cannot consume, and production
and consumption are the basis of railway business. But why, it
may be asked, would the railway corporations cut their own
throats by helping elect McKinley? Surely they understand their
business much better than does a Texas maverick-brander who
writes economic editorials while astride a mustang. Possibly so;
but it were well to remember that while it is evidently to the
interests of the stockholders of such a corporation that it
should prosper, the bond-owner, who is a kind of wholesale