If by either of these two courses more American labor can be put back to work, thereby increasing the purchasing power of our people so that they will have more money to buy the products of our industries, and so that the burden of unemployment relief on our taxpayers may be lightened, the result will be an increase in national welfare which, in the long run, will benefit every citizen in the Nation, even though some particular factory in New Jersey, Ohio, or Massachusetts may lose an artificial Government-given advantage in expanding its business, according to this present bill.

That is what I mean by the new protectionism as embodied, it seems to me, in this bill, a national policy of protection for the national welfare, rather than for the particular local, selfish welfare of particular localities and factories which wish to expand at the expense of the whole people.

Protectionists usually pride themselves on being nationalists. I was glad to hear the gentleman from Michigan say yesterday that he was a nationalist, and I am sorry he is not here this morning so I can tell him how glad I was.

If protectionists are truly nationalists, there is no better time or opportunity for them to show it than here and now.

Nationalism does not mean the protection of some local interest, or any number of local interests, to a point which cuts down and paralyzes and destroys the purchasing power of our people. That kind of protection is not protection and it is not national. It is antinational because it weakens the economic vitality of the Nation as a whole in return for a local advantage that is illusory and unreal, since, in the last analysis, no locality within the Nation can truly prosper by itself if the Nation does not prosper, if the springs of national prosperity are choked and dried up, any more than any part of the body can live and function without the other parts.

No, gentlemen; too frequently our protectionist friends are not nationalists at all. I am reminded of what is said to have been the shortest tariff speech on record, and one of the best ever delivered on that subject. It was delivered down in Virginia at a political rally a good many years ago, and it was to this effect.

This is what the

speaker said. "My friends", he said, "this tariff question is really very simple. The tariff is like a cow; she has her mouth down South and her udder up North, and what we would like to do down here is just to reverse that cow."

That is the spirit in which we have grown accustomed to approach the tariff question in this country.

I was glad to hear my friend, the ranking minority member on this committee, say that he represented a little district up in western Massachusetts. I know that country and I love it, and, indeed, as a taxpayer up there I am a sort of constituent of the honorable Member from the First District of Massachusetts, since I pay taxes within his district.

Mr. TREADWAY. You show wonderfully good judgment.

Mr. DICKINSON. But I was also reminded of another Member from Massachusetts who, on an historic occasion, said he was here not to speak as a Massachusetts man, not as a northern man, but as an American.

Gentlemen, I do not believe that western Massachusetts can long remain prosperous unless the Nation prospers, or unless western

Massachusetts chooses to interpret prosperity in terms of living on blueberries in the summer and maple sugar in the winter.

Mr. TREADWAY. And snowballs.

Mr. DICKINSON. Our country has grown rich and strong as a result of the wisdom of the fathers of our Government in guaranteeing an unobstructed interchange of goods throughout the length and breadth of this land. That absence of barriers and the resulting ebb and flow of industry and trade have from time to time deprived Massachusetts of a good many factories and industries, but, as Mr. O'Brien pointed out yesterday, their place has always been taken by other factories and other industries more numerous and more productive. Apparent loss has continually been transmuted into actual gain in the alembic of national propserity, and Massachusetts is better off today than ever before. That is the true doctrine of nationalism.

Coming down to the specific purpose of this bill, and the specific way in which it will operate, the question has properly been asked how this bill will operate to increase American exports beyond their present low level.

I would suggest that that is not its only purpose. Its purpose is at least to maintain them where they may be, so far as possible at their present level, without subjecting them to a further decrease from continually mounting tariff barriers abroad.

How will the bill operate toward those ends? I can conceive of at least three ways.

In the first place its operation may not require any decrease in duties at all. The President may make an agreement with a particular foreign country whereby this country will agree not to raise duties on one or more types of articles imported from that particular country, if the country in question will, in return, agree either to lower, or not to increase duties on American goods, or to take some specified quantity of American goods which will represent a larger total than it has been taking from us recently, or a larger total than it might otherwise take from us.

That is the first way in which this bill will make it possible to increase, or at least to protect our exports, without in any way lowering the duties supposed to exist for the protection of American industry.

I can conceive of another and a second way in which the powers proposed to be conferred by this bill may be used to protect and increase our export trade.

There are many articles in our tariff schedule on which a very high rate of duty is charged, although the articles are not produced in the United States at all. The duty is imposed on them because they might conceivably in some sort of way be used as substitutes for something that is produced in the United States, and out of an excess of caution the American producers of these latter articles have reached out and closed the door to their admission.

That caution is frequently, I believe, perfectly unjustified, particularly where the foreign article is a fine and high-grade product, while the American substitute is a cheaper product, made by massproduction methods.

For example, the very heavy duty on hand-made lace, which is not produced in the United States at all, and which our labor people are not qualified to produce, does not mean that the people who would

otherwise use the imported hand-made lace use the cheaper machinemade lace of this country. It only means that less lace is used on very high-grade and expensive garments. The maker or the wearer of the high-grade garment will not descend to the use of the lower quality local lace.

Similarly, if the very high duty on high-grade linen damask tablecloths were lowered, I do not believe it would mean that we would use less of the cheap cotton variety manufactured in this country. It would mean that we would probably go back to the fashion of setting our tables, using tablecloths more frequently.

Period furniture was mentioned here yesterday. The fact that the duty on period furniture is so high as to keep a great many people from buying it does not mean that those people will buy any more of the Grand Rapids product.

If we are to permit an extensive importation of champagne from France, at a reasonable rate of duty, I do not believe it would necessarily mean that any less of the California product would be sold, since the cost of the French champagne would bring it within the reach of a different class of users.

It may be said that all these articles are luxuries, and so they are, but that does not necessarily mean that under a wise tariff policy they would mount up into many millions of dollars, which we could well afford to expend in exchange for exports of our staple commodities, because every dollar used on a luxury would go into the wages spent for the employment of men in the making of the staples, and be used to pay for the luxury article in the exchange of commodities between countries.

It is precisely luxuries which a rich nation that produces staple commodities may reasonably be expected to import, and every dollar spent for such imports serves to give work to the American producers of the staples, who probably would not otherwise be employed.

In buying these luxuries with out exports, we are not wasting our substance, because we are supporting our American farmers and workers who produce the exports.

A proper development of imports of this kind would represent no interference with the development of American industry, since our whole industrial system is geared up to mass-production methods, which would render it uneconomic and unwise to attempt to develop here the production of luxury goods on any scale that would justify the exclusion of such imports from abroad.

There is a third way that I would like to suggest, in which the powers here granted might be exercised, and that would be in connection with the imports of articles, chiefly raw materials, which the United States produces to some extent, but which experience has shown that it cannot produce to anything like the extent of our domestic requirements, and which must, therefore, be imported in relatively large quantities.

Here a flat reduction of the duty, taken by itself, might result in some damage to domestic reduction, but this result could be avoided by an agreement with a particular country, which would provide that the decreased duty should apply only to the quantity of imports from that country which has normally been coming in, and in return for such a concession, or agreement, if you will, to receive a given quantity of imports, it might well be possible to secure from the country

in question either lower duties for our products, or at least a guaranteed outlet for some of our exports.

I would like now to refer to a very practical instance of the way in which the tariff bargaining powers conferred by this bill could be used to prevent one of the developments which this committee is most interested in preventing, namely, the moving of American factories to foreign countries.

One of the principal reasons why American factories move to a foreign country is because that country in which they have already established a market raises its duties to a point where they can no longer send their products in from the United States.

Only yesterday, there came to my desk in the Department of Commerce a letter from an American manufacturing concern, saying that that had a long established market in a particular foreign country, and that that market was now threatened by the fact that the country in question was about the raise its import duties on their products to a prohibitive level, so it would be absolutely necessary for them to go down there and establish a local factory, unless, through some agreement between the two countries, the threatened increase in duties did not occur.

That is precisely the kind of situation to which this pending bill is meant to apply, and it affords practically the only available remedy I can conceive of against the progressive restriction of trade which is going on throughout all the world and strangling all countries.

Is there anything in the operation of this bill, which I have just described, which should rouse any fear in the friends of reasonable protection in the national interest? It threatens no established industry and no vested interest; rather, it affords better safeguards for them than now exist.

All that it does threaten is the claim of particular local interests to an illusory right to expand at the expense of the whole Nation, and of the workers in our export industries, who are thrown out of work while this process of expansion is supposed to be occurring.

I have been interested to note that the main argument which has been made against this bill is not that it threatens established industries, but that it runs counter to the theory that we ought to keep out of the country any article which can possibly be manufactured here, no matter how small the scale on which we happen to be making it at the present time.

In that argument there is revealed the difference between what I would like to characterize as the futile, destructive doctrine of high protectionism and the doctrine of reasonable protection to American workers and American industry.

Let us look for a moment at this doctrine that we ought not to open the door to any products that we can possibly make in this country. It has been coupled here with another doctrine, that we ought not even to insist that the article can be made efficiently here, and it has also been coupled in practice with the corollary that we ought not to import, at least in the field of manufactured goods, any article which which can be used as a substitute for an article that can possibly be manufactured here.

It is these three doctrines in combination which have largely brought us to the point where we are today in our international trade.

What really do they mean when analyzed in terms of protection to American workers and American industry?

The argument that if it is possible to produce an article in this country, no matter how inefficiently, we ought not to buy that article from abroad, means obviously that a great deal less of the article will be bought, and meanwhile that the American labor and capital which otherwise would be employed in manufacturing things which would be sent abroad to purchase an article abroad will remain without employment, while as to these smaller quantities of the articles in question, in the meanwhile we will not make the things we can make efficiently and ship abroad to pay for those articles, if they are brought in.

This result diminishes in both directions the supply of goods available for the use of the people of this country. That is what Secretary Wallace meant when he was asked how this would affect the national welfare, and he said it would reduce the quantity of enjoyable and consumable goods made for the use of the American people.

Of course, there is a world of difference between efficiency and mere cheapness, and when I say an article cannot be produced efficiently in this country, I do not mean that we ought to produce the cheap and nasty articles produced abroad under improper conditions, but if we flatly pursue the policy of throwing efficiency out of the window, we cannot continue to maintain the high standard of living of our people, to which such frequent reference has been made. The high standard of living is not due to the fact that the American people are an inefficient people living behind a protective tariff wall and being held up and supported in their inefficiency by governmental means. The high standard of living of the American people is due to the fact that they are the most efficient people in the world, and that, as has been repeatedly said, our wages are higher than those paid anywhere else in the world. And our labor costs compare favorably with the labor costs in countries where the laboring man gets a great deal less of the product.

We were able to bury our heads in the sand and conceal the impalatable truth for ourselves during recent years through keeping up our exports by extending loans to the foreigners who purchased them, but the time has come when we cannot any longer continue that self-deception.

I submit, if we would see in its true light the doctrine that we ought not to import any article which can be used as a substitute for articles that can be manufactured here, I suggest that we should apply that doctrine to the field of agriculture and raw materials to see just what it means.

The statement has been made here that agriculture has been given the same protection as manufactured goods. I deny that that is so, so far as respects protection against possible substitutes, but there is no reason why the same principle does not apply.

We import great quantities of silk from Japan. If we did not do so we might possibly use more cotton. I do not believe that we probably would, but on this line of argument we have to assume if we do not import silk we would use more cotton, and on the protectionist theory, which has been advanced here, I see no reason why it should not be proposed to exclude our importations of silk, and naturally, the effect would be to cut off our exports of cotton to

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