the Catholic Church in Ireland is Protestant England. If that were once realized for the fact it unquestionably is, we should not then have Ulster taking up, and Nonconformist England mechanically echoing, the cry that Home Rule means Rome Rule. It is English Rule that means Rome Rule. It is the British trick or policy of ignoring the Catholic laity in Ireland and of dealing over their heads with the Church direct that, as much as anything else, buttresses and perpetuates the temporal power of Irish Catholicism. Home Rule would eventually tear that power to pieces. Is there a country where the people, once masters in their own house, have tolerated indefinitely the domination of the Church in their schools and universities? The enfranchisement of the Irish mind will be, I admit, a process uniquely protracted, incalculably slow. But to doubt its inevitability when once the people are placed in charge of their own destinies is simply to write down all human history a lie. Home Rule, so far from spelling Rome Rule, spells Rome Ruin.

What, then, is the true attitude of the Church towards the master-question of Irish politics? Does the Hierarchy really and sincerely favor an autonomy which sooner or later would infallibly loosen and then destroy ecclesiastical control of popular education? Confronted with the choice between sacrificing its hold over the schools and sacrificing Home Rule, which would it choose? Is the Church in its secret heart Nationalist first and Catholic afterwards, or Catholic first and Nationalist afterwards? Finding in England and the English connection, and the political bargains to which that connection gives rise, an effective and durable bulwark against an educated laity already muttering in revolt, is it genuinely anxious to see the barrier torn down? These are questions that admit at present of no clear and decisive answer. Even to consider them is to find oneself launched on a vast and all but trackless but not necessarily unprofitable ocean of speculation. I think, however, that sooner or later the Irish intelligence will burst its clerical leading-strings and insist on mapping out for itself the lines of its future progress. Movements of discontent, in and out of the Church, are already vaguely discernible. The emancipation of the Irish mind-the most needed of all Irish revolutions-has already begun.

(To be Concluded.)

SYDNEY BROOKS.

THE TARIFF MAKE-BELIEVE.

BY WOODROW WILSON.

THE wrong settlement of a great public question is no settlement at all. The Payne-Aldrich tariff bill, therefore, which its authors would fain regard as a settlement of the tariff question, is no settlement at all. It is miscellaneously wrong in detail and radically wrong in principle. It disturbs more than it settles, and by its very failure to settle forces the tariff question forward into a new and much more acute stage.

It is so obviously impossible to settle the question satisfactorily in the way these gentlemen have attempted to settle it; it is so evident that men of their mind and with their attitude towards the economic interests of the country can never settle it that thinking men of every kind realize at last that new men and new principles of action must be found. These gentlemen do not know the way and cannot find it. They "revised" the tariff, indeed, but by a method which was a grand make-believe from beginning to end. They may have convinced themselves of the intelligence and integrity of the process, but they have convinced nobody else. The country must now go to the bottom of the matter and obtain what it wants.

It has gone to the bottom of it at some points already, and the process will be carried very far before it is through with it. In the first place, it is the general opinion throughout the country that this particular revision was chiefly pretence, and that it is the first time that we have had tariff legislation of this kind. The McKinley tariff bill and the Dingley tariff bill, whatever may be thought of their wisdom or of their validity as acts of statesmanship, were unquestionably frank and genuine. There was no concealment or make-believe about either their purpose or their character. No doubt many things were accomplished by

them of which the public knew nothing and was intended to know nothing. Not all the advantages gained by this, that or the other industry from legislation of that kind could be explained to the public without creating inconvenient comment and startling questions that might cut very deep; but that is true of all legislation which is meant to give particular classes of citizens a special economic assistance or advantage. Private favors will inevitably creep in. But no one was deceived. The men who put those measures through had no doubt that they had the support of the country in doing so. They gave the country what they thought opinion would sustain: gave it what they honestly supposed that it wanted. But no one who is capable of assessing opinion now can possibly claim that that is what the men who were behind the Payne-Aldrich legislation did. They knew that they were not giving the country what it wanted, and the more thoughtful and statesmanlike among them deeply regretted that they could not. There was a process almost of haphazard in the construction of the House bill, and mere false leadership and chicanery produced the bill which the Senate substituted for it and which largely prevailed in conference.

The methods by which tariff bills are constructed have now become all too familiar and throw a significant light on the character of the legislation involved. Debate in the Houses has little or nothing to do with it. The process by which such a bill is made is private, not public; because the reasons which underlie many of the rates imposed are private. The stronger faction of the Ways and Means Committee of the House makes up the preliminary bill, with the assistance of "experts" whom it permits the industries most concerned to supply for its guidance. The controlling members of the Committee also determine what amendments, if any, shall be accepted, either from the minority faction of the Committee or from the House itself. It permits itself to be dictated to, if at all, only by the imperative action of a party caucus. The stronger faction of the Finance Committee of the Senate, in like fashion, frames the bill which it intends to substitute for the one sent up from the House. It is often to be found at work on it before any bill reaches it from the popular chamber. The compromise between the two measures is arranged in private conference by conferees drawn from the two committees. What takes place in the committees

and in the conference is confidential. It is considered impertinent for reporters to inquire. It is admitted to be the business of the manufacturers concerned, but not the business of the public, who are to pay the rates. The debates which the country is invited to hear in the open sessions of the Houses are merely formal. They determine nothing and disclose very little.

It is the policy of silence and secrecy, indeed, with regard to the whole process that makes it absolutely inconsistent with every standard of public duty and political integrity. If the newspapers published and the public read even the debates, empty of significance as they generally are, the entire country would presently realize how flagrant the whole make-believe is. The committees under whose guidance the bills are put through the Houses disclose nothing that is not wrung from them by members who have made investigations of their own and who insist upon having their questions answered; and there are few enough who have the audacity or take the trouble. But here and there a fact is dragged out, and before the encounters of debate are over enough has been brought to the light to make extremely instructive reading. It is devoutly to be wished,-merely to cite examples,-that every voter in the United States had read, or would yet read, the debates in the Senate on the duty on electric carbons, the carbons used in the arc-lights in all our cities,and on the duty on razors. Every detail is a commentary on the whole depressing business.

One extraordinary circumstance of the debates in the Senate should receive more than a passing allusion. The Republican party platform had promised that the tariff rates should be revised and that the standard of revision should be the differences between the cost of producing the various articles affected in this country and in the countries with which our manufacturers compete. One of our chief industrial competitors is now Germany, with its extraordinary skill in manufacture and the handicrafts and its formidable sagacity in foreign trade; and the Department of State, in order to enable Congress the more intelligently to fulfil the promises of the party, had, at the suggestion of the President, requested the German Government to furnish it with as full information as possible about the rates of wages paid in the leading industries in that country,-wages being known, of course, to be one of the largest items in the cost of production.

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The German Government of course complied, with its usual courtesy and thoroughness, transmitting an interesting report, each portion of which was properly authenticated and vouched for. The Department of State placed it at the disposal of the Finance Committee of the Senate. But Senators tried in vain to ascertain what it contained. Mr. Aldrich spoke of it contemptuously as "anonymous," which of course it was not, as unofficial," and even as an impertinent attempt, on the part of the German Government, to influence our tariff legislation. It was only too plain that the contents of the report made the members of the controlling faction of the Finance Committee very uncomfortable indeed. It undoubtedly showed, what independent private inquiries readily enough confirm, that the wages paid to skilled laborers in Germany are practically as great as those paid in the United States, the difference in the cost of living in the two countries being taken into consideration. To have made it public would have been to upset half the arguments for the rates proposed with which the committee had been misinforming the country. It would no doubt have explained, for example, why the skilled grinders of Solingen do not think it worth their while to emigrate to America and oblige almost all razor-makers in other countries to send their blades to them to be ground,— and many another matter left studiously undebated, unexplained, about which Senators had been asking for information. It would have proved that the leaders of the party were deliberately breaking its promise to the country. It was, therefore, thrown into a pigeonhole and disregarded. It was a private document.

In pursuance of the same policy of secrecy and private management, the bill was filled with what those who discovered them were good-natured or cynical enough to call "jokers,"-clauses whose meaning did not lie upon the surface, whose language was meant not to disclose its meaning to the members of the Houses who were to be asked to enact them into law, but only to those by whom the law was to be administered after its enactment. This was one of the uses to which the "experts" were put whom the committees encouraged to advise them. They knew the technical words under which meanings could be hidden, or the apparently harmless words which had a chance to go unnoted or unchallenged. Electric carbons had been taxed at ninety cents per hundred; the new bill taxed them at seventy cents per hun