is likely to happen if America delays too long to reform her tariff? Mr. Hewitt shall answer again, "Our capacity to produce is now fully equal to our wants, and in most branches of business there are already indications that the demand is not fully equal to the supply. If, when the surplus comes, it cannot get an outlet, then it will not be produced; a portion of our labour will be unemployed, and no increase in the tariff, not even if the existing rates of duty were doubled, would provide an adequate remedy in such an emergency. Should these circumstances coincide with good harvests abroad, we shall have a great surplus of food upon our hands, and the price will fall; wages will go down with the fall in price; the reduction of wages will be resisted by strikes and lockouts; the conflicts between capital and labour will be reopened, and have indeed already begun; the prosperity of the country will be arrested; there will be a dearth of employment all over it; the volume of immigration will fall off, and the career of expansion and general development will be brought to a disastrous conclusion; the sad experience of 1873-79 will be repeated until, passing through the gates of suffering, poverty and want, the products of the country, weighted as they are with obstructive taxes, which must be deducted from the wages of labour, will force their way into the open markets of the world in spite of the tariff

Хойдой

1893-4

We shall then reach the era of free trade, but upon conditions which will deprive this generation of workmen of all the benefits they would have derived from it if the way had been properly prepared for its final triumph. Free trade must come, and, with wise statesmanship, the transition may be made, not only without disaster or suffering, but with immense benefit to the general welfare. With a failure to comprehend the situation, however, it will come through convulsions and revolutions, from the suffering and horrors of which I prefer to turn away in silence.

"But there is one aspect of the case to which I cannot shut my eyes. The whole structure and genius of our government must be changed to meet the primary necessity which will thus arise for preserving social order. With the general occurrence, of strikes and lockouts will come, as in the case of the railroad riots in 1877, the demand for the presence of troops, force will be met by force, a larger standing army will be demanded by public opinion and conceded by Congress, and the powers and rights of States will be subordinated to the superior vigour and resources of the national government. With a large standing army, acting as a national police, under an omnipotent executive, the era of free government will have passed away, and all that freedom has gained in a thousand years by the heroic struggles of our forefathers, or our own resistance to tyranny in the

new world, will be put in peril. Such a calamity can never come about except by the people of this country, and their representatives on this floor, failing to comprehend the spirit and neglecting the warnings of the time."*

* Speech of the Hon. A. S. Hewitt, delivered in the House of Representatives, March 30, 1882.

CHAPTER XVII.

BOSTON.

AN Englishman arriving for the first time at Boston is conscious of very different emotions from those with which he first beholds New York. Here, from the moment of landing to leaving, everything suggests the present and future; nothing even whispers of the past. He seems to sojourn in a great camp, elbowed by the excited soldiery of civilization, who march to unknown conquests, following the flag of fortune. The rudeness of some, and the luxury of other surroundings remind him, now of a soldier's rough quarters, now of the pomp of some great commander's tent. Mentally, he sees, everywhere, the preparation for a campaign, and hears, from dawn to dark, the trumpets of progress harshly braying.

Boston, on the other hand, is, like London, a city where commerce is a reigning king, rather than a military chief planning new invasions. Hence, while one talks of Wall Street and the Produce Exchange, of the Elevated Railroad and the Brooklyn Bridge, of Central

Park, Fifth Avenue, and of the "world, the flesh and the devil" in New York, one thinks, in Boston, of Miles Standish and the Puritan settlers, of General Gage and the Boston Boys, of the Stamp Act and the tea-ships, of Lexington and national independence.

Whether Miles Standish was really the first white man who ever landed on the shore of what is now Boston harbour is a matter of conjecture. Certain it is, however, that this stout Puritan soldier, "broad in the shoulders, deep chested, with muscles and sinews of iron," sailed with some ten companions from the Plymouth colony and landed upon the peninsula in 1621, “partly to see the country, partly to make peace with the Massachusetts Indians, and partly to procure their truck." After being feasted with lobsters and cod-fish, Standish made a treaty of friendship with Obbatinewat, the native lord of the soil, and the party returned to the bleak home of the Pilgrim Fathers, with a considerable quantity of beaver, a good report of the place, and "wishing we had seated ourselves there."

Five years after this, the first visit of the English to Boston harbour, the Rev. William Blackstone, an eccentric episcopal minister, squatted upon the peninsula, where he built a small cottage and lived a solitary life. Presently, in 1630, came Governor Winthrop from England, leading the party of Puritans who, as we know, founded the colony of Massachusett Bay, and who, four years after their first settlement, bought, for thirty