you have the general benefit of the country as your standard, you have a principle upon which it is as legitimate to withdraw protection as to give it.

It may seem like a vague principle, affording room for many varieties of contrary judgment; but it will be found to lose its vagueness when stated in contrast with the principle upon which Congress has acted in recent years. In all the recent tariff legislation of the country, in all legislation since 1828, the committees of the House and Senate, when making up the several schedules of duties they were to propose, have asked, not what will be good for the country, but what will be good for the industries affected, what can they stand, what rates of duty will assure them abundant profits? It is true that they have assumed, it has been the burden of innumerable weary campaign speeches,—that the prosperity of the individual interest considered would be the prosperity of the country; but the poor sophistry of that argument has long been commonplace. By hard, desperately hard, use that assumption has been worn through to the thread. It must be replaced by new and sounder stuff. No doubt you can say to the country, "Feed and sustain these corporations and they will employ you: feed your employers out of the taxes and they, in turn, will give you work and feed you." But no candid student of this great question can now confidently believe that a policy which has the profits of the manufacturers as its main object is likely to promote the impartial, natural, wholesome, symmetrical, general development of the country.

The men who happen to possess the field do not constitute the nation; they do not even represent it when they speak of their own interest. We have taught them, by our petting, to regard their own interest as the interest of the country; but the two are by no means necessarily identical. They may be, they may not be. It is a question of fact to be looked into. Their prosperity and success may or may not benefit the country as a whole. Even if the country be indisputably benefited, it might be still more highly benefited by the promotion of an entirely different interest. What the fact is may depend upon many circumstances. It is those circumstances we are bound to look into, if we be indeed statesmen and patriots, asking not what the protected interests want or can prove that they need, but what it is to the general interest of the country to do: whether some interests have

not been too much favored, given a dominance not at all compatible either with honest politics or wholesome economic growth. In brief, we are now face to face with a great question of fact. What part of the protective system still benefits the country and is in the general interest; what part is unnecessary; what part is pure favoritism and the basis of dangerous and demoralizing special privilege? These are the questions which should underlie a tariff policy. No other questions are pertinent or admissible. "The benefit of the country" is a big phrase. What do you mean by it? What do you mean by "the country"? Whom do you mean by it? If you are honest and sincere, you mean the people of the country, its sections and varieties of climate and population taken, not separately or by their voting strength, but together; its men and women of every rank and quality and circumstance; its bone and sinew. If any particular industry has been given its opportunity to establish itself and get its normal development, under cover of the customs, and is still unable to meet the foreign competition which is the standard of its efficiency, it is unjust to tax the people of the country any further to support it. Wherever the advantages accorded by a tariff have resulted in giving those who control the greater part of the output of a particular industry the chance, after their individual success has been achieved, to combine and corner the advantage, those advantages ought to be withdrawn; and the presumption is that every industry thus controlled has had the support of the Government as long as it should have it.

There is something more than the economic activities of the country to be considered. There is its moral soundness; the variety, not of employment, but of opportunity for individual initiative and action which the policy of its law creates; the standards of business its trades and manufactures observe and are gauged by; and the connection which exists between its successful business men and its Government. By these significant matters should the tariff policy of Congress be judged, as well as by the tests of successful business.

Only those undertakings should be given the protection of high duties on imports which are manifestly suited to the country and as yet undeveloped or only imperfectly developed. From all the rest protection should be withdrawn, the object of the Government being, not to support its citizens in business, but

to promote the full energy and development of the country. Existing protection should not be suddenly withdrawn, but steadily and upon a fixed programme upon which every man of business can base his definite forecasts and systematic plans. For the rest, the object of customs taxation should be revenue for the Government. The Federal Government should depend for its revenue chiefly on taxes of this kind, because the greater part of the field of direct taxation must be left to the States. It must raise abundant revenue, therefore, from customs duties. But it should choose for taxation the things which are not of primary necessity to the people in their lives or their industry, things, for the most part, which they can do without without suffering or actual privation. If taxes levied upon these do not suffice, the things added should be those which it would cause them the least inconvenience or suffering to dispense with. Customs thus laid and with such objects will be found to yield more, and the people will be freer.

There is no real difficulty about finding how and where to lay such taxes when once a just principle has been agreed upon, if statesmen have the desire to find it. The only trouble is to ascertain the facts in a very complex economic system. Honest inquiry will soon find them out, and honest men will readily enough act upon them, if they be not only honest, but also courageous, true lovers of justice and of their country.

WOODROW WILSON.

NEW BOOKS REVIEWED.

BIOGRAPHY.

LAURENCE STERNE," writes Heine, "is the born equal of William Shakespeare; and he, too, was nurtured by the Muses on Parnassus. But after the manner of women, they quickly spoiled him with their caresses. He was the darling of the pale, tragic goddess. Once, in an access of fierce tenderness, she kissed his young heart with such power, passion and madness that his heart began to bleed, and suddenly he understood all the sorrows of this world and was filled with infinite compassion. Poor young poet heart! But the young daughter of Mnemosyne, the rosy goddess of humor, quickly ran up to him and took the suffering boy in her arms and sought to cheer him with laughter and song; she gave him for playthings the comic mask and the jester's bells and kissed his lips soothingly, kissing upon them all her levity and mirth, all her wit and mockery."

And all these matters are fully set forth in this full and delightful Life of Laurence Sterne ;* there are levity and mirth and wit and the continuous jangle of the jester's bells, together with the poetry and passion and infinite pathos of a disordered, unguided life. Sterne was a genius, and therefore to read of him is enlivening, since genius, after all, is just being a little more alive than other men, more alert to take impressions, more keen to feel, more able to produce further impressions and stimulate emotions.

From the beginning, as a neglected imp of the barracks, the frail son of an improvident ensign to the ending—a lonely death and unattended burial, Sterne's life seems to have been unguided by anything but his swift and generous impulses, his appetite

"The Life and Times of Laurence Sterne." By Wilbur L. Cross. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1909.

for fun and his unending interest in human nature and the shifting pageant of life. It was, however, the enthralling career of a great and conquering genius. For did not Lessing say he would gladly lay down ten years of his life to give Laurence Sterne one more in which to write? And Goethe spoke of him as the finest type of wit that ever influenced literature and as having cured him of Wertherism. It was, however, a life totally lacking in dignity. Perhaps it was too alive, too full for order; chaos is always more turbulent, more active than convention and order. At any rate, from the time when, as a neglected child, he was pushed from pillar to post, patronized here and helped a little there, through all his university career, as a Sizar in debt; his struggles for preferment in the church; his wasteful efforts at farming on a large scale; his squabbles with kinsmen and acquaintance; his unexpected and amazing literary successes; his braggart delight in social recognition and his middle-aged love-affairs, Sterne's is a lovable, fascinating, absorbing, unadmirable and unworthy personality. He had the lovable and the unlovable points of the Celt. An interesting and illuminating chapter in the Life is that on the publication of “Tristram Shandy," giving a vivid picture of a great literary success in the age of Dr. Johnson, Walpole, Garrick, Hogarth and Pitt. A second edition of the great novel was called for in a month, and the obscure country parson and bankrupt farmer found himself a month deep in social engagements, being interviewed by reporters quite like the modern author of a "best seller," being painted and sketched and made much of, while drawing-rooms rang with anecdotes of the witty clergyman who wrote the wickedest book of his age.

Very interesting, too, are the data as to Sterne's reading and his free and easy adaptations and transportations from other authors. Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," an inexhaustible mine, even to the present day for all thieves of ideas, lay ever open at his elbow when he wrote. His life was full and exciting; as if to offer the proper dramatic contrast at the close he died in London lodgings without a friend or kinsman near and was buried in an obscure spot in the city, whence his body was snatched a few days later and sold to an Oxford surgeon for dissection. Alas! poor Yorick!

The present excellent biography does much toward rescuing