It takes no extended examination of any period in the last fifty years—the term covered by the phrase "Our Times" in the title of this book—to convince an unprejudiced student that as far as the tariff is concerned public opinion has never been fairly embodied in the bills adopted. If the popular understanding of protection as expressed in our elections had been conscientiously followed, there would be to-day no duties on iron and steel products, on cheap cottons and cotton mixtures, and, certainly none on a great variety of raw materials probably including raw wool. That is, in these cases and in multitudes of similar ones, the purposes of protection had been realized, or it had been proved that they never could be realized; and in either case the dogma required the duty to be withdrawn. This volume is an attempt to tell in narrative form the story of this defeat of the popular will.
