WE HAVE neither knowledge nor courage to predict the final consequences of the tariff act, in which, it may be suspected, we are as one with the Senate itself. Indeed we are persuaded that not more than a score of senators have given much thought to these consequences; if we are wrong, they are bolder spirits than senators traditionally have a right to be; perhaps we should say more reckless. For this bill which they have at last approved cannot fail to work changes in our economic organization from the bottom up, yet it was passed without any great conviction that those changes are necessary. This we conclude from the sentiments expressed by the senators themselves. The opinion of the majority is that no better bill could be drafted “under the circumstances,” which is hardly an enthusiastic defense, and Senator Connally’s bitter summary occasioned little reply. “Favored industries already prosperous will be more prosperous,” he said. “Other industries, including agriculture, already distressed, will be more distressed.” He was thought to be painfully obvious. 

With such recommendations we are handed the highest tariff ever imposed upon a land of high tariffs. In commodity prices it will cost the consumer not less than half a billion a year, and very probably twice that sum; it will arouse the resentment of every other industrial nation, and in some cases inspire reciprocal action against American products. For instance, it is reported that France has already decided for a prohibitive import tax against American automobiles; who shall say that it is an unreasonable decision? But the further consequences which lie within these immediate effects cannot so easily be extracted and brought to light. Today no one can tell whether the consumer will be able to take that heavy loss and grin about it; nor whether the exporter will manage to make up in other ways for the curtailing of his foreign market. A billion dollars is passed about in Washington as casually as though it were $.10. Our objection to leaving the tariff in the hands of politicians is that where so much is at stake every risk that can be eliminated should be eliminated. The system which demands log rolling and vote trading to get anywhere is simply a gamble. If we have good luck, we win; if events pursue a normal and predictable course, or if we have bad luck, we lose. 

The Senate gave six arduous months to the tariff bill, but so far as the final results are concerned, the wishes of the Old Guard may almost as well have been conceded in six days. And since those results so obviously reflect a last-minute political expediency rather than an honest and genuine persuasion, many now realize as if hearing it for the first time what observers at Washington have constantly said: that the representatives of the nation seldom, and only for brief moments, attain to a perspective of themselves and their proper jobs. There is a technique of politics, but there is no political philosophy. There is a routine of legislation, but there is no legislative conviction. About as much conviction is exerted on the drafting of a tariff bill as enters into a game of checkers. In the votes on oil, lumber, aluminum, pig iron and hides only eleven senators stuck to their original positions. The reversal of the votes on sugar and cement did not mean that certain senators had changed their minds as to the justice of the rates sought for those items. What in the world can this indicate except that the Senate as a whole knows no more about the fairness of the Smoot-Hawley-Grundy tariff than we do, and cares less? 

We suspect this bill principally because of the way in which it has been passed. It seems to us that a tariff bill should be written out of an appreciation of the real needs of the country at the time, without regard for anything else whatever, and not as a schoolboy writes his first composition, in the wild hope that this jumble of words, meant to reexpress ideas which are without significance to him, will in the end make sense to someone else. But of course we know nothing about it. We are aware only that the bill which has been imposed upon this country after it had grown weary of protest is certain to make a difference in the pay envelope of every wage-earner within a year, and we have an idea that the difference will be qualitative, not quantitative.