American Notes of the Week
(By Cable)
[The SPECTATOR publishes week by -Week a surrey of news and opinion in America; cabled from New' York by Our American correspondent4
PLAIN SPEAKING ABOUT TARIFFS.
Mr. Hoover's Presidential honeymoon has been unusually short-lived. He called Congress into extraordinary session for the purpose of affording a measure of relief to farmers and of adopting a limited revision of the tariff. But fighting began immediately over the proposed Farm Relief Bill and has now -broken out more bitterly than ever upon the new Tariff Bill. The Democrats criticize it as utterly wrong in principle.- The group- representing the interests of the farmers claims that it protects manufacturers but does not adequately protect agriculture. President Hoover himself is said to be anxious over the degree to which the Bill has extended the principle of Protection ; instead of being a limited revision of the tariff within that time-honoured principle it has approached perilously near to being designed for the unlimited exclusion of foreign goods which Compete with American production. Senator Hiram Johnson of California, a Repub- lican, and always an enfant terrible in the Senate, has done some amazingly plain speaking about the new Bill. He concedes that Protection is a form of subsidy for special classes. He confesses that he himself had voted for it and that he used to talk at one time in noble language about "the American system of raising wages for our working-men and diffusing general prosperity by - means- of a tax on imported goods." Now he says that he 'has come to 'perceive that the whole thing was a sort of conspiracy of false pretences in which he himself had joined. "I am culpable with others," he says, "but at least I am different from some others in admitting it, and I can yet laugh, and that saves Me in this peculiar era."
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