Protection and War

Henry George

[Excerpt from a speech delivered in Protestant Hall, Sydney, Australia, 1890]

I say protection is linked with everything that enslaves man. What has everywhere enslaved men? This theory of our socialistic friends, or so-called scientific friends, that man was at first a serf, a slave, and gradually won his freedom so far, is, in the very nature of things, wrong.

It is not tyranny which is eternal, which existed in the beginning - it is freedom. Man was created free. The great agency of slavery everywhere is war. War is necessarily the enslaver -- even war for a just cause. You cannot organize men into an army even to fight for freedom without endangering that personal liberty. War has always been the enslaver.

What does protection do but to foster and encourage the jealousy of men, to tell them that Christ's message was a lie, to tell them that "they don't know everything down in Judee." "We may," they say, "in some sort of sense and in the good time coming, but now we must keep our neighbors from getting ahead of us and must fence ourselves in with these tariffs."

Mr. Trenwith in Melbourne, in spite of himself, could not help speaking of "saurkraut Germans." Go to the United States and what do you hear but references to pauper English labor? Everywhere the spirit of envy, everywhere the drawing of lines separating men more than the seas and mountains do. It is 7,000 miles across the ocean from your country to my country, and our tariff keeps us far more distant than these 7,000 miles.

Protection! Why, everywhere what does it do? It involves unnecessary complexities of government, its spies search and seize, and its guards are employed to pounce on every ship that is coming in. It is always a temptation to corruption. In Australia I do not think you fully realise that. But be warned by the examples of the American colonies.