Tariff Chokes Us, Wilson Declares.

New York Times 100 years ago today, August 15, 1912:
Opens Jersey Campaign with Speech to Farmers, Urging War on Special Interests.
TEARS UP WRITTEN NOTES
And Makes Extemporaneous Address — Says Railways Must Not Use the Canal to Keep Up Rates.
Special to The New York Times.
    SEA GIRT, N. J., Aug. 15,— Gov. Woodrow Wilson, who hates to make a speech from manuscript, tore his prepared notes into a hundred shreds when he appeared before several thousand New Jersey farmers at a farmer's fair at Washington Park this afternoon, and proceeded in a wholly extemporaneous vein to tell what all the people ought to do to bring the powers of their own Government into their own hands.
    "You people own a big house," he urged, " but you have let the other fellow live in it. It is time to turn him out. What I modestly suggest is that you proceed to break into your own house and live in it. The tenants who have been there a long time have been making you pay them the rent instead of paying rent to you. You have paid the money that enabled them to live in your own house and dominate your own premises. Turn them out."
    Gov. Wilson paid Col. Roosevelt's platform the compliment of declaring that it would "require a Sabbath day's journey to drive through it," and for that reason he explained that he had not yet been able to find out what it was all about. The speech was delivered from an open air platform in an enclosure where a crowd officially estimated at 70,000 persons was present. Only about 2,000 of them forsook the merry-go-rounds, the roller coasters, and the "hot dog" vendors to hear the first political speech of the campaign.
    For Gov. Wilson there was practically no cheering. He came to the park in an automobile, and immediately hurried into a dining room, where fried chicken and other Southern dainties were waiting for him. At the dinner table he exhibited his characteristic taste for retirement by slipping away from the head of the table while the other guests were applauding him, and taking an inconspicuous seat near the foot of the table.
    Policemen who escorted the Governor out to the speakers' stand shook his hand, and a few dozen persons along the way started individual cheers. Once on the stand, be began a speech, after Congressman William Hughes had introduced him, which brought cries of "That's right!" and "Here's a Republican vote for you!" from the crowd, but no outbreak of enthusiasm.
    Gov. Wilson in the course of his speech made his first emphatic utterance in regard to Panama Canal tolls.
    "One of the great objects in cutting that great ditch," he said, "is to allow farmers who are near the Atlantic to ship to the Pacific Coast by way of the Atlantic ports, to allow all the farmers on what I may, standing here, call this half of the continent, to find their outlet at the ports of the Gulf or the ports of the Atlantic seaboard, and then to have coastwise steamers carry their products down around the canal and up the Pacific Coast or down the coast of South America.
    "Now, at present there are no ships to do that. And one of the bills pending, just passed by Congress, provides for free tolls for American ships through that canal and prohibits any ship from passing through that canal which is owned by any American railway company. You see the object of that. We don't want the railways to compete with themselves, because we understand that kind of competition. We want the water carriage to compete with the land carriage, so as to be perfectly sure that you are going to get better rates around by the canal than you would across the continent."

Aldrich Saw Signs of Times.
    At one point in his speech Gov. Wilson spoke in an impassioned manner. This was when he was denouncing the Payne-Aldrich tariff and the methods by which it was constructed.
    "While you farmers," he said, "you descendants of the embattled farmers who stood at Lexington, were feeding the world, Congress was feeding the trusts. We know the kind of people that got tariff favors; they were not thinking of the people of the United States or the Nation's prosperity. They were thinking of balance sheets in particular industries. My indictment against the tariff is that it has been a long time since tariffs were made by men who even supposed they were seeking to serve the general good.
    "I at least give one man who helped to frame the tariff credit for having a good weather eye. Mr. Aldrich retired of his own free will from public life. He knew the people knew he had imposed upon them and that they would not be imposed upon any longer. You can't go into a game of serving the special interests like Aldrich did without narrowing and narrowing the circle of interest until presently you will not think of anything but one particular, individual interest.
    "It makes a great deal of difference to you that Mr. Taft vetoed the Steel bill. It makes a difference in the cost of every tool you buy and it ought to be very significant that the Democratic Congress has just passed the Steel Tariff bill over the President's veto — a thing, I am informed, unprecedented in the history of the country, that a House should have passed two tariff measures, the Wool bill and the Steel bill, over the veto of the President.
    "The reason we have never had a parcels post in this country is that special interests have objected. Now, I move that the objections of all private enterprises be overruled. The trouble with the business of the United States under the tariff is that men think they can't make money without the assistance of the Government. As long as you allow them to think that then every mother's son of us is tied to the apron strings of the old grandmother sitting in the Capitol at Washington. Now, for my part I am free, and 21, and I don't want any assistance of the Government to enable me to make a living.
    "Legitimate business has nothing to fear so long as it will stand on its own bottom. But business has everything to fear if all it has under it is the prop of a tax which everybody is obliged to pay in order that business may prosper. There is a bill pending in the House now for the purpose of beginning this system of what may properly be called university extension to the farm. They are going ahead with their duty now, because our platform is not molasses to catch flies. It means what it says. The American people are now taking notice in a way in which they never took notice before and gentlemen who talk one way and vote another are going to be retired to a very quiet and private retirement.

"The Tariff That Smothers Us."
    "If prosperity is not to be checked in this country, we must broaden our borders and make conquest of the markets of the world. That is the reason that America is so deeply interested in the question of the merchant marine, and that is also the reason why America is go much interested in breaking down, wherever it is possible without danger, that dam against which all the tides of our prosperity have banked up — that great dam that runs around all our coasts, and which we call the protective tariff. I would prefer to call it the restrictive tariff. I would prefer to call it the tariff which holds us back. I would prefer to call it the tariff that hems us in, the tariff that chokes us, the tariff that smothers us, because the great unmatched energy of America is now waiting for a field greater than America itself in which to prove that Americans can take care of themselves.
    "I don't want to belong to a crowd that can't take care of themselves. After a while, if you keep on with this tariff business, we will have to have a special board of guardians to look after the United States. Guardians have not a large imagination. Guardians attend to business, and I don't want to see the United States any longer in the bands of guardians.
    "There was a time, ladles and gentlemen, not many years ago, when I would have uttered sentiments like these with a certain degree of heat, because I would have known, I would have felt at any rate that I was against an almost irresistable force. But I don't feel the least heat now. We have got the interests on the run and the resistance is very little. The friction is going to come when they try to put on brakes and try to stop. There is no heat in the business now, there is hopeful confidence that the people of the United States at last realize their opportunity, know what it is they want, and are out to get it.
    "I have never known anything like the awakening that has occurred in the United States in recent years. It is just as if we had all been taking a long and comfortable sleep, with sometimes very disturbing dreams, to wake up once in a while in a nightmare and say 'who is this sitting on my chest?' but then we would turn over and go to sleep again. And now we have come entirely to the consciousness of the new day. There are not going to be any more nightmares.
    "I was talking to a friend the other day who said, 'We must go around and form clubs.' I said: 'My dear boy, they are forming themselves.' They don't have to have Presidents and Secretaries and constitutions. Every group you meet on the street corner is a club, and somewhere about their clothes they have got a club and the men that need to watch the weather are the men for whom that club is reserved.

"A Peaceful Revolution Nov. 5."
    "I believe that there is going to be a great, handsome, peaceful, hopeful revolution on the 5th day of November, 1912, and that after that revolution has been accomplished men will go about their business saying, 'What was it that we feared? We feared chains and we have won liberty. We feared to touch anything for fear we should mar it, and now everything wears the bright face of prosperity, and we know that the right is also the profitable thing, and that nobody can serve a nation without serving also himself."
    At the conclusion of his speech Gov. Wilson attempted to make his way alone through the crowd and to become one of it, but it would not focus its attention anywhere else than about him. He became the vortex of a whirling multitude that nearly swept him off his feet, and gave his secretaries and close friends half an hour's work before they could rescue him. He was finally jostled into an automobile, in which he escaped to a train bound back to Sea Girt.
    To-morrow Gov. Wilson will rest in preparation for the Jersey field day on Saturday, when he will greet 10,000 of his fellow-citizens on the lawns about the Little White House.