THE "CONGRESSIONAL RECORD."
(To THE EDITOR OF TRE " twersroa."1 Sia,—Why don't you verify your quotations, or, to be precise, "refer" for your facts? You say on your front page last week : "Some ingenious Radical Senator once began reading Henry George's Progress and Poverty, and thus secured a :leo
reprint of that ingenuous work in the Conoressiohal Record." Now the actual work you mean was Henry George's Protection or Free Trade.
Having pulled a feather from your tail, I aid run the risk you did and give you from memory what actually occurred. In those days, I don't know what is the case now, the United States had some queer arrangement which enabled a Senator not only to get. a 'speech or pamphlet printed in the Congres- sional Record, but to have innumerable reproductions of such speech printed for public circulation at the cost of the State, be paying, I believe, only the actual cost of printing. Some " ingenious Tory Protectionist " during the fight on one of the U.S.A. Tariff Bills, I think the one known as the Wilson Bill, hit upon the idea of making. as his speech a pamphlet by James G. Blaine advocating Protection, with the object of publishing at the expense of the State a huge mass of Tory Protectionist propaganda. This could not be prevented, but your " ingenious Radical Free Trader " went one better, and, as his speech, took Henry George's whole book, Protection or Free Trade. This then went on the Congressional Record, and the Fres Traders managed to get an edition of a million copies, whish. were, sold at two cents each; one of which is still a valued possession of mine.
May I say, further, as a Free Trader of thirty years' stand- ing, that if we had a million copies at a penny each of Henry George's hook available in England to-day, and •voters who mould read it, the country would make short work of this Government's policy of Protection by a side-wind ? Of all the books on the fiscal problem, 1 know none comparable with this
[The "queer arrangement" for circulating speeches has of course a very well-known counterpart in France, where either House can vote that an important and edifying speech be placarded throughout the country.—ED. Spectator.)
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