the foundation of the Republic the high-tariff men have generally had the last word in American trade policy. They won their early battles for protection of infant industries over the passionate objections of the Southern states, which were trying to make their raw materials as competitive as possible on the world market. The high-tariff men won their battle later with the Western farmers largely by ignoring the issue and prolonging the echoes of the Civil War. The wheat exporting states were mainly settled by veterans of the Northern Armies who took their rugged Republicanism west with them. It suited the interests of the Eastern manufacturers much better than those of the Western farmers. For the first 150 years the United States could justify its tariffs by the fact that it was a debtor nation. It owed Europe capital and interest which it could only repay if it had the best possible trade conditions: freedom to export and a protected home market. The first world war changed all that, but, as usual, realization of the significance of the change was tardy. The first significant breach in the tariff walls was made by Cordell Hull. He took advantage of the extreme unpopularity of everything that had been done under President Hoover to discredit, as it seemed forever, the tariff philosophy which had found its ultimate expression in the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act of 1930. His Reciprocal Trade Act gave the Administration wide power of tariff reduction. Tariffs could be, and many were, cut by fifty per cent.. The Hawley-Smoot level, however, had been so high that they were still, in many cases, prohibitive. A second round was sanctioned by Congress with some doubts. To allay these the Administra-