The old Conservative Party, with its religious convictions and constitutional principles, will disappear, and a new Party will arise like perhaps the Republican Party of the United States of America—rich, materialist, and secular—whose opinions will turn on tariffs, and who will cause the lobbies to be crowded with the touts of protected industries.
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If the Conservative Party were your refrigerator, all your food would go bad. If it were your car or bicycle, you would be stranded by the side of the road. If it were your accountant, you would be bankrupt. If it were your lawyer, you would be in prison. If any consumer good, service or profession so consistently and predictably disappointed or failed in its ostensible main purpose, people would turn their backs on it. It would be overtaken, replaced and driven out of business by a better competitor.
[T]he party will not again be reunited till a new programme has been elaborated which shall satisfy the just expectations of the representatives of labour, as well as conciliate the Nonconformists who have been driven into rebellion. It is impossible to say with certainty what will be the exact form of this protest against the ever-recurring assumption that the time has come when statesmen may rest from their labours and parties be at peace, but it must include some or all of the following ideas which have been exercising a growing attraction for political thinkers, and which are summed up in the sentence which may perhaps form the motto of the new party—Free Church, Free Land, Free Schools, and Free Labour.
Twenty-five years ago this Republic was bearing and wearing a triple chain of bondage. Long familiarity with traffic in the bodies and souls of men had paralyzed the consciences of a majority of our people; the narrowing and disintegrating doctrine of State sovereignty had shackled and weakened the noblest and most beneficent powers of the national government; and the grasping power of slavery was seizing upon the virgin territories of the West, and dragging them into the den of eternal bondage. At that crisis the Republican party was born. It drew its first inspiration from that fire of liberty which God has lighted in every human heart, and which all the powers of ignorance and tyranny can never wholly extinguish. The Republican party came to deliver and to save.
The strange alchemy of time has somehow converted the Democrats into the truly conservative party of this country — the party dedicated to conserving all that is best, and building solidly and safely on these foundations. The Republicans, by contrast, are behaving like the radical party — the party of the reckless and the embittered, bent on dismantling institutions which have been built solidly into our social fabric. . . . Our social-security system and our Democratic Party's sponsorship of the social reforms and advances of the past two decades — conservatism at its best. Certainly there could be nothing more conservative than to change when change is due, to reduce tensions and wants by wise changes, rather than to stand pat stubbornly, until, like King Canute, we are engulfed by relentless forces that will always go too far.
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The Republican party is a party of progress and of liberality toward its opponents. It encourages the poor to strive to better their children, to enable them to compete successfully with their more fortunate associates, and, in fine, it secures an entire equality before the law of every citizen, no matter what his race, nationality, or previous condition. It tolerates no privileged class. Every one has the opportunity to make himself all he is capable of.
Now it's absolutely true, and I agree with Professor DiLorenzo, that the Republican Party could never have been successful without the support of the tariff interests involved. The Free Soil Party and the Liberty Party were anti-slavery parties, which were, you might say, pure in their principles, but they had no chance of being successful on a national basis. It was the addition of the tariff interests that gave the Republicans the ability to carry their anti-slavery program into action. And it’s in that light, I think, that you have to look at the whole question of the tariffs.
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