The Nineteenth Century , No 182, Apr 1892 [‎36r] (76/244)

1892
CHICAGO AND IT
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thousand miles away. It is even a long way from the sea-coast
where all the goods have to be landed. Nor does it rank quite with
with Paris as a pleasure resort. We are all of us too glad of an
excuse to go to Paris, and we crowd to an exhibition there from every
corner of the earth. The delights of Chicago are not yet sufficiently
familiar to attract us thither.
On the other hand, Chicago is in the midst of a perfectly new
country, a country full of rich men, and fuller still of well-to-do men,
where people are just awakening to the delights of luxury and the
joys of luxurious living, where art is beginning to be fashionable,
and the market for artistic wares great and growing. Now and in the
years to come all that ministers to the delight of the eye and the
pride of life will find a ready sale in Western America, as new towns
are built, all of new houses requiring new furniture, new decorations,
new fittings of every degree of comfort and luxury.
As the Philadelphia Exhibition in 1876 set the fashion of house
building and furniture throughout the Northern States, so it is pretty
certain will the Chicago one of 1893 set the fashion in the West.
The great difficulty, however, in the way of British exhibitors is
neither the distance of Chicago nor the consequent cost of exhibiting
there. It is, of course, the McKinley Tariff. Why, I have been asked
over and over again, why should I show my goods to a people who are
acting in so unfriendly a manner, who are doing the best they can to
prevent my selling those goods ? The answer to this cannot be
given offhand, and it must depend on the character of the particular
manufacturer. As a general consideration, it is to be remembered
that an exhibition is visited by people from all parts of the world,
and that the things shown there are not shown only to the natives
of the country where the exhibition is held. For instance, the
Chicago people expect to have large numbers of visitors from South
America, and they regard the exhibition as offering a most favourable
opportunity of getting our South American trade away from us. If
they are correct, it is essential that our manufacturers who make for
the South American market should be prepared to keep themselves
in the minds of those of their customers from that continent who
visit the exhibition.
As to the unfriendliness of the tariff, surely that is a very feeble
and somewhat hypocritical sort of argument. We are a free-trade
country, not because of our great love for all other countries, but
because the majority of us consider it to be a good thing for ourselves.
America is protectionist for no better and no worse a cause. Can
anybody believe that if a majority of British voters were of the same
mind as the majority of American voters apparently are on this point,
one or other of our political parties would not at once become pro
tectionist, and would give us a McKinley Tariff of our own as soon as
the necessary parliamentary fighting had been done ?