How can you take the view you do of the Herald! You compare it with the Tribune. It is perfectly legitimate to compare the Tribune with Mr. Watterson’s paper, the Courier-Journal. Honest people could agree or disagree about those two papers. Personally I think that during the last thirty or forty years the Tribune has been infinitely more helpful to good causes than the Courier-Journal, but, as I say, people can differ on such a subject; and I should be very glad to meet at any time either Henry Watterson or Whitelaw Reid. But to compare either one of them with the Herald is literally and precisely as if I should compare either the American Magazine or The Outlook with Town Topics.

Having expressed his opinion of the Herald, he proceeded to an elaborate specious explanation of the matter which had so stirred my ire that I had protested to him.

Now as for what you say about The Outlook’s publishing “The Truth about K.” In the first place, I admit at once that the title, the type, and the placing of this advertisement did make it look to many readers like an editorial article. We used the same title, type and placing that had been used for similar articles for twenty years; but our attention was subsequently called to the fact, to which you now call my attention, i.e., that some people were misled in the matter; and in consequence we at once abandoned this twenty years’ custom. From now on, every article of the kind will appear under the heading of “Advertising Department” or “Advertising Section,” so that there cannot be any possible mistake in the future. As for the publication of the article itself, I most emphatically think that it was not only justifiable, but commendable. The Outlook publishes continually letters from people upholding policies or views with which The Outlook diametrically disagrees. (For example, The Outlook has on several different occasions published letters taking a very dark view of my own character and achievements, whether at San Juan Hill or elsewhere.) This particular article by Spencer I should have been glad to see published in the regular section of the Outlook as putting forth his side of the case, just as I am now trying to secure publication in The Outlook of an article from the North Western farmers giving their side of the case against Canadian reciprocity. Spencer’s article, however, was too long, and such being the case, as I say, I was not merely willing but glad to see it put in. (I did not know it had been put in, of course, until long after it had appeared; but when I did see it, I was glad that it had been put in.) Probably you know that on April 8th The Outlook editorially took up this question, stated that the American Woolen Company was entirely justified in printing their article as an advertisement, and that The Outlook violated in no degree the ethics of journalism in admitting the advertisement to its pages and expressed its total disagreement with the views expressed in the article. I would have gone further than this; I would have stated that The Outlook did not violate the ethics of journalism, but rendered a great and needed service as an example in showing its willingness to accept the statement of a case with which it did not agree, to put it in exactly as it was written, and then itself to comment with absolute freedom, as it has done, upon the arguments made in the advertisement. Let me repeat that if The Outlook had had space, which it unfortunately did not have, I should have been glad to see Spencer’s article inserted, not as an advertisement, but as a communication signed by Spencer, and avowedly stating his side of the case.

I felt that I had won my case with Mr. Roosevelt’s assurance that henceforth every article of the kind would appear under the head of “Advertising Department.”

When the Payne-Aldrich bill was finally passed with Mr. Taft’s and Mr. Aldrich’s brutally frank explanations, I was done with the tariff as a subject for further study and writing. Four years later came the Democratic effort to make a revision. I had only the most casual interest. It was the same old method. They might make a better bill, I told myself, but there never could be a fair one as long as tariffs were set by a Congress under the thumb of people personally interested.

One thing seemed to me clear which is still clearer now, the combined prohibitive tariff industries were digging their own grave. Foreign markets they had to have; but they refused to buy from those to whom they wanted to sell. What the gentlemen did not realize was that by this procedure they were practically forcing nations not naturally industrial to copy their methods, industrialize themselves. These nations soon were succeeding with such skill that in spite of the boosting of the tariff again and again the foreigners continued to undersell us.

But the prohibitive protectionists were building a future competitor threatening to be stronger than foreign trade. This in the realm of politics. There had been no more hearty and conscienceless supporters of prohibitive tariffs than certain groups of organized labor, conspicuously the Amalgamated Steel and Iron Workers under John Jarrett. They were not a numerous body, but with the cry of the full dinner pail they were able to back the demands of the employers. They had a body of votes that no political party dared defy. But in teaching organized labor the power of political pressure the industrialists gave them a weapon that they did not see might one day be turned against themselves.

Back in the eighties one of the wisest and soundest economists we have produced, David A. Wells, said in substance of the victory of the tariff lobbies: “This is a revolution. It will take another revolution to overthrow the leadership now established by business men.”

I felt after the bill of 1909 that there was nothing for an outsider like me to do but wait for that revolution.

I felt this so deeply that when President Wilson invited me to be a member of the Tariff Commission he formed in December, 1916, I refused. I was pleased, of course, that Mr. Wilson thought me fit for such a place. I knew that I should find the associations interesting. The dean of tariff students in the United States—Dr. Taussig of Harvard—was the chairman. To be under him would be an education that would be worth the taking, but I did not hesitate.

First, there was my personal situation—my obligations. I had no right to give up my profession for a connection of that sort, in its nature temporary. Then I realized my own unfitness as Mr. Wilson could not. I had had no experience in the kind of work this required. I was an observer and reporter, not a negotiator. I am not a good fighter in a group; I forget my duty in watching the contestants. But primarily there was my hopelessness about the service the Tariff Commission might render. Its researches and its conclusions, however sound, would stand no chance in Congress when a wool or iron and steel or sugar lobby appeared. A Tariff Commission was hamstrung from the start.

Of course it was not only my interest and work on the tariff that had led Mr. Wilson to offer me the position. He was looking about for women to whom he could give recognition. He was an outspoken advocate of suffrage and wanted to use women when he thought them qualified.

Jane Addams pleaded with me to accept “for the sake of women,” but I did not feel that women were served merely by an appointment to office. Women, like men, serve in proportion to their fitness for office, to the actual fact they have something to contribute. I had no enthusiasm for the task, did not even respect it greatly. I believed, too, that harm is done all around by undertaking technical jobs without proper scientific training. The cause of women is not to be advanced by putting them into positions for which they are untrained.

The press comments on the idea of a woman on this commission were not unfriendly, as far as I saw them; but they were a little surprised and, as I was to find later, protests were made to Mr. Wilson. My friend Ray Stannard Baker, working on the Wilson papers, came across an answer of the President on December 27, 1916, to one protesting gentleman which I am not too modest to print:

As a matter of fact, she has written more good sense, good plain common sense, about the tariff than any man I know of, and is a student of industrial conditions in this country of the most serious and sensible sort.