possess this power it might, as we have said, become exceedingly difficult for us to maintain the protective policy as against the treatymaking power and encourage or even maintain existing home industries. In this case those products happen more especially to be tobacco, sugar, hemp, fruits, and rice. The depletion in our revenue might necessitate the levying of heavy internal-revenue taxes to fill the vacuum produced by the colonial "free trade" contention. We may have come to be a "world power," but if the contention here asserted is true we are without the necessary power to protect ourselves from the results which may readily flow therefrom.

Every nation in the world maintains the existence of and asserts its power to tax the products from its colonies or acquired territory. Every great nation in the world is expending large sums of money annually in the effort to produce its own supply of sugar one of the home products that would be seriously affected, if not ruined, eventually, if the doctrine contended for here prevails. Germany, Russia, France, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Holland, and lastly Sweden, Italy, and Spain, have deemed it wise to secure their own sugar from their own soil and not jeopard that policy by the incorporation of tropical territory. Even Great Britain, which is unable to grow the raw material for sugar in the Kingdom, allows India to countervail the sugar bounties. laid by other (rival) governments. The policy of this Government has been emphasized in the same direction, especially since 1890.

We feel that this court will be able to see its way clear to determine that this nation is strong enough to protect the Union of the States and the industries of the people therein, even while we may be advancing to a supremacy that astonishes the world.

IN THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES.

October Term, December 18, 1900.

JOHN H. GOETZE, APPELLANT, V. THE UNITED STATES.

No. 340. On appeal, etc.

FOURTEEN DIAMOND RINGS, MANUEL PEPKE, CLAIMANT, PLAINTIFF IN ERROR, V. THE UNITED STATES.

No. 419. On writ of error.

ARGUMENT OF THE ATTORNEY-GENERAL.

If your Honors please: It may be that, while following the counsel in their pleasant wandering among the fields of general principles and plucking the flowers of eloquence, we have gotten away from the exact point where the cases lie, and therefore I shall explain very briefly

the facts.

The Goetze case is one where the constituted authorities of the United States required an importer at the port of New York to pay the same duty on his goods brought from Porto Rico that they required other importers from other countries, which were admittedly foreign, to pay. There was no exercise of authority by the President or anybody else over the island of Porto Rico; and so in the case of the diamond rings, this worthy and gallant soldier, who had fought in a Dakota regiment, and, having also a tendency to thrift, had gathered up a rather unusually large collection of jewels, which he brought back into the country without entering them at the custom-house, as the Government claimed, with the intention of defrauding it out of the tariff duty; and therefore the Government proceeded under the revenue laws by means of an information to forfeit the rings in accordance with the law, and the only possible defense that the soldier could have would be that these were not dutiable.

It seems to have been supposed to be of some consequence that he had been born in the United States; that he enlisted in the United States service; that he had fought, and even been wounded, in the service of his country in Luzon. All of these are things to be proud of, but they have nothing to do with the case.

The contentions of the Government in these cases I have endeavored to state succinctly and together. They are these: The tariff act of 1897 declares that "there shall be levied, collected, and paid upon all articles imported from foreign countries, and mentioned in the schedules herein contained, the rates of duties which are by the schedules