German tariff of 1879
[7] However, industrialists favoured tariffs against British goods to safeguard their infant industries and they therefore came to believe that winning over the farmers to protectionism was crucial.
[11] In the late 1870s world grain prices started to fall due to the opening up of the American prairies to cultivation following the settlement of the Midwest after the Civil War.
[16] The Prussian landowner Guido Henckel von Donnersmarck complained to Heinrich von Tiedemann about the sixfold increase in American grain, flour and meat exports "in truly unbelivable numbers, for German agriculture, there must be a grain, flour and meat tariff as an unconditional necessity if we are not to expose it to the same fluctuations as industry".
[19] The autumn of 1878 witnessed a high-point in their protectionist campaign and in the Reichstag 204 deputies (including 87 Centrists, 36 Conservatives and 27 Liberals) formed a cross-party association in favour of protection.
[25] On 31 March 1878 Bismarck met Wilhelm von Kardorff, an industrialist and a landowner, informing him of his conversion to "moderate protective and finance tariffs".
[29] He further argued: I leave undecided the question whether complete mutual freedom of international commerce, such as is contemplated by the theory of Free Trade, would not serve the interests of Germany.
But as long as most of the countries with which our trade is carried on surround themselves with customs barriers, which there is still a growing tendency to multiply, it does not seem to me justifiable, or to the economic interest of the nation, that we should allow ourselves to be restricted in the satisfaction of our financial wants by the apprehension that German products will thereby be slightly preferred to foreign ones.
The minority of the population, which does not produce at all, but exclusively consumes, will apparently be injured by a customs system favouring the entire national production.
Yet if by means of such a system the aggregate sum of the values produced in the country increase, and thus the national wealth be on the whole enhanced, the non-producing parts of the population...will eventually be benefited.
[36] He gave his name to a clause in the legislation that limited to 130 million marks as the maximum amount the central government could receive from customs revenue and the tobacco duty.
The historian Erich Eyck argued that if Germany's political culture at the beginning of the 20th century differed from that in Western Europe, agricultural protection was largely responsible.
