Democratic Sentinel, Volume 4, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 March 1880 — REMARKABLE MEMORIAL. [ARTICLE]

REMARKABLE MEMORIAL.

Feck’s Views in Begard to the Tariff on Type and Paper-Making Materials. Geo. W. Peck, of Milwaukee, has addressed the following memorial to Congress. The M. C.’s.will read it, whatever else they may do in regard to the matter discussed: Office of President or 1 Wisconsin Editors’ and Publishers’ Ass'n, > Milwaukee, Feb. 20,1880. ) To Senators and Members of Congress: It becomes my painful official duty to address you a few lines, and if you will pay attention and allow the ideas herein advanced to gently enter your several systems without the aid of a surgical operation or a shot-gun, it will be a cussed sight more than we have a right to expect. At the annual meeting of the Wisconsin Ed.tors’ and Publishers’ Association, held last June at Oshkosh, after the members had been formally admitted to the Insane Asylum, they Eassed the following whereases and resolutions, etween free lunches and picnics, and made me the humble instrument of torture to bring the aforesaid whereases and resolutions to your attention: “Whereas, The type foundries of the United States have formed a combination for the purpose es imposing such terms and regulations es they choose upon trade, and “Whereas, They have been and are using their organization to the great disadvantage and injury of their patrons, the printers and publis iters of the country, and “Whereas, The ordinary and permanent difficulties in the way of oi-taining type from foreign countries are such as to afford ample protection to American type foundries without the addition of the safeguard of a tariff, therefore “ Resolved , That the just interests of the printers and publishers of the United States require that the tariff on type meial and type be removed. “ Resolved , That the representatives of Wisconsin in Congress are urgently requested to use their influence and efforts to secure a speedy abolition of such tariff.” Now that you have read the resolutions, it is a supposable case that you will feel that your next duty is to throw them into the waste basket In the name of 40,000,000 people, be the same moro or less, I ask you not to lose your cud, but ruminate, as it were, and think over the highway robbery that is beiDg practiced upon your unsophisticated constituents by the type founders, who are foundering the newspapers. As it is now, they stand in the entrance of the editorial sanctum and take the money that comes in on subscription, and only allow the publisher the cord-wood and farm produce. I3y the protection your alleged honorable body affords them, in the way of tariff, they grapple the throat of every newspaper in America and say “Kono,” while the newspaper publisher can only return his chips to the dealer and say—words of disapprobation. Every article that is used by a newspaper man, excepting second-hand ulster overcoats and liver, is protected by a tariff that makes the cold chills run up his spine. Another thing that the association did not pass any resolutions about, but which they probably will at the next meeting, if there are enough of them left outside of the poor-house to meet, before they meet on that beautiful shore, is the recent action of the manufacturers of paper, who are endeavoring to screw down the lid of the newspaper coffin which the type-founders are preparing for the grave. In the last three months, by their own sweet will, they have run the price of paper up almost 100 per cent. There is nothing to prevent them from doing it, as foreign manufactured paper is kept out of the country by the tariff. Every article that goes into the construction of rag paper, except basswood, sweat and water, has a tariff on it. The soda, the asafeetida and blue mass, or whatever is used to deodorize undershirts and cast-off drawers, so that they will smell good in a Mewspaper, has a corn on it in the shape of a tariff, so that the paper manufacturing three-card-monte chaps have an excuse to bleed newspapers to the last drop. What the newspapers want, and they believe it is not an unreasonable demand, is the removal of the tariff on type, on rags, on paper, and on all chemicals used in the manufacture of paper. Iu a tariff on rags (if there is no tariff on rags you had better putoneon, unless you remove the tariff on the rest of the stuff; if a tariff is a good thiDg you cau’t have too much of it), for instance, whom do you protect? Nobody but guttersnipe rag-pickers and old maids, who save up rags to buy snuff, and tin peddlers who trade tiu dippers and skimmers occasionally lor a Hour-sack full of bad-smelling rags. Are the rag-pickers and old maids your principal constituents? The newspapers of the country believe that they are entitled to some consideration at your hands. They are, in many instances, the instruments through which many of you have attained the positions you now hold, and they never have got much of anything from you except Patent Office reports and agricultural documents. They have set up nights for you, and done dirty' work that may bar them out of all participation iu the chariot races iu the golden streets of the New Jerusalem, and now they demand that you protect them from the ravages of the type-founding and paper making grasshoppers, before it is everlastingly too late. Not boing one of the “ literary fellers” so touchingly alluded to by the groat Senator Simon Cameron, this epistle to you Corinthians may be a little raw, and not as polished as it should bo, but it tries to represent the feeliDgs of the newspaper men of Wisconsin in language that the wayfaring man, though a diabolical idiot, can understand, and it means business. The newspapers are desperate, and, while they don’t want to go on the war-path, they feel that they have been ravished about enough by the different tribes of beneficiaries of the Government. If you great men will pass a bill to give us re- * lief you will strike it rich, aud don’t you forget it. Geo. W. Peck, President Wisconsin Editors’ and. Publishers’ Association

Housewives are interested in knowing that the paper manufacturers of this city are now paying 3-J- cents per pound for common mixed rags; for clean white rags they are paying ftom 54 to 6 cents per pound. In view of these facts, no housewife ought to sell her common rags to peddlers for less than cents, nor clean cotton rags for less than cents. —Chicago Journal. A tramp found a woman alone in a Vermont farm-house, and threatened to kill her if she did not give him 5 cents. “Well, here.it is,” she said, showing the coin, “but I guess I’ll shoot it to you,” and she dropped it into the barrel of a shot-gun. The fellow did not wait to take it. Physicians say that there is no remedy for Consumption, and, possibly, in some cases the assertion may be correct. We know, however, of many cures made by Dr. Bull’s Cough Syrup, and will guarantee positive relief to the sufferer in every instance.