Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 December 1881 — Removal ! [ARTICLE]

Removal !

The Sentinel Office has been moved into rooms one door east of Makeover’s New Hotel, where we will be pleased to greet our friends in future.

Message on first page. Delphi Times: T. H. Hlner, of the Air Li ue road has been appointed eu perintendent of the Western Union Telegraph line.from this city to Chicago. ' The Indianapolis News, one of the most ably edited Republican newsna pers in Indiana, has this to say of the tariff convention: “A ray of light flashes in upon our neighbor, the Times, when it says, ‘lt is very evident that the National tariff convention is being run by and in the interest of, men who are demanding protection as a matter of peisonat profit aud speculation to themselves.’ That is very nearly the color of the tariff business. The tariff, a good and needful thing in the present financial condition of the country, is so adjusted in large part as to be merely and only an encouragement forfmonopoly and a legalized method by which a few capitalists can plunder the people. But the ludicrous side of it is to hear the working men bellowing around in this fools paradise under the impression that‘protection’ means protection to him when in most cases it simply makes him the victim in common with all customers, robbed for the behoof of those who can control legislation.”

The Delphi Times very properly says: “Not more than one in twenty of the people of the United States can be classed among the beneficiaries of our present tariff. A system of imposts, designed to protect certain pet monopolies at the expense of other industries, is a forced levy on nineteen citizens for the benefit of one. It may be that a large proportion of the people, possibly Dearly half, believe this system conduces to their prosperity. But if asked to state the grounds of such belief, to show how it inures to their advantage they can only mouth some of the platitudinous and exploded sophistries by which protective robbery has sought to justify its existence. The theory that a people can grow rioh by * fencing out the products of other nations is a wild absurdity. It rests on the delusion that commerce is the exchange of the surplus products of one nation for the cash of other nations. instead of an interchange of products. Take our great agricultural interest, the main reliance for home consumption and exports, and tell us how the farmer is helped by a prohibitory tariff. He sells his breadstuffs and meat in Europe. He gets not a penny more for what he sells than he would under a reformed rev nnue system. But almost everything that he buys is taxed. He erives three bushels of wheat or three pounds of beef for what would cost him only two bushels or two pounds, if he were not plundered by the tariff ADd as it is with the farmer so is it with all except the favored few, who thrive on prohibitory imposts. The time is .coming when the victims of this thieving system will not be among its advocates. Unless we are to go backward to barbarism, we must go forward in the path of enlightened civilization, and that lies in the direction of revenue reform. — We may not hope for absolute freedom of trade for many generations, but we may fairly hope to see the worst evils of monopolistic {protection destroyed.”