Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 March 1882 — One of the Beauties of Protection. [ARTICLE]

One of the Beauties of Protection.

Our so-called “ protective tariff ” operates as an export tax on American manufactures. It operates in two directions : First, it prohibits to some extent tlie importation of competing goods, and secondly, it prohibits the exportation of protected domestic manufactures. These results are the reasonable effects of a protective tariff. The Uuited States ought to be the great manufacturing nation of the world. We have all the raw material, all the fuel and all the labor needed, and we have what no other nation has—the most essential of all—an abundance of cheap food. In some lines of goods we have peculiar advantages. This country is the home of the cotton plant. We export twenty times as much cotton as we consume at home. We supply other lands with the raw material for cotton goods, and purchase, despite our tariff, more cotton f oods than we export. Our tariff so inreases the cost of producing cotton cloth that it cannot be exported aud sold in competition with cloth made from American cotton in foreign countries. In the absence of a protective tariff we might produce cotton goods so much cheaper than all other countries that we could command the trade in all the markets of the world. —Chicago Tribune.