Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 February 1884 — CRUSHED INDUSTRIES. [ARTICLE]

CRUSHED INDUSTRIES.

SOME INDUSTRIES WHICH HAVB BEEN DESTRQYBD BY THE TARIFF. ' I wish the Herald would take the trouble to make a test of the useful industries wip«d out by the high war tariff,”*said a gentleman to the Washington correspondent of the New York Herald. “That tariff, made by monopolists under the pretense that it was needed to raise the largest possible revenue, strpek a deadly blow at many truly American industries. I wonder the so-called free-traders have never made a list of them. It would he instructive just now. Take the smelting of foreign copper ores as one example. It eir l ployed skilled labor, it was an important industry, giving employment to many men around Baltimore and at some other points, I think in Massachusetts We have the richest and mp§t abundant copper mines in the world. Nature has so favored us that the notion of our copper mine owners needing additional artifi cial protection is nonsense on the face of it. But before 1861 we had a large trade with Chili, which bought from us great quantity of American manufactures, giving us in return Chilian copper ores, which were brought as return cargoes in American ships and smelted by American workmen. When, during the war, everybody rushed for a high tariff, the Lake Superior copper owners took care to get their share of the fashionable protection They got so high a tariff put on foreign copper ores as to exclude these entirely.' y “Now observe what resulted: fipst, the smelting works, purelycAmerican industiies, were crushed out at once. I saw the? 1 ruins some years ago. The tariff prohibited them from getting the ra w materials. But hat was only tlie.beginning. Our ships, carrying American manufactures of various kinds }o Chili could no longer bring return cargoes of Chilian ores. Without a cargo both ways no man can profitably sail a ship. At first our Yankee captains ;ried carrying Chilian ores to England, but that sent them home empty. The English, seeing our blunder, sent English manufactures in English bottoms to Chiii and freely took in exchange the ores as return cargo. Thus our American manufacturers of furniture and hundreds of other articles lost a valuable market by the high tariff on copper ores S'* you see that in order to enrich the Lake Superior copper mine otvners, who employ a comparitively insignificant number of men in one of the least desirable and least paid of all the occupations-

mining for days’ wages—the high tariff men destroyed—first, American smelting works, and, second, a valuable shipping trade, and finally destroyed a large and rapidly growing market for a great variety of American manufactures—a market which the English now, thanks to this single instance of so-called protection to American industries, almost monopolize, and which is so val pble that they run a semi-weekly line of very large and finely-fitted steamers to Valparaiso. “Now, what has happened to the American manufacturers of cooper goods? This: The protected copper mine owners actually charge American manufacturers more for their protected cop per than they sell the same copper for to foreigners in English and other European markets. Thus our home manufacturers of copper goods ar® oppressed in favor of foreigners, and this is called protection to Amerioan industry.” An inventor,of Bandy Creek, New York, has been offered SI,OOO for a ha If interest in his Patent hairpin.