Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 September 1884 — Does Protection Protect. [ARTICLE]

Does Protection Protect.

The Chicago Herald, In speaking of the coal*miners’ strike in Pennsylvania and Ohio, in consequence of a reduo* tion of wages by those protected industries, says: ‘.lt will.surprise many people to knew that in this year of pleuty there are thousands of people iu Pennsylvania and Ohio Buffeting lor the necessaries of life. f ‘The dispatches making note of Me arrest of forty or fifty coal miners near California, Pa-, state that when the men were being loaded into wagons to be oonveyed to jail the *ives of fifteen or twenty of them with babes in their arms begged the officers to take them to prison also for they bad nothing to eat. ‘it will eurprise many other people to know that in this free country, when thousands oi men quit work because wages have been reduced below the living point and their employers then import pauper labor, the workingmen have no right to assemble and discuss their wrongs in public, ‘The dispatch from the Pennsylvania and Ohio mining regions daily contain allusions to the wholesale arrest of men whose only fault appears to be that they are poor and are seeking in the only way known to better their condition. ‘lt will surprise some other reople to know that many of these mining districts resemble military camps in which imported laborers without families are marched around under warlike guards, while the displaced workingmen, with helpless women and children, gauntfaced and hollow-eyed, clinging to them. Btaud by sullenly. ‘ let the dispatches from the various mining towns ot Ohio daily contain some such sentence as this: ‘A military guard knocked one aged striker down and broke hig right arm.” ‘lt will touch some hearts in this great West where the barns are burstirg and the golden theaves are piled high in every field to know that the free distribution of coffee and dry bread to a camp of four or four five hundred idle miners in Pool No. ♦, Pennsylvania, called out delirious expressions of joy from the half-famished men.

‘A telegram from Pittsburg says that when this poor least was in progress one old man, bent almost double with age aud toil, laid his miserable morsel on the ground while he sang with streaming eves and a trembling voice: ‘Hard Times Come again No Mare.” ‘These are protected industries. These men are the ones whom eur pollticaus tell us they ennoble by tariff legislation. These hunger-stricken and palefaced women and children begging for imprisonment if so be it bring bread are the families of the protected workingmen »f whom we hear to much. Tbne thousands of idle men standing arou d watching imported laborers who work under the protection of gleaming rifles are the workiug men whom the tariff is levied to enrich. These sleek employers who fill the places of strikers so easily with wholesale importations arc tire men who contribute to maintain campaign organs which preach lies and circulate falsehoods aud which claim to be laboring only for the workingman's good‘Out here in the Wes' these thousands of prosperous jj an-‘ comfortable farmers whom one sees • . every hand are not protected. No <> • passes law to dignify and ennoble i on. These carpenters aud masons au<> railroad laborers are not protected, hut they have j enough to eat and to wear. Hunger, want, and idlene.-s come to none ol these- They are in enjoyment of the comforts of life iu spite of a ‘protection’ which taxes them forty per cent, on most of the things which they are compelled to buy. * ‘A lari ff reformer need uot be afraid to invite a comparison between the protectionist east and the free trade west. The record is open ' Yes.‘the record is open,’ and James G. Blaine is the cnampien of the protectionists.