Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 December 1886 — The Free List. [ARTICLE]

The Free List.

Quinine was added to the free list, and none of the dire consequences prophesied by two manufacturers followed. On the contrary the business fiou.ishes as it neyer did before, and the .people have quinine at from a rourth to a third of former prices.’ Coal and lumber should in like manner be added to the free list this winter, one 'at the tim . Some little opposition to this would be developed, but it would not be effective. Workingmen ~ould understand tariff reform presented to tltem m this way. When thev know that opposition to tariff reform means opposition to cheap fuel and cheap houses, they will appreciate better Mr. George’s advocacy of free trade. There is no duty on anthracite "oal. It is produce*! in Pennsylvania and in small quantities in Wales, so the Pennsylvania miners do not fear competition with foreign anthracite. But competition takes many .forms, and it is found that bituminous coal produced in Nova fceotia interferes with American miners, and so we have a duty of 75 cents per ton on coai from the mines of Nova Scotia, and the price is enhanced all along the Eastern coast It is an unjustifiable tax on American industry and energy, labor and capital, and a bill repealing this duty would be approved by 95 per cent, of the workingmen in America. So with lumber, n e have laws of one kind and another in nearl, every State in the Union to encourage the planting of trees and to prevent the devastation of the forest. Yet by a tax on mported lumber we pa} 7 a borus for every ree cut down. There is nothing quite so absurd as this tax on lumber; nothing that so flatly contradicts the intelligent'conclusions of every civilized nation. A tax on lumber expands the cost f every home and of everything in it, and it is a premium paid for the destruction of our forests. A proposition to put lumber on the free list could certainly, by good management, be pushed through even the Forty-ninth Congress. Nothing would destro so manv illusions and delusions t.aceable to the tariff as would putting.oca: and

lumber on the free list.—Louisville ( ,’ourier-J burnal.