Democratic Sentinel, Volume 11, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 January 1888 — JOHN SHERMAN. [ARTICLE]

JOHN SHERMAN.

His War-Tariff Speech Answered by the Chicago Tribune. A Strong Editorial from the Leading Republican Journal of the Northwest. The burden of John Sherman’s speech ■on the tariff was, “No redaction of war-tax burdens on the people of the West; no relief to the plundered, robbed, overcharged Western farmers.” To avoid any reduction ■of taxation Sherman has innumerable schemes for dissipating surplus revenues and making continued high taxation necessary—premature bond redemptions, wasteful expenditures for coast defenses, indiscriminate pensioning, refunding direct war taxes to the States, adoption of lavish river and harbor appropriations, the Blair humbug educational bill, etc., etc. Aiming' to place every possible obstacle in the way of tariff reform and reduced taxation, Sherman made just such a speech as might have been expected from an Eastern Senator from a coddled, protected State and representing a constituency of trust monopolists and mill barons, but not one that does any credit to a Senator from the West. Don Cameron, of Pennsylvania; Senator McPherson, of New Jersey; Aldrich, of Rhode Island; Sam Randall or Pig-Iron Kelley, could not make any more ultra, never-let-up, tariff-robber - harangue, Sherman thinks he has found the straight path to the White House, but is only proving his demoralization through too great intimacy with Eastern coupon-clippers and monopolists. Sherman’s speech would have done well enough twenty-five years ago, when every cent that could be squeezed out of the people was needed, and when it sweetened the bitter dose to make them believe they were swallowing sugar-coated high-protection pills. High tariffs now stand on an entirely different footing. The Government is collecting 100 millions not needed for any justifiable or proper purpose, and the exaction ought to be thrown off in the interest particularly of Western farmers, who are working for a profit of 50 cents a day, and whose demand for reduced fixes must be heeded. These farmers know that their condition can be improved only by cutting down taxes and lessening th#-cost of living. They have to sell their surplus products in low free-trade markets, and they cannot go on buying their goods and manufactured articles at ultra high- protection prices. They submitted to this burden when the revenues were needed to carry on the war and to pay the war debt, but now that the tax levies are being piled up in useless hoards in the Treasury, all John Sherman’s sophistry will not convince them that the blood-letting must go on. Among his various schemes to perpetuale high taxation and tariff protected monopolies, Sherman thinks none would be more effective than the repeal of the tobacco tax and the payment of a direct bounty to the Louisiana sugar-growers. But if a bounty is to be paid on sugargrowing, why not on wheat, corn, barley, oats and live stock? Who needs or deserves a bounty more than the hard-working and miserably paid Western farmers who sell their surplus productions in the free trade markets of Europe and buy all their goods, tools, machinery, clothing and necessaries from American tariff-protected trusts and monopolies. Western farmers would be glad to'have a bounty of 15 cents a bushel on corn, 25 cents a bushel on wheat, 10 cents a pound on butter, 2 cents on pork, and on other products in like measure, and if a Treasury bonus is to be paid any department of agriculture, why should it not go to that branch which has deserved the most, suffered longest, and received the least? Sherman loses his bearings altogether when he proposes to bonus the ex-rebels who are working she sugar plantations of Louisiana with negro labor and to leave Western farmers out in the cold. Surely this scheme is not in the interests of the negroes on the sugar plantations. They get no protection now, and would not under the bounty system, and would still be required to toil for a bare subsistence. If Sherman would look to the interest of the toiling blacks instead of their ex-rebel bosses on the sugar plantations he would advocate a far different policy. If the monopoly plantations were broken up, find the land devoted to the more profitable culture of cotton, many of the blacks might get patches of land for themselves instead of depending for a livelihood on the beggarly wages paid by the plantation bosses. Nor need Sherman feel alarmed lest the removal of the sugar duty would give sugar-producing countries an opportunity to replace the levy with'an export tax, and so transfer to their own coffers the revenues now paid into the United States Treasury while keeping unthe price of sugar to consumers. That difficulty could be met by a discriminating tariff so arranged as to preserve the duties against any country that levied an export tax. Senator Sherman revamps old protectionist dogmas with poor success. His claim that the wool duty has “encouraged the production of wool” is squarely and emphatically refuted by the record. The lowest price wool has reached in thirty years —25 cents —was under the high protective tariff, and when the duty was lowered in 1883 the price began to advance and rose steadily until it is now at 32 cents. Nor did the lessening of the duty lead so an increase of importations. In the four years preceding the reduction the imports of clothing wool were valued at $16,772,000, and in the four years following at $16,377,000, a decrease of $400,000. Mi. Sherman’s talents as a financier and statistician might perhaps be employed to advantage in showing how a lessening of the duty was followed by improved prices and a check of importations. He would haidly succeed better in the undertaking, however, than he does in renewing the claim that high tariffs are preserved solely to benefit labor and insure higher wages. It is notorious that the worst paid labor in the United .States is that employed in the high protected industries. Beggarly wages forced Americans out of the mills and factories of New England to give place to the Irish, whose discontent was expressed in strikes until they were made to give way to the wretched, superstitious, priestridden French-Canadian imported operatives, who can live on less and endure more than any other class the mill barons have yet found. Woman and child labor is the distinctive curse of the industries having the heaviest tariff protection. New

England has two strongly distinguished classes of population: tariff-protected monopolists and coupon-clippers so ruh that they don't know how to spend their money, and the pauper factory hands who never get a cent s worth of protection out of the tardf. But while John Sherman wants the tariff preserved for .he benefit of persons who never get a dime from it he hasn’t even a crocodile tear for the underpaid Western farmer. Not only in New England, but in every marc of the country, is it true that low wages are paid in industries having the highest protection. The census of 1880 gives the following: Unskilled labor m blast furnaces in Virginia, b 2 cents per day; in Alabama, 08 cents; in Pennsylvania, SI.OJ; and in Missouri, $1.20. The iron industry, having 50 to 90 per cent, protection, makes the following showing of average wages for the year in different sections of the Union: Eastern States, $417 per annum; Western, $396; .Pacific, $354; Southern, $304. The average wages varying from $1 to $1.33 per day. Ihe average weekly wages paid to workers in woolen goods (enjoying a protection of 70 per cent.) in Massachusetts in 1884 was $0.90, or $1.15 per day, while the average to workers in flax, linen, and hemp (30 to 40 per cent, protection) was only $6 per week, or $1 per day; to glass-workers (50 to 100 per cent protection), $lO per week, or $1.66 per day; to cotton operatives (40 to 50 per cent protection), $7.68 per week, or $1.28 per day; and to clothing operatives (70 per cent, protection), sb.i>B per week, or $1.43 per day. The unprotected classes, especially the mechanics, do far better, the lowest grade of daylaborers averaging higher pay than the best class of skilled operatives in New England. So many of the latter are women and children, employed at starvation wages, that the average is reduced to a low figure. It should be noted also that the statistics we have given as to wages of protected classes in New England include in tho averages the cost of superintendence, the figures in this respect being deceptive and probably intended to deceive. Attributing to the tariff the prosperity flowing from the natural weath of the country, the abundance and cheapness of rich land, and the invention of laborsaving machinery, John Sherman is unable to escape the fact that where protection is highest wages are relatively low and slow to rise. Necessarily it must be so. Ultra protectionism fosters monopoly and gives manufacturers power to squeeze bo.h the laborer and the consumer. When not needed for purposes of revenue there can be no justification for duties so high that they exclude and prohibit foreign competition and offer home manufacturers a bribe to combine in pools and trusts to extort high prices, depress wages, and mononolize the market.

Senator Sherman took exceptions to the President’s policy because he had, on what he (Mr. Sherman) regarded as a frivolous reason, refused his signature to the river and harbor bill, “which would have appropriated more than $10,000,000 for necessary (?) public works,” and by his veto of the dependent pension bill “he had withheld from Union soldiers appropriations made for their relief.” President Cleveland vetoed the river and harbor bill because there were jobs and steals in it involving thousands upon thousands of dollars which he could not prevent without vetoing it entire. The bill Was full of these jobs, set up by local bosses and engineered by log-rolling’ Congressmen who were anxious to secure the influence of these bosses and to spend public money among their constituents, It is a matter of public notoriety that surveys of rivers and creeks have been ordered that could not be found by the surveyors. The history of Clark’s Creek and Mingo Creek, alleged to be in South Carolina, whose existence was unknown to any person in that State, is top familiar to need repetition. It is notorious that the bill contained numerous similar steals and jobs for dredging and improving goose ponds and duck creeks, involving an immense amount of money. Would it not have been more statesmanlike for the Senator to have pointed out these steals, and, more than this, to have demanded that the President shall have the authority to veto items in such a bill just as the State authorities of New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois, and the Mayor of Chicago have, for the protection of taxpayers? The President took a justifiable position when hp voted the bill, and the Senator’s attack upon him was not well made. The vetoing of extravagant river and harbor bills is not a distinctive Democratic policy. President Grant vetoed some of these bills, and President Arthur did the same. Has it come to this—that the Republican party must assume responsibility for all the swindling river and harbor grabs that may be logrolled through Congress in the future, and must denounce any Democratic President who may have the courage to veto them? Is an annual river and harbor swindle as well ,$s belief in an immutable ultra war tariff to be adopted as a new article of faith in the Republican creed; and is every Republican who does not believe in the policy of improving goose ponds and dry creeks to be “read out of the party?” This is where'Senator Sherman, with his ferocious and bigoted partisanship, seems to be leading his followers. If consistent they must abandon the policy of Grant and Arthur in order to be justified in assailing Cleveland for doing precisely what his Republican predecessors had ddne. How many more fundamental principles of Republicanism shall the followers of Sherman be required to give up, and how many more meritorious acts of Republican Presidents are to be ignored or apologized for by them?