Democratic Sentinel, Volume 12, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 February 1888 — A WORD TO FARMERS. [ARTICLE]

A WORD TO FARMERS.

It Is Time for Agriculturists to Quit Being Made the Tools of Other Classes. [From the Tennessee Farmer. ] In 1880 the aggregate value of the iron and steel manufactured in the United States was $296,000,000, but as this included the pig-iron twice, first as a separate product and again in the bar-iron or steel into which it went, its value of $89,000,000 is twice given. A more correct estimate, when the report is free from duplications, would place the aggregate at about $200,000,000. During the year ending June 30, 1881, the export of American agriculture to foreign nations was of the value of $7’29,650,000, or three and one-half times as much as our total products of iron and steel —and this, too, after our enormous home demand had been filled. If, therefore, it were true that a protective tariff were needed to support our iron furnaces—which we utterly deny, for we made iron long before we ever had a tariff—yet to secure a trade worth $200,000,000 we are jeopardizing one worth $700,000,000. The loss of that foreign trade for our agricultural products not only determines the fact whether we shall make anything on what we sell at home of such products, but would of itself entail, if lost or but one year, a greater injury to American industry than the destruction of three times the capital invested in all our iron and steel works as it stood in 1880. Yet this system is called “protection," and, we are told, is kept up to enable iron men to pay “good wages.” Farmers have their workmen to pay also, and grubbing potatoes is just as honorable as grubbing iron ore, and a far higher degree of intelligence is required. It is time for agriculturists to quit being made the tools of the other classes, and to demand that taxes not needed to support the Government shall not be transferred by the Government to favored induslries. What the Government does not need to maintain public peace, order, and security, should remain in the taxpayers’ pockets. Reduce the tariff.