Democratic Sentinel, Volume 12, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 February 1888 — OYER THE SEA FOR A MARKET. [ARTICLE]

OYER THE SEA FOR A MARKET.

Special from Sault Ste M.rie, Michigan, to the Chicago Tribune of recent date: “The first seeti m of twenty cere of th? Minneapolis flour train arrived in the Soo this afternoon.— Fully 2,000 people were out to meet it, and great enthusiasm prevailed. AU the.oars bore plaeards with inscriptions relative to the great new seaboard route. They loaded with Pillsbury Mill flour, and came in pulled by a double-header. The cars were all sealed and bonded here, and then the Canadian Pacific took them across the bridge and on to Montreal. The four ether trains are expected to-night.” To which Bartlet W00d5,.% prominent Republican farmer of Lake county, responds in the Crown Point Star as follows: T' “Cars all sealed and bonded;” that means ov.-r the sea. Why should these 107 oars of flour go to Montreal? I ask this of he Protective Tai iff League. Why go eutside of the beneficent and fostering c«re of our own American tariff which protects flour with 20 per Cent., duty? Sherman in his tariff speech in the United States Senate of January 4th, says: “The principle of protection demanded equality of benefits and

of burdens; the same rule had been applied for the farmer, the miner and the fu.nace owner as well as the manufacturer; and whenever that rule was departed from the whole system would fail, and properly so.” As far as the farmers’ interests are concerned the whole system has failed! To the farmer it is all burden and no benefit. The 20 per cent, gives him nothing. If protection wers an equal benefit, and as Sherman and Blaine insist, gave the farmer a home market, these 107 cars of flour would not have to brave the storms of the Atlantia and face competition in the open markets of the world. The fact is, the home market the farmer gets is, not now, nor never was, the result of proie tion We owe the great value of the home market to the perfect freedom of trade between the States; in no other way could our people harmonize their different interests. This exchange, this unrestrictec commerce, this free trade among the States, makes us, more than anything else, one people. It binds the Union in a commercial brotherhood which no protectionist “wil ever dare disturb.”

These 107 cars es flour are only a part of that big surplus that is compelled to And a market outside of the magic circle of the “American policy,of protection.” Dakota and Minnesota where this flour was made and the wheat grown is a cold tlimate. They have a surplus of flour, but they need badly good woolen underwear, warm clothing and a heavy allwool blanket on every bed. Common sense and the rights of every American citizen should guarantee to every one the right to the property which his own “American labor” has produced; it is his, and he the right to take it and soil it to the best advantage he can, and all that the 107 cars will buy belongs to those whose labor and capital made it, and the more in exchange they take back to Minneapolis and the farms so much the better for them. Who has a better right to it? And right here is

where the farmers will take their stand. They will willingly pay to the Government a duty for revenue for the needs of the Government, but they will insist that on the return cargo, what the flour has purchas?d, that no duty, no tariff charge, sh?ll be exacted on the goods for the mere purpose of socaUed protection; it is confiscation, it takes from one to give to some one else. As it is now the final result that Government, b • its tariff legislation, reduces the earnings and income of every farmer by lowering the value of his products in purchasing power which reacts on all and must in the end be disastrous to the best interests of our coun-

try.

B. WOODS.