Democratic Sentinel, Volume 12, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 April 1888 — Trusts and Workingmen. [ARTICLE]

Trusts and Workingmen.

“What is a trust, anyhow?” writes a workman. “We read a good deal j ust now about tfrusts, but I would like you to explain precisely what they are and how they affect us workingmen.” Well, listen. A trust is a combination of manufacturing capitalists to check production, feed the market with only a limited supply of their goods, and thus keep prices high. Their aim is to manufacture less and charge more. But if they make less goods, that means that they will employ fearer workmen, or give those they keep on less steady work. Hence a trust is a blow at the workmen.

If there were no high protective duties trusts would be impossible, because the moment manufacturers here combine to limit production and raise prices, that moment goods would rush in from abroad to supply the market. It is the high tariff, therefore, which is the basis of trusts. The tariff shuts out foreign goods; thereupon manufacturing capitalists combine to limjt production and raise prices at borne; and in doing this they necessarily injure their own workmen, because they deprive them of full work, and injure the people at large by forcing them to pay artificially high prices for goods. One example will show how a trust injures workingmen. When the salt duty was high the Michigan and Syracuse salt monopolists hired the Great Kanawha Salt Works in West Virginia to stand idle. That is to say, the salt trust paid the owners of these works a fixed sum per year to make no salt. They did not pay the men who had found employmentin these works a cent. The workmen were turned out neck and heels to shift for themselves. But the capitalist owners of the works were paid handsomely. That is how a trust affects workingmen and protects capitalists.— New York Herald.