Democratic Sentinel, Volume 12, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 April 1888 — BLED FOR TWENTY YEARS. [ARTICLE]

BLED FOR TWENTY YEARS.

American Farmers Robbed by Trust-Protected Classes. All Monopolies and Huge Corporations Oppose a Revision of the Tariff, Because It Would Leave the People x No Longer at Their Mercy. There is one peculiar fact in connection with the most persistent, the most rabid, and the most intensely interested advocates of high tariff that the agricultural, laboring, and consuming masses do not seem to have studied as closely as it might be profitably studied. Every “trust,” every “combination,” every great corporation, and every monopolistic interest stands like a stone wall in opposition to any revision of the tariff or ' any reduction of the customs duties upon all the articles that are essential to the welfare and the comfort of the masses of the people. ! If you will take a census of them you will find that they are in iavor of reducing the surplus revenues by cheapening whisky and tobacco, but are unalterably opposed to reducing them by cheapening the necessaries of life. Does the farmer look to the “trusts,” the “combinations.” the g'ant corporations, and the interests ’that have grown into grinding monopolies through the operations of a tariff system carried to a manifest excess for the promotion of his interests? Clearly he does not, for his complaints have been ascending against them tor twenty years. While their power has grown, and their wealth has increased, and their arrogance has become next to unendurable his profits have shrunk, and new “shingles” have been nailed upon his real estate by the money lenders. They have suffered what the agricultural I class suffer in all overtaxed countries and j communities—their profits have decreased and their debts have increased, while a limited class have profited enormously at the expense of an immensely larger and more deserving class. When a system of unjust and unnecessary taxation is converted into an engine of genteel and legalized plunder of the many by the few, there can be no community of interest between the plundered and the plunderers. This proposition is too : plain to need any argument. The farmer cannot, consistently with his own interests, advocate the system that serves the purpose of the trust, the combination, and the monopoly. For that system tends only to the concentration of wealth; and the safety, the welfare, and the prosperity of the farmer lie only in its widest diffusion and most equitable distribution.

Of course the farmer is told this year, as he has been told heretofore by the advocates of the tariff, that he is prosperous, and that his marvelous prosperity is the direct result of our war-tariff system. He has had more than twenty years of wartariff taxation in time of peace, and I appeal to him to ask himself about his alleged prosperity, and answer his own question. When he makes his complaint the trust protectionists either tells him that he is on the threshold of fortune through the “home market, ” or that the tariff has saved nim from absolute bankruptcy. Now that he has been standing still or going backward during these twenty odd years, would it not be wise for him to advocate and by intelligent advocacy compel a change, and test the question of a change in results? In a representative Government like ours it is always safe to change a financial and governmental policy that is reasonably suspected of not producing the best attainable results. Even if a mistake is made it is not irreparable, and may be as easily corrected as made. And in this connection it is well enough to note an historical act. Not a change in the direction of the lessening of war taxes has been made in the last twenty years but has been vindicated by ensuing results and approved by the sober judgment of the country. Will any reasonable man pretend to say that there is any possible danger of still further reducing our enormous and unnecessary national revenues and bringing them down to the simple needs of the Government? As a class the laboring men, skilled and unskilled, have been more generally and completely deceived and bamboozled by the protection fetich than any other. With their employers protected against foreign competition and themselves open to the competition of imported contract labor, which has been poured like a many-chan-neled river into every section of the country where there was a large market for labor, they have spent about one-third of the time at hard work and the other twothirds in organizing against their “oppressors” and striking against a reduction of wages, while perhaps a majority of them went regularly to the polls and voted to maintain the system that put them at the mercy of the men who, while deploring the idea that the American workingman should be placed in competition with the “pauper-made” wares of Europe, ransacked the Old World for the “pauper labor” with which they broke the strikes, and by doubling the supply of laborers were able to pit one set of men against the other, and make their special privileges cut like a two-edged sword. But for our vicious tariff system, continued and made more galling after the great national exigency which made it temporarily permissible had passed away, the workingmen of the country would have no “oppressors”—they never had them in any other period of our national history—the country would not be filled with the clamor of strikes, disastrous not only to those engaged in them but to whole communities, and frequently producing national stagnation, and not a ship-load of contract pauper laborers would ever have been imported The-system of fostering a, certain class of industries and stimulating them by a misnamed or at least a deceitful system of protection created a privileged class, who, being relieved from foreign competition, began to grind their employes, and when they rebelled, availed themselves of the double privilege of the free importation of labor to maintain their undue advantage,

not only over their employes, but the whole community. This is the true history of our protective system, stripped of the sophistry of th< protected protectionists, and which is written in twenty years of strikes, often bloody and always destructive and desolating to ! the common interests of the whole community where it occurred. We are told and have been told all along that this system was especially designed, under the guidance of Providence, to make the workingman happy, contented, and prosperous. Has it accomplished its proclaimed purpose? I leave the workingman to answer the question for himself. Ido not believe that he has fought, and organized, and struggled, and suffered, andcomfilained for a score of years for the mere ove of being a disturber. He has been the victim of a bad system, and the beneficiaries of that system, while holding him by the throat, have instilled into his mind the idea that the wiping out of that system would ruin him. As a matter of fact, what is left at the end of twenty years for him to lose? Under the beneficent system which he is called upon to worship and maintain by his vote his cottage has grown dilapidated and degenerated into shreds and patches, while his employer has grown into a millionaire and erected a palace that Lucullus might have envied. t The reason for this is simple enough. I Under a vicious system of excessive taxation, masked with a deceitful name, the actual wealth of the country is being rapidly concentrated in the hands of a few, while the many suffer the inevitable evil effect —and the men who work must drink the dregs of the bitter draught. Have the workingmen, the farmers, the masses of the people any remedy? An easy and a sure one, and as simple as the cause of all their woes. Break the wheels of the Juggernaut of excessive, unneces- I sary class taxation, and the national wealth will readjust itself. It needs no dynamite, no torch, no dagger to deliver the people from the oppression of which they so justly complain. A Congress composed of men who believe in just taxation, equitably distributed, just to all, with special privileges to none, will speedily accomplish the work. The people have listened long enough to the siren sophistries of the protection barons; let them listen to the plain voice of common sense and take counsel with their own interests and elect such a Congress.

Columbus, O.

W. A. TAYLOR.