Democratic Sentinel, Volume 12, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 October 1888 — MILLS DEFENDS HIS BILL [ARTICLE]

MILLS DEFENDS HIS BILL

THE TEXAS TARIFF-REFORMER BEFORE AN INDIANA AUDIENCE. A Vigorous Speech on the Leading Que« • tion —How Free Raw .Materials Will Benefit the Workingman—Figures that Show the Fending Measure to Be a Very Moderate One. Hon. Roger Q. Mills recently addressed an immense audience at Richmond, Ind. We print below a summary of his very able speech. Mr. Mills, on rising, was greeted with a ringing round of cheers, and at once began his speech. He pitched his voice in a high key. and •was easily heard by those even at the outskirts of the assemblage. He quoted at the beginning from Mr. Blaine’s New York sjteecb, that capital was able to take care of itself; that the question in this campaign was one of laborlabor from the skin to the core, and from the core back to the skin again. Mr. Mills said he would accept that definition, and he proposed ito show that the Democratic party was now. as it had always been, the true friend of labor and of the laboring man—a proposition which evoked the first outbreak oi general applause. By way of proof, he cited the enormous taxation imposed by the Republican party during and after the war, until the income began to be beyond the needs of the Government. Ho then called attention to the fact that when the Republicans began to reduce the burden they did ■not begin to take the taxes off the poor, but directly off the rich. The income-tax, Nor instance, .which was one affecting but a few of .he peoplo of the country, and they all weil-to-do, was among the first removed by the Republican party In its haste to favor the rich, while professing to be the friend of the toiling masses. In the same line was their treatment of the tax on railroads and other wealthy corporations. They were a., relieved of taxation, as lie sarcastically said, because the Republican party was so deeply concerned for the welfare of the laboring people. On the otter hand, the Democrats proposed toremove the tax from the clothing of the ioor, from the implements of labor wherewith the laborers earn their subsistence, and from other articles which go to make up the enormous taxation of labor to gather an unnecessary surplus. This effort met uniform opposition from the Republicans, and yet Mr. Blaine wou’d have the People believe that this is a campaign in which the question is one of labor, and that the Republicans are the only friends of laborers. It was indeed a question of labor, but the true friends of labor were found in the Democratic party. Mr. Mills was emphatic in his declaration that the Democrats did not propose t > give the nation free whisky, that it was understood that if an attempt was made to remove the tax on whisky the Democrats were ready to fight it out on that line, if it took all summer and all this fall. Continuing his proof of the proposition with which he began, Mr. Mills denied that the Democrats favored free trade, and quoted the very small reduction of the tariff as proposed in the Mills bilL “Why,” said he, “wo propose to reduce the tariff from for;y-sevon per cent, to forty-two nnd one-half. That is no more free trade than was tho reform made by a hard drinker when he reduced his drams from fortyseven a day to forty-two and one-half. ” Mr. Mills went on with differmt articles enumerated in his bill, in which .here was a reduction of the tariff, to show how in oach case the protection which the Republicans insist oir did not protect the workman, but did protect the thing made by the workman, and that in everv case the benefit of the protection wont to the manufacturer—the master—and not to the man. “Lotus see what sort of a Uil we have presented. It is very moderate. Wo have reduced the average taxation from $47.1) on the SIOO to $42.50 on the $100; a little less than $5 on a hundred on imported goods. They are going about the coun ry aud saying this is free trade, that it will ruin the whole epuntry. A ftve-dol-■lar reduction in taxation on the necessaries of life, still leaving th ) people to pay over S4O on the hundred of taxation—is that free trade? If it is, I would like to know what they mean by protection. ” He then took up the iron schedule, stating that the Mills bill made a reduction of $2.30 on the SIOO worth of iron and steel. He compared the labor cost of iron in England and United States, saying: “Our high-priced labor onl\- amounts to $1.50 a ton ; supposo theirs is 75 ccntH a ton ; then if we made a duty of 7 > cents on pig iron that would cover the difference between England and the United States ; then the cost of transportation from Liverpool would bo $2 a ton, which would be an ample margin for profit. We reduce the duty on pig iron oniv 52 cents, leaving ic at $5. That is for labor. We left these pig-iron manufacturers $5 a ton, which they tell us they want for th dr laborers, and yet they pav their laborers only $1.25 of it. Why the devil don't they pay .the balance of it? Tnere is no statute that prevents them from paying this money that is ■placed in their hands by Congress in trust to pay their laborers. Y r et from the very beginning of their manufactory down to the present moment they haye hired their laborers at the .lowest cost in the open markets of the world. The reason the laborer doesn't get that is because the tariff is not for the benefit of the laborer. They can fool them—maybe. They used to fool them, but they don’t very much now. They are getting their eyes opened. They want the laborers to take an interest in the tariff because they have votes and money has not votes. “The tariff is on the thing that labor makes. That thing belongs to the manufacturer. The laborer has only the strokeofhis arm, and ho has .that in open competition with all the markets in •the world. He is a free trader. Nothing protocts fi. Congress protects Dig iron, but it does not jP-utect the poor lellow that burns himself away at the forge. I will repeat a question that 1 have asked from Boston across to Chicago. A rflyty of $6.72 is on that ton of pig iron, and I say that $6.72 went right down into the pocket of the itoh owner and is there yet. Now, let any laboring man, any friend of Harrison and Morton, any iKepublicau tell me how I can assist the laborer togst that $6.72 out oi” the pocket of the Hianufocturer and put it into his, aud I will vote for Harrison and Morton—and free whisky. To say that the Democratic party is unfriendly to workingmen is to say that it is unfriendly to its own right arm. It is to say that a man does not love his home best. It is a question of labor from the skin to the core, nnd the Democratic party is probing that question to the core. Take a pair of five-pound blankets costing 55 cents for labor. The tariff on them is SI.OO, which is given for the i rotectiou of American labor against pauper labor. The manufacturer gets it and puts it all in his pocket. The laborer, when he goes home at night, feels in vain for that $1.93. It is not there. “Let us see what we have put on tho feee list —wool, lumber, tin plates, juts, and we have put the raw materials ou thefies list. On. reason f r this is that when you put a raw material on the free list you can reduce the duty on the finished product. Take wool to illustrate. The duty is 40 cents a pound, then 35 cents ad valorem In addition, making 67 cents on every pound. We are asked the question, ‘Why don't you put the tax on wool for the benefit of our farmers ?’ We come back to the old slogan, to the old motto, ‘Equal rights for all and exclusive privileges for none.’ We don’t puo taxes on an article simply to take money out of one person’s pocket and put it into somebody else s. We put a tax on an article to make a revenue to support the Government. We believe revenues ought to be as little burdensome as possible. So raise your revenues as to make y..ur tax as low as possible on the man that has the tax to pay. We had still another object in putting raw materials on the free list. We import each year about $44,000,003 of manufactured woolen goods. It takes somewhere about 200,003,030 pounds or raw wool to make these ..goods. It takes something like a hundred thousand men working in factories to make these goods. Where are they made? They are made in Europe. Foreign laborers mako them. Who ought to make them ? Our own laborers ought to make them. We say that the manufacturing capacity of this country has reached that point in its development, when worked at its fullest force eight months in the year, that they can make the entire product that the population ■will consume in a year. What are you going to do the other four months? The manufacturer ■can take care of hims If. He shuts up his establishment when he finds prices going down, and all the manufacturers come together and .make one big establishment and take stock and call it a trust and fix the price. They stifle, they strangle, they kill competition. They form a monopoly like that infernal high-handed cotton begging trust. Now, then, our people My we put this wool and these other raw materials on the free list and we will import them and give that work to loo.ojjo American workingmen to make this raw material up. With the immense increase in our own population, having attained the highest point of coneumption, if we don’t find some kind of employment for our people there is going to be great ■distress. We propose to reach all the markets

of the world* V*V proposo to bring all the material that can be n-uc l *» into manufitctur d products and give constant employment through the whole year to all our people We have put hemp and jute and tin plate cn the freelist. Taking the tax off Uu plate makes it cheaper and more of it is imported, and it will give more work to more men to mako more tin buckets and tih cans aud roofs of booses, and it will help drive the wolf from the door. "The tariff cannot help the wirkingmeu; it increases the profit of the manufacturer, but it doesn’t change his heart. He is Use the rest of ns—won t run down the street to give it away. I will tell you what lie does vt ;h it. He will come oot here and lend it to you. and take a mortgage on your farms. The thing that will benefit workingmen is to have more work. If you have a half-dozen bosses ruuuing after every workingman, then the workingman can take care of himself, but if you have a half a dozen workingmen running after one employer, and his office is closed and hj is gme to Scotland, you can see the tariff does you no gool. How are we to get this additional employment for our peoule? You must make more markets for the consumption of things that these workingmen are making. In eight months of the year we can supply the whole of the home market. Suppose we add the markets of all Europe aud Asia and South America. Suppose we let down this Chinese wall—we don’t want any Chinese walls. We don’t want any Chinese people or Chinese pig-tails. Wo want to buy all the wool in South America an! Australia and Russia and bring it here and work it up and supply all the markets of the world. We have got the cheapest labor in the world. We have the highest-priced labor by the day. week, month or year, and that is conclusive proof that the labor cost is the lowest. A high rate of wages and a lower labor cost are like twoopposite beams of a balance, when one goes down, the other goes up. They cannot both go down together. When the labor cost goes up. the rate of wages goes down, and instead of cheap labor driving high-priced labor out of the

market, high-priced labor always drives cheap labor out of tho market. With the old spinning wheel our mothers made three pound-* of yam a week, which was worth $1.50. They made twentyfive cents a day. Now a pair of spinning mules can turn out 3,003 pounds of yarn in a week. The spinner who tends the spinning mules gets $6 a week. Isn’t there danger that the old spinning wheel will crawl out of the closet some nay and knock these mules higher than a kite ? “It is not the rate of wages that comes into the market. It is the thing that labor makes. Now, how can a pound of thread, the labor of which is fifty cents, come into the market and drive out a pound the labor cost'of which is ouefiftnofaceut? It cannot bs done. The fact is, the whole of our civilization, the whole of our progress to industrial improvement, the whole march of our people lias been an invasion of cheap labor by high-priced labor. Tha Republican party has built a Chinese wall that keeps us from the markets of the world. The Democratic party is going to blow those old horns and those walls will fall like the walls or Jericho, and we will go and take possession.”