Democratic Sentinel, Volume 14, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 April 1890 — SOUNDING THE ALARM. [ARTICLE]

SOUNDING THE ALARM.

SIGNIFICANT UTTERANCES OF A PROTECTIONIST ORGAN. Seeing the Handwriting on the Wall, It Ca Is a Halt aud Urges Tariff Reduction —Unless This la Done It Predicts a Reaction Against Protection—Alarm at the Attitude of the Farmers. The National Labor Tribune, of Pittsburg, heretofore au ultra high protectionist orgau, recently printed the following significant editorial: TARIFF MODIFICATION. Any min who is in position to observe the trend of public opinion and who haa wit enough to oompreheud it, cannot but admit that the teudenoy is toward modification of the t riff schedules. We do not reier to the free traders, but to those who are' known as proteotionUt-L The fe >r is that except there shall be a return to the old pro.eotiouist ground there will be reaction in favor of something nearer to absolute free trade than the country has vet had. The origin il idea of protection was to build up infant industries, not to aid them to large profits after they hud been established. It is asserted that this policy has grown into one that aims to produce everything at home, whether the article can or can not be made at a reasonable profit, and that this costs the people more than the advantages warrant. It strikes us that the argument of these "protectionists” is so much like that advanced in favor of Mr. Morrison’s "horizontal reduction bill” of a few years ago, mixed with the logio advanced in favor of the Mills bill, as to be a confession that Morrison and Mills were right. This new departure of a considerable number of protectionists may be briefly stated as favoring a general reduction of tariff aud special reduction in some oases. Will any gentleman of intelligence please inform us what is the difierence between this and the policy the Demooraoy fought for in the last Presidential canvass? Yet the trend of Bopublicanism is now set in strongly for just such modification of the tariff. One does not need to be in favor of this new policy to admit that there is no disguising the faot th t it is making he idway. This is a palpable truth that it would be silly to ignore. Wbatareyou going to do abont it? is the question that is most pertinent. It seems that the farmers are awakened to what they fancy is the cause of their distress. That distress is due to laok of business qualifications—to raising cropß that did not pay because they raised so much of a lew leading articles that the markets became weak, and to paying high interest for borrowed money and to credit purchases —but it. does not matter what the real cinse is so long as the farmers imagine it is protective tariff, inasmuch as they will vote as stubbornly mistakenlv as tnough they were voting intelligently. Hence, except they get an (normous tariff on wool and are coddled by misleadeW in the matter of high duties on some other items of farm produce, they will kick out of the protective traces. However, they will be mollified in this legard. But how long will the mollification last? Just until they find that comparatively few of them are interested in wool equal to the extra expenditure that wool tariff will put on their clothing, and until they find that the increase on potatoes affects them only when the potato crop is so bad that they have none to sell. It appears to us clear that except th* practice of deception that obtains among the politicians intrusted with the making of tariff schedules shall cease, and men be sent to the capital who are honest and capable (hence will legislate for the best interests of the people), there will within two years be a reaction against protection that will be fatal to it. What the protected industries should do is either to reoognlze this eoudition and agree to the reshaping of legislation in accord therewith, or to hang on energetically to unadulterated protection and get all they can out of it so long as it lasts.