Democratic Sentinel, Volume 14, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 May 1890 — TO OUR FARMERS. [ARTICLE]

TO OUR FARMERS.

You will soon be called upon by the Democratic and Republican parties to aid in perfecting a thorough organization of those parties for the coming battle of ballots. Carefully consider the attitude of these parties upon the vital questions of to-day! Educate yourselves, take a decisive stand, laying aside all prejudices, and your position cannot other thar lavorable to the Democracy. You are an active principal in the business and producing world, and as such cannot afford to support a policy the application of which means hampered markets, tiie coddling of trusts and combines with special privileges to favored individuals. Protection, a combination of knavery and theft, is the trap set to eatch the unwaiy and uninformed. The McKinleyite meets you with a kiss, and, while he presses his lips, scented with free ottar of roses, to your brow, thrusts a dagger into your heart in the way of increased taxes on clothing and other necessaries of life. The farmer is not banefitted in the least by the duties on agricultural products. We produce a surplus which must find a foreign market. England is our largest purchaser, and Liverpool th. * g eatest market for American grain pr ducts. Now, in ail cases where there is a surplus the piices in the home market is fixed where that surplus is sold, consequently the price of a bushel of wheat, corn or oats, and the price of beef or pork is fixed in Liverpool, in other words, the price in New York or Chicago is the pifie in Liverpool, less transpomtation, commissions, etc. ’ The tariff duty piaced on farm products is a delusion and a Lnare. It is a mantle to cover the deformity of the devils fish which sdeks the profits of the farm, and a large per cent of labor’s hire, into Aa rapacious maw. It increases the price of machinery, farming implements and necessities by confining our people to a liom s market which is controlled by trusts and combines that could not exist bu + for a protect ve tariff. Take a lesson from the protected barbed wire and binding twine trusts. It is give but never receive. Now, to iifus trate, suppose a farmer sell- $lO worth of wheat in Liverpool and purchases a $lO suit of clothing in the same market. The natural .’aws ot trade, supply and demand, govern both sale and- purchase. All exchanges, barters or sales must be fair if the same law fixing values govern both sides of the transaction. The farmer finds on arriving at New Yorn that he must pay a tariff tax of G 8 per cent, before he is allowed to remove his goods from the custom house.ow -the suit, under the natural laws of trade cost him $lO, which, with the tariff of $6,80 costs him really $16,80. In other words, he exchanged $lO worth of wheat for $lO worth of clothing and paid $6,80 m addition to the government for having the audacity to make the exchange. Is that fairtrade? Now suppose he wishes to duplicate that suit in New York city, it will cost him the same amount—if imported goods the importer adding th ereto the tax paid by him; if home manufacture the manufacturer, having taken advantage of tne tariff tax, adds, receives and transfers to his pockets the ain’t. Now if the tariff increases the price of a suit of clothing, either a foreign or domestic article, to nearly double the price of the same, if governed only by the natural laws of trade, why does not the high tariff and blessed home market increase the price of the farmer’s wheat in like proportion ? Simply because the farmer produces a surplus and no tariff can have any effect upon the price except to lower it by preventing a tair exchange of products with our foreign purchaser. The devilfish gefs in its work by compelling you to give on rn average cue and onehalf bushels of wheat for an artis cle which with fair trade could be purchased wich one bushel. Are

you not getting tired of be'ng robbed for the bent fit of favored classes? If so, vote for the partv that advocates equal rights to all and exclusive privileges to none: that makes war on trusts and com D bines of all forms: that ad ocate3 honest election laws, a iree ballot and f. fair count: that denounces unnecessary taxation as unjust taxation.

A FARMER.