Democratic Sentinel, Volume 14, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 August 1890 — The McKinley Bill. [ARTICLE]

The McKinley Bill.

Even though the bill should never beoomo a law, the attempt to make It so will fasten upon its advocates an odium not loss than that under which they will rest should it be placed upon the statute books. See the purpose and scope of the bill when it becomes a law. Under the specious guise of protection to American homes and industries it taxes every man, woman and child to heap up increased riches to a favored and privileged few. It takes from honest labor with one hand the meager subsistence it pretends to give with the other. It imposes upon the homes of the peopie burdens of debt which toil and thrift can. never raise while it continues. It’ destroys foreign commerce by rates of duty prohibiting imports of goods which cannot be furnished or fully supplied at home. It fosters and builds up gigantic trusts by import discriminations, and so pours added millions Into already well-filled treasuries. It provides rewards In the past and recolnpense in the future to those who have shamelessly bought seats, official power and patronage. -It yields to the call of monopoly and hastens to do its bidding as a hireling his master’s will. It belittles and belies the great declaration that all men are born with inalienable rights. #t usurps the authority of State sovereignties in order to give more power to the Federal head. It wrings vast sums from overburden* ed taxpayers, not for Government use, L but to bestow those wh*» stjnport it,

however unheeding or u a wo-thy tho/ may be. It poor* money into the nation’s coffers to be poured out again in profuse end profligate expenditures. It leads nway the uninformed with the delusion that taxation increases wealth and professes to seek reduction of redundant revenue by increasing taxes on the necessaries of life. Ik creates antagonism between sections, the West and South against the North and East, which will grow into retaliatory conflicts and which will quickly pass beyond the power of the best statesmanship to control. Finally, whatever there is of folly in partisanship, of error in economic statement, of falsehood in popular assumption, of hypocrisy In professed belief, all this; all these and more, is comprehended in the McKinley bill, a sum of political wrong such as no people in any country or in any ago were ever before confronted with. —Chicago Herald.