Democratic Sentinel, Volume 14, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 November 1890 — IT SEEMS TO GLADSTONE [ARTICLE]

IT SEEMS TO GLADSTONE

THE M’KINLEY BILL WILL HURT US MORE THAN ENGLAND. 'The Grand Old Man Talks About the New Tariff—lt Will Help England in the Long Kun—Protection a Delusion and a t nareThe alarm of a few English manufacturers over the passage of the McKinley bill has led many rash protectionists to the conclusion that the bill will do great harm to that country, and they draw the -stupid inference therefrom that “England’s loss is our gain.” Doubtless :some English manufacturers will lose for a time, and this fact has thrown them into unnecessary anxiety. But the -views of a great statesman and financier like Gladstone are far more important than those of the manufacturers. While Gladstone has many enemies in this own country he enjoys the distinction of being the one Englishman who is .respected and admired above all others .by everybody in the United States —by Democrat and Republican alike. The fact of his universal popularity with us lends additional importance to his recent on the McKinley bill and on ■the trade relations between England and r tho United States. Gladstone said when his party was dcsfeated by the Tories five year? ago that it was the characteristic of an Englishman never to know when he is defeated —to fight right on just as if he had not -been beaten at all. The grand old man Jias acted upon this principle himself, ;and now every sign points to his early victory over his opponents. Those persons who, like our Major McKinley, have been pointing out what a blow our new tariff will strike at England must read with disappointment the •confident words of Gladstone, at Dundee, Scotland, on the subject of that bill. Indeed, the Grand Old Man is no more •discouraged than ho was when he was beaten by the Tories and did not know die was beaten. He would bring no railing accusation against us, for he recognized the fact that “protection, although it might inflict incidental collateral iblows on other countries, did far greater mischief to the people of the country -which adopted such a policy, and whose people it plundered aryl defrauded. ’There were people who believed that the injurious effects of protection were •chiefly felt in the countries dealing with the protected country. That was a fundamental mistake. There plight be a ■deal of disturbance aud even demoralization in trade, but it was not true at any time that the trade of any country on •earth could interfere seriously with the of Great Britain. ” That is the same indomitable spirit which has made England the greatest power on earth. But Glad•stone has good cause to fear no permanent harm to British commerce from the McKinley bill. “Supposing there •were twenty great markets in the world, ” •he said, “and in one a stringent protective measure like the McKinley law was passed, doubtless the first effect would be to injure us and to restrict dealings, but a larger and wider effect would be •to raise the standard Of prices under protection. This meant diminished power of exportation. Therefore, while we were damnified in this one market we were benefited in the rest. Every country giving greater stringency of protec--tion within its borders, though damaging us within its own market, give us a :freer and broader field in other markets. It was not possible for Great Britain to a vital injury from any of these operations abroad.” The effect which he thinks the new -tariff law will have in this country will ■be toward the manufacture of coarser goods, thus degrading our productions, while the English arc improving .theirs. This view is confirmed by the fact that •while our wool manufacturers were strongly opposed to the high McKinley ■duties on wool, the shoddy men were clamorous in advocating them. Mr. Gladstone gave in his speech a fitting name to protection. The word ■“protection, ” he said, was a misnomer. “It ought to be oppression. It is a delusion and a fraud.” The reason for the strength of the protection party in the United States is •clearly seen by Mr. Gladstone. Because •of our vast territory,our immense natural wealth in land, timber, and minerals, •our progress must necessarily be rapid, protection or no protection. “The possession of these enormous advantages helped to disguise the truth from American reasoners; but the adoption of the .McKinley law would involve a fearful' waste of resources by which her people ■ought to be made strong and happy.” But he does not think that we are going to remain blind to the evils of protection. People so acute as the Americans, he "thinks, will find their way to the results •of the protective system; and he has faith that economic truth will be vindicated among us sooner or later. A Tariff* Built on JCies. The greatest temptation to downright dying that poor, weak humanity can be exposed to is when protected manufacturers are asked to come before a committee of Congress to testify as to the condition of their industry. That they ■often yield to this temptation, and lie in the most palpable and shameful manner, has long been suspected. Ben Butterworth warned his fellow-protectionists that the testimony of the beneficiaries of legislation is not always to be accepted. One of the Repiblican leaders has ••made a statement which virtually convicts one of these industries of deliberate falsehood. This was Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts, and the industry referred to was none other than the binding-twine trust, which has most of sits mills in Massachusetts. When the tariff bill was still in the House last spring and when the trust had ■ seen that it would not get as much tariff •booty out of the farmers as its thirst demanded, the trust sent an appeal to the Senate Committee on Finance, before which the tariff bill was to come up after passing the House: This appeal was in 'the following language: “Sir: The cordage and binder-twine of the United States beg ••that your honorable committee will amend that clause in the tariff bill which relates to our business. It places a duty ■of 1% cents per pound upon bindertwine. Should this become a law, it will •close our mills. We ask for 1% cents per pound, an increase of one-half cent.” Has the trust now closed its mills? Not at all; although free binder-twine was defeated because the fifteen Republican Senators were too weak-kneed to stand by the Democrats for free twine, and voted with the Republican House for a duty of seven tenths of a cent per pound. ■Still the trust has gone right on without •the slightest apparent interruption of its (prosperity.

directly after tne enactment of a r>te of duty more than a half a cent lower than they said would “close our mills,” they became so cheerful that they offered a large part of their property Th the form of preferred stock to the public, and advertised that they were in very prosperous circumstances, and that they had formed a combination that would insure a continuance of the prosperity. Now, Mr. Lodge says: “We gave the cordage factories free raw material; it is perfectly right and proper that they should have it. Farmers raised a cry that they wanted free binder-twine. The duty we put upon it in the House was stricken off in the Senate. Then petitions commenced to flow in from the men who worked in factories. They didn’t go to the Democratic party, they came to the Republican party. They said: Give us duty on binder-twine that we may not be ruined; and we saved : enough for them to go on, I hope. ” The Republican statesman now thinks • they cau “go on,” although they had ; threatened that they would be ruined i with a duty of 1% cents per pound. This is precisci}' like the case of the ‘ Connecticut cutlery manufacturer who ■ told McKinley’s committee that he would be ruined unless he got higher duties; and Senator Carlisle afterward showed in the Senate that at the very time when this manufacturer made that statement he was actually selling knives cheaper to foreigners than to his fellowcitizens. This charge was c’early proved by Senator Carlisle by bills of the firm made out by it for sales of knives to be exported. Here are two cases showing how protected manufacturers will lie when money can be made out of the dear public by doing so. How much longer are we going to believe them and give them everything they ask? Many of these men simply wrote out the duties as they wanted them and gave them to McKinley, and these stand in the law to-day precisely as the manufacturers first wrote them out.

The Women and McKinley Prices. The McKinley bill is the first tariff measure in which protection has avowedly been carried to the point of prohibition, and the prices of goods enhanced, not for the purpose of raising, but for the purpose of diminishing the public revenue. Moreover, the rise in prices is so sudden, so marked, and so general that it is brought to the notice of everybody. The McKinley bill affects all household supplies, food only excepted, and almost all articles of raiment. Now, the shopping sex in this country is the female sex. Women not only buy all household supplies, and much more than half of all articles of clothing, but they are well known to merchants as much “closer buyers” than men. There is probably.not a woman in the country who has “gone shopping” within the past few weeks who has not found herself brought into disagreeable relation with the laws of her country. Even when she has not had to pay more for what she has needed than she would have had to pay a month ago, with no more satisfactory explanation than that the tariff has raised the price, she has been urged to supply herself now, because when the present stock is exhausted the prices will be marked up, for the same reason. She naturally goes to another store, such being the significance of “going shopping,.” but in every store she hears the same story. Every woman has now been made aware, by agencies much more convincing to her than articles in newspapers, that the allowance she has made heretofore for clothing and household supplies will be insufficient hereafter, and, if she be a married-woman, has communicated this discouraging information to her husband. Who Is Favored? The tariff has at last come home to men’s business and bosoms as tariffreformers have been for many years hoping that it would do. What all the “theorists” have not been able to do, a few practical men in Congress, actuated by no other motive than to “fry the fat” from the members of trusts and combinations for contributions to the Republican campaign fund have succeeded in doing. There is not a single head of a household in the United States, if we except the small number of direct beneficiaries of the McKinley bill, who does not know that he is worse off by reason of its enactment. This he feels and knows, and the arguments addressed to him to prove to him that he is also better off will not affect him in the least. He is better off in so far as the McKinley bill has been the means of increasing his income to correspond, or to do more than correspond, with the increase of his expenses. The only men of whom this is true arc the members of the trusts and combinations, and these, though pecuniarily very strong, are numerically very weak. It is not true of any farmer in the United States nor of any worker for wages. All the farmers and all the workers for wages are in the way to be convinced of its untruth, if they have not been convinced already, by a demonstration immeasurably more forcible than anything that can be said by all the speakers and all the writers for prohibitive protection.

Hamilton’s Protection Ont of Date Now. Hon. Everett P. Wheeler, of New York, has shown in a recent address on the tariff that every one of the conditions which Hamilton in 1789 put forward as a justification for his tariff policy has ceased to exist. The country is no longer weak and poor. It has become the richest and probably the most powerful nation on the globe. It has more miles of railroad than all other countries of the world put together. Its manufactures have developed and become enormously productive, and many of them very profitable. They have been fostered by twenty years of a high protective tariff. The improvements in the means of transportation have kept pace with the growth of the country in territory, and make it practically more compact and accessible than it was in 1789. Its trade with foreign countries has enormously increased. The country with which our commerce is most extensive and most profitable admits all the products of this country, except wine and spirits and silver, free of tax. It would seem, therefore, that if we are to follow the counsels of our earlier statesmen, or be guided by the reasons which led them to advise the adoption of the tariff on imports, we should immediately set about its thorough revision, with the view to a great reduction in the rates of taxation it imposes. Yet, as we all know, the tendency at present is directly the reverse. A bill enormously increasing, and in many cases doubling, the rates of duty on imported articles has passed, and this bill

offers to [the fat/ner. It says in substance: We will put up the price of your clothes and your blankets, your tools and your ploughs, your wagons and your tin pans. In return for this we offer you an increase of twenty cents a bushel on barley.

A Dying Caterpillar. As an autumnal evening lighted its glowing fires in the west, and zephyrs I played with the falling leaves, our steps were arrested by the sight of a wounded, dying caterpillar. The foot of a child, or, perchance, the fall of a twig—for such trifles may terminate an existence—had inflicted a mortal hurt, and that mysterious element called life was running out like the traditional “sands,” and following a current of blood as unerringly as electricity does a wire; aud on its suffering form Death Rrinn’d horrible a ghastly smile. The longed-for butterfly state had been denied this poor hairy wretch, now expiring from no choice or fault of its own, For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause. As we bent over the dying worm whose hairy coat quivered with pain and the evening wind, the lines of Shirley flitted over the scene: The glories of our birth and state Are shadows, not substautial things; There is no armor against fate— Death lays his icy hands on kings. And with the setting sun the caterpillar’s life went down, and it seemed to realize tha‘. its hour had come, for The sense of death is most in apprehension, And the poor beetle that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great As when a giant dies. Can Longfellow be right when he says: There is no death ; what seems so is transition; This life of mortal breath .Is but a suburb of the life elysian. Whose portal we call death. As we slowly took the pathway to our rented quarters of honest indigence we could not banish from our thoughts the question, What has become cf that dying caterpillar ?—Pullman {III.) Journal.

••The General Rulo.” Senator Sherman said during the campaign: “We want duties enough to protect home industries, but not enough to enable them .to combine and extort unreasonable prices. ” As usual, the Senator professes stern opposition to trusts. But how does he act? When the tariff • bill was under consideration in the Senate a Republican Senator moved an amendment to put binding twine on the free list in order to break up the Twine Trust. The yearly profits of this trust were stated by Senator Davis (Rep., Minn.) to be 40 per cent. What did Senator Sherman say to this amendment? “I shall vote against the amendment, because I am in favor of the general rule of protection, which applies to binders’ twine for the farmers or for the speculators, and to all things alike.” The “general rule” is that you cannot get a protectionist Senator or Representative to vote for the extermination of trusts by the removal of duties, however much these mon may say, as Sherman himself has said, that they are in favor of doing this. Two Tariff Trusts. To benefit the Linseed Oil Trust the McKinley act raises the duty on linseed oil from 25 to 32 cents per gallon. There was no occasion for this advance except the bare design to take money out of the pockets of consumers and put it into the pockets of the managers of the trust. White lead, into which linseed oil enters as a component part in preparing paint, sells in England for 4 cents a pound. The McKinley act continues the protective duty of 3 cents a pound for the benefit of the White Lead Trust (although lead is produced cheaper in the United States than in any other country), and the trust has advanced the price to 6% cents per pound. These increased prices for Unseed oil and white lead mean that the farmers and mechanics have now got to pay twice as much for painting their houses and barns as they need to, and that fishermen, farmers and teamsters have got to pay a great deal more for their oilskin coats and tarpaulins. One would not reasonably suppose that, where we have paid $1.5) a yard for material to put into a garment to sell for $3.50, we will now pay $1.75 a yard for the same cloth and let the price of the manufactured article remain the same. There must be one of two things—cheaper material will have to be used, else a smaller amount must be allowed for making. Materials for which our firm has paid 62% cents now cost us 72%, and the advance on nearly all trimmings has been correspondingly large. This’ will all tell in the clothing when it is made up. and the laboring man who wears, almost entirely, readymade clothes will pay for it.— Buffalo {N. K) Clothing Manufacturer.

Dutch metal, cheap imitation of gold leaf, is made in Fuerth, Bavaria, and is used for gilding picture frames, moldings, and other things which it would be impracticable to cover with gold leaf. None of it is made in this country. The duty on this great necessary has been raised to such an extent that on a recent importion, for which s4l was charged under the old law, a duty of $542 would have been collected had the McKinley tariff been in force. The increase in duty was made upon the demand of gold-leaf beaters. If. I were going to settle in this country, I should not embark any capital in the manfacture of tin plates. In saying so, I am taking the experience of those of your people who have already ventured into the business and were not successful at it. If a duty of 1 cent per pound was insufficient to keep .the Welsh makers from successfully doing business in this country, I do not think that an additional tax of 1.30 cents will prevent them from continuing to do so. — William Williams, of Swansea, South Wales. Every man of the world quickly discovers the trouble which arises in intrusting work to others. In a man’s own line whatever he does himself he can be quite sure of, but if he intrust anything of much importance to others he must revise the work carefully of he will get Into trouble. Now that the elections are over, will the protectionist orators admit that the “McKinley prices” are not a “Democratic conspiracy?” —< Trusts continue to multiply. The latest tariff heir is a barbed-wire trust—a very strong and well-formed infant with $20,000,000 capital.