Democratic Sentinel, Volume 14, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 January 1891 — A PERTINENT ILLUSTRATION. [ARTICLE]

A PERTINENT ILLUSTRATION.

Showing, in a Plain and Homely Way, How the Tariff Works. Old Uncle Samuel States has a large f amilv of twenty sons. Many of them are married, and they all live in Uniontown. They number sixty-five all) told. One of the sons is a tailor, another a blaoksmith, and another keeps a grocery store. The other seventeen are employed in various occupations,|all trying to earn for themselves. Several of them age farmers who would be glad to sell their produce to the people in the neighboring towns if they oould make satisfactory arrangements with them in the way of trade. But the old gentleman has very peculiar notions on that subject. He tells them, “All * right; sell all you oanforoash, but don’t you take anything yon need for your family from them in exchange." The resnlt is that they sell all they can in Uniontown and soon overstock the market, so that their crops do not yield a profit. Nor is this all. Unele Samuel tells them that even if they have ready money they shall not bnv anything with it outside. If they wantclothes they must go to their brother Jim for them, even if he charges them forty per cent, more than the Bnlltown tailor wo*d charge. If they want wagons they mast bay them of John, who charges thirty per cent, more for them than the Sawneyville meohanic, so that they cannot do any freighting out of town because their wagons are so dear, and if they want groceries hey must go to Tom, who, having the market to himself, charges 50 pei cent, more than the price either In Bulltown or Sawneyville. “The reason for this is,” he says,“that I don’t want yon to bring their pauper labor into competition with our own. ” "But,” says Charley, “I am a farmer and I don’t Bee now their pauper labor affects me, and why should I pay Jim, John and Tom so muoh money for what I c»n get so much o’ieaper elsewhere?” "Nor I, either," says Ned, the mason. “Nor I,"says Bill, the plumber. “Nor i, ” join in the carpenter, the brickmaker, the oar driver, the shoemaker, the dentist, the lawyer, the parson, the editor, and all the balance of tne seventeen who see no reason why they should be called upon to support the favored three. ’’Now, this is exactly the oondition of things in the United States. By the oensus of 1880, there 20,000,000 people here engaged in the various industries and professions. They are all enumerated in Spofford’s Almanac." ExaminF tfie list oarefully and yon will find that by the ntmost stretch of allowance not 3,000,000 of the whole are engaged in any occupation dependent agon “protection." Moreover, many of tins minority would be better off, and their number would be increased by a reduction of the tariff. Consider that the miners are a very small proportion of the men who work on iron in Pennsylvania; that the sheep growers of Ohio are few in number compared with the men who work in woolen factories. Cheaper foreign iron and oheaper foreign wool would vastly increase the number of those operatives to whom protection is really a bane. Still father, taking the balance that wonld remain of the laboring men (not of the small fraotion of employers who are in truth the only men benefited by protection), it will be fonnd that the average of their wageß is very mnch lower| than th it of the vaßt majority of laborers who derive no benefit whatever from protection, but whose expenses are enormously increased not to’keep “panper labor” away from themselves nor from any part of the minority of nominally protected laborers, but solely to roll up tne posits of the many, though injoomparison with the whole population, tne infinitesimal few, to whom protection is really an advantage for whioh they can afford to pay liberally to a subsidized press and to an election fund. —Captin John Codman.in Salt Lake Herald.