Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 February 1891 — Free Trade with Brazil. [ARTICLE]

Free Trade with Brazil.

The Republican press everywhere is rejoicing in the fact that we are to have partial free trade with Brazil: It is a delightful sight'to behold the men who have been denouncing free trade as a . wicked British device for ruining American industry now facing about under the enchantment of the “shrewd and weatherwUe navigator” of the State Department, and praising absolute free trade with Brazil as a thing highly beneficial to our farmers and manufacturers The foreign market, which they have been laboring in season and out to prove worthless, unprofitable, uncertain, far away, expensive, and cursed with pauper labor, suddenly looms up as a thing of "beauty. McKinley wanted to know only last May “what peculiar sanctity hangs about foreign trade,” and already the sanctity is discovered. There is to be an attempt to find “a foreign market for another barrel of pork and another bushel of wheat. ” Of course the treaty with Brazil will ne a good thing, so far as it will go, out •our farmers must not expect it to go too far. The.duties on farm products which Brazil will remove on the first of April *xe very small at present. What thou

duties are may be seen from the following statement from a commercial company in New York: “Wheat, free; wheat flour, 10 per cent ad valorem on a fixed valuation of 10 reis per kilogramme: corn, 10 per cent ad valorem on a valuation of 5 reis per kilogramme; corn flour, 30 per cent ad valorem on a valuation of 120 reis per kilogramme; rye, 10 per cent, ad valorem on a valuation of 20 reis per kilogramme; potatoes, beans, and peas, 10 per cent ad valorem on a valuation of 5 reis per kilogramme; pork, 10 per cent ad valorem on a valuation of 40 reis per kilogramme; dry fish, 10 percent, ad valorem on a valuation of 20 reis per kilogramme; canned fish, 30 per ceht ad valorem on a valuation of 300 reis per kilogramme; turpentine, 10 per cent ad valorem on a valuation of 40 reis per kilogramme; rosin, 10 per cent, ad valorem on a valntion of 5 reis per kilogramme. “The old duties on the articles reduced by 25 per cent were chiefly as follows: Lard, 20 per cent, advalorem on a valuatiyn of 120 reis per kilogram; cotton clothing, as high as 30 per cent, ad- I valorem per 1,000 reis; stockings, 30 per | cent upon a valuation of 2,000 reis per dozen; shirts, 30 per cent., upon a valuation of 8,500 reis per dozen. On some dry goods the duty was as much as 30 per cent, oiya high valuation, while on different qualities of oil, machinery and naval stores it was very heavy. “The method of calculating these reductions of duty will now be not to take off 25 per cent of the dutiable rate, as for instance 16 instead of 20 per tent, upon lard, but to lower the valuation by 25 per cent, and calculate lard, for instance, at 20 per cent, on a valuation of 96 reis per kilogram instead of on a valuation of 120 reis. A reis isabouha half

cent., and a kilogram is two and twotenths pounds.”