Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 March 1891 — C ASTELAR ON PROTECTION. [ARTICLE]

C ASTELAR ON PROTECTION.

The Spanish Patriot Arraigns Protection and Paints the Achievements of America in Eloquent Words. The most progressive man in Spain to-day is Castelar, who is known throughout the world as a patriot, a statesman, an orator, a writer of ability, and as the leader of the republican movement in that country." Spain is now agitating the question of “revising” her tariff upward, in imitation of the McKinley method, and provoked thereto by McKinley’s Chinese antics. In view of these facts it is of interest to note a recent letter from Castelar, which was printed in the New York Herald. This letter shows Castelar to be a broad-minded citizen of the world, devoted to the good of the race, and hence looking with pity upon the folly of the nations in waging commercial warfare upon each other in the form of protective tariffs. Castelar does not lay the blame of originating protective tariffs upon America. He finds, rather, that America Is simply following the bad example set by Europe. He does blame America, however, for adopting a system so at war with her traditions of freedom, and so damaging to her mission as the standardbearer of liberty among the nations of the world. Among the continental nations of Europe her influence for liberty and enlightened statesmanship is largely nullified by protection, and her example is used to strengthen the old hatreds and jealousies which have proven so disastrous to those nations. The old spirit of International distrust and hate which has so often wrought ruin in Europe is still alive in the form of retaliatory tariff laws, and the example of America is unhappily thrown upon the wrong side. Castelar eloquently says: “Archaeological contradictions must disappear, and the cause of human progress imperatively requires nations to urge on universal exchange, free trade, just as cosmic heat compels sidereal motion. Having in every sense of the word outgrown the age when competition could be fatal to it, as well as the period of economic contradictions, the new world fights against its own providential destiny and betrays its office by aggravating, as it is now doing, its protectionist tariff, converted by measures which are simply odious into desolat ng prohibition.”

How pitiable appear the attempts of the protectionists to undermine America’s confidence in herself, in the light of Castelar's eloquent portrayal of America’s great achievements. “Nations, like individuals, in proportion as they mount toward the highest summits-ot illustr'ous renown, assume an increased responsibility. The nation within whose frontiers reign peace, liberty, democracy, republicanism, progress and labor must not, beyond those frontiers, represent reaction, race enmity and the retrogradation of humanity. The people who have chained the tempest and subjected the lightning, who have fitted our vessels with the steam engines which enable them to override all waves and to brave all winds, who have given to speech the speed of lightning, who have created the power of transmitting the human voice over the whole surface of the earth by means of the miraculous telephone, who by the aid of the magic strands of the telegraphic cable hidden in the depths of the ocean have joined the most distant lands, who have given the human race the benefit of the electric light, are compelled to forward the cause of universal progress by the adoption of free labor and free exchange.