Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 April 1891 — Opposing Human Progress. [ARTICLE]

Opposing Human Progress.

Protection, is getting a pernicious brood of ideas in this country which needs to be destroyed. The starting point of the protectionist heresy is in the proposition that the powers of theGovernment can be rightly used to protect manufacturers from competition. Whatever fives our manufacturers abigger job «nd bigger profits, it is held,, is good for the entire country. , This thing spreads. The laborers employed in the Bureau of Engraving and Printing at Washington made a curious though logical application of this protectionist principle during the recent, session of Congress. The laborers saw that if the steam plate printing presses in the bureau were removed, it would give them a bigger job and bigger profits. The power of the United States Government was Invoked to protect the pi intern, from the “ruinous competition” of steann machinery; and the protection Congress obediently voted a law removing the steam presses. As the result of this measure the spendthrift legislators found it necessary to increase the appropriation for the bureau by #IOO,OOO. Now that tho printers are protected from c«>mpetiti< m it is impossible to print revenue stamps, with the hand presses as fast as they ar*> ordered; and Secretary Foster has been, pleading with the men to permit the use. of twenty steam presses to catch up with the orders. The men, however, are Inexorable and will not yield one jot of their “protection.” Every outsider sees how absurd then whole business la On this principle the self-binder would have to bo driven from: every wheat field in order to make a. greater amount of labor for men with, the old grain cradle; and the threshing machine would have to go In order that meu might beat out the grain with flails. But these case*, absurd as they seem, are precisely parallel to the proposition. of the protectionists that we must manufacture everything at home in order to< make more employment for labor. They' do not see that the demand for machinery and the demand for untaxed foreign goods are at bottom one and tbo same thing. In both cases you want toproduce the greatest possible amount of goods with your labor, or get the most, for your money. Tne laborer who wishes to burn reaping machines or the one who setsasidosteam presses ar* no more unreasonablethan the McKlnleyltes who try to keep back the stream of foreign goods from coining into the country. The saving of labor, not its creatlori,, is the end and aim of human progress.