Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 May 1891 — OUR MARKETS.” [ARTICLE]

OUR MARKETS.”

THE SHALLOWNESS OF THE RECIPROCITY IDEA. We Trade for Our Own Cood-We Enrich Ourselves by What We Got in Exchange—“ Reciprocity” Good, but Must Be Wider—Thoughts for Farmers. A shrewd Yankee! shoe manufacturer Indorses reciprocity for the reason that "“itwill open up for us markets, without our being compelled to give for them, as a price, markets well and cheaply supplied by our own labor.” But tyhen we “give our markets, ” wo do not do so to accommodate other people, but ourselves. The pretense that in putting sugar, for instance, upon the free list we are doing a great favor to Cuba is a piece of transparent hypocrisy. We put sugar on the free list because we Americans want cheap sugar. “Giving our markets” by removing duties is precisely like the citizens of some isolatedtown going to work to build a irailroad in order to put themselves in communication with the outside world — they “give their market” and get a market The market which they get adds to their source of wealth, but in “giving their market” they do not take one penny from their wealth. On the contrary, they grow richer by opening their market to outsiders. The “give their market” in order to get goods into it; and surely these goods are a blessing, else the citizens of the town were great fools in building their railroad. Pursuing this analogy further, if these citizens should take up Republican notions about protection and reciprocity, and should determine that their “market” was too valuable a thing to “give away,” they could easily protect that precious market and make 1t harder for outside goods to come in, by passing a law that all in-coming •trains should consist of only two cars, that thfey should not run above ten miles an hour, and that there should be only •one such train a day. Of course they build their railroads in order to get goods •as well as to sell them, and these regulations would merely defeat the object they had in view in building the road; yet such regulations are an exact parallel to the whole protection system. Duties are levied on foreign goods in •order to render the home market more •or less inaecessble. The same thing could be accomplished by compelling all steamship companies to use steamers only half as large as those now in use, to make their trips less frequently, or to remain five days outside our harbors before landing. Such is protection, and such the false notions on which reciprocity rests. Yet for all that, there is no man in the United States doing more to undermine the projection system than Blaine with his reciprocity treaties Thoso treaties, if they increase our foreign trade, will only make it plainer to the people that in “giving away our markets” we are gainers and not losers. Moreover, what are to be the limits of reciprocity? It was first intended to be purely an American affair—a thing for “sister republics.” But already it has crossed the Atlantic and has taken in monarchical Spain. Where shall the thing end? If it is good to trade with one country, why is it not good to trade with any other country? If trade is to bo freer with Spain, why not cross the Pyrenees and make it freer with France? Why not cross the Channel and make it freer with England? But all this is strong meat for the backers of reciprocity. They look back with a timid concern to tho home market, fearing lest wo “give away” that market —“the best market in the world. They are like the farmer who should decide that he would not open his “market” —for every farmer is a market—to more than one manufacturer of plows or wagons or cloth or sugar. The simplestmiuded farmer in the country knows that it is best for him to open his little market as widely as possible to all the manufacturers of plows, in order that they may bid against each other and so reduce the price of plows; ditto of wagons, cloth, sugar, and all other commodities “Competition is tho life of trade,” says the old adage, and in order that there may be competition there must be open markets.