Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 June 1891 — PIG IRON PRODUCTION. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

PIG IRON PRODUCTION.

IS ENGLAND'S LOSS TO OUR CAIN? Foolish Protectionist | Claim—A Great Falling Vfi in Oar Pig Iron Production —Figures Which Do Not Lie—Another Case Where La tor Gets Lsft. “England's loss is our gain* is one of those cheap and ignorant cries with which the protectionists attempt to defend their scheme of high-tariff taxation for the American people. The shallowness of this statement may be seen from a recent “tariff picture” in Robert P. Porter s New York Press in regard to pig-iron foundries. This hightariff organ prints in heavy black letters at the head of its editorial column the following bit of protectionist wisdom: “TAIUFF PICTUBEB. “We are making an increased percentage every year of the pig iion we use. We imported from England 32,564 tons of pig iron in the first four months of 1890, and only 12,341 tons in the first four months of 1891. ” That >s to ray, we have increased our pig Iron production by 30,231 tons in these four months.althoughthe McKinley law leaves the duty at 86.72 a ton, the same that it has been since 1883. But the high tariff organ could very easily have found out that the production of pig iron shows a tremendous falling off m the first four months of this year. The fact that a very large number of furnaces have been shut down since January is wed known to everybody who has kept himself at all informed as to industrial news. A recent number of the Iron Age, the leading journal of the iron industry in the United States, gave some of the statistics of the decrease of our iron production from January to May 1. The furnaces in blast the first week in each month since Bee. 1, 1890, are stated as follows: Weekly caFurnaces parity in in blast. gross tons. December 1, 1890340 183,846 January 1,18)1302 167,599 February 1294 146,050 March 1.....257 134,526 April 1228 113,483 May 1227 115,590 From these figures it will be seen that the falling off in production for the first week in each month has been as follows: Gross tons. Januaryl6,24s February 37,796 March49,32o Apri170,363 May 68,256 Any one who is curious to know just what the total falling off was from Jan. 1 to the end of April can easily reach the total from the figures here given. It will be found that the decrease in production was considerably above 800,000 tons. These figures may appear large, but that they are not excessive may be seen from other figures compiled by the American Manufacturer, au extremely high-tariff trade paper, published at Pittsburg, Pa. Early in April this paper published a table showing that the number of active blast furnaces in the country on the Ist of April was 231, with a weekly capacity of 113,316 tons, while the idle furnaces numbered 302, with a capacity of 13 7,213 tons per week. The shutting down of more than half the furnaces of the country ne essarily throws out of employment thousands of laborers to whom protection has been promising, all these years, good wages and steady employment So much for the sil y claim of the Press that our production of pig iron increased 20,000 tons from Jan. 1 to April 30, since our imports from England fell off by that amount. By the same cheap method the Press has shown that many other American industries are turning out more goods than last year. The fallingoff in the imports of wo nen and children's dress goods from England is made to show to a dollar just how much more of those goods the domestic manufacturers are producing this year: and so with worsted and woolen goods for men’s wear. The Press does not seem to have caught the famous words ot Jay Gou d last fall when the McKinley bill passed: “1 cannot see tha* the new tariff of itself will be a disadvantage to the country. If it increases the cost of some articles people will simply use less of them. Take wool, for instance. If the tariff on wool makes clothing cost more, a person will get along with one’ suit where he would otherwise have two.”

A Free-Trada Ma lufaciurer. Some time ago Col. Albert Clarke. Secretary of the well-known Home Market Club of Boston, saw a statement in a newspaper to the elect that Mr. A. B- Farquhar, of the Pennsylvania Agricultural Works at York, Pa , had admitted that his firm sold agricultural implements in foreign countries at prices 5 to 10 per cent, lower than in the home market This statement troubled the Home Market Secretary, and he wrote to Mr. Farquhar to make inquiry as to its truth. In his reply this gentleman said: “I have to acknowledge it is quite true that our firm sells implements and machinery through Mexico, South America and Africa at prices from 5 to 10 per cent less than they are sold for in this country.” Mr. Farquhar also admitted that he had said that “the manufacturer who is able to export his goods can have no use for protection, ” except to enable him to extort more money from home purchasers than he is able to get from those abroad. ” In his letter, Col. Clarke had asked: •Do you believe that American manufacturers generally would be able to sell ma.ny more goods abroad than now if they had free raw materials, and if so, about what percentage more than now?” To this question Mr. Farquhar answered : “I do believe that American manufacturers generally would be able to sell many more goods abroad than now if they had free raw material. The importation of this material would of Itself stimulate a demand for American products abroad. * * * I should expect an increase of at last 25 per cent.” Another question of the Home Market Secretary was still more pointed: “Would you favor a reduction or repeal of the duty on manufactured goods as well as on raw materials?” Mr. Farquhar’s answer to this question leaves no doubt as to where he stands on the tariff question: “I would unhesitatingly favor a repeal of the duty on all the manufactured goods we make. Since we can and do export, the duty can be of no possible service: and, since it tends to provoke retaliation, we hnd it a serious obstacle. ” Still further to enforce tbe necessity for free raw materials Mr. Farquhar said the reason he did not get as good prices abroad as at home was, “that we have to compete with countries having Che great advantage of free raw material

In their manufactures and the further advantage of better transportation facilities,”

CHEERFUL FOR Bad CW>p* in Europe—Large Experts •! Farm Products Expected—Wheat Will Bring Back trur Gold. The foreign demand this year for the wheat and other products of our farms promises to be unusually larged The gloomy outlook in Europe makes it certain tnat if we produce larg i crops our exports of farm produce will be greater than in any year since 1880, when we sent 3211,000,C0J worth of wheat and flour alone to foreign countries. A recent dispatch from London says: “For ten days the weather throughout the British islands and over a great part of the continent has been very unseasonable. Snow, hail, -disagreeable cold rain have in turns been the prevailing order. The agricultural outlook was decidedly unfavorable before this recent bad weather. The spring was very backward, the only good weather being that of the latter part of April, The crops generally will be a failure. In France the recent rains have greatly injured the growing wheat, and the Minister of Agriculture states that a large shortage is inevitable, and if more favorab e weather is not experienced soon it will be well-nigh a total failure. In England it is decidedly worse than in trance. “The American farmers may therefore take it for granted,” the dispatch goes on, “that there will be a market for all their surplus wheat in Europe, and at good prices. The persons who are distressed at the large shipments of gold hitherward may dismiss their fears. It is being bought and Shipped here and to the continent at a considerable loss to the importers. It will all have to be shipped back this fall to pay for breadstuffs. The D iily Telegraph, in ' its money market article yesterday, said: “ ‘The export of gold from the States is expected to soon diminish or entirely cease, and injlie autumn a large portion of the £8,000,000 that has been received here and abroad since Jan. 1 last will, according to the views of practical authorities, be taken back against consignments of wheat to-Europe. ’ ” Foj thirty years the protectionists have been deluding the farmer to support our high tariff system, on the ground that it would build up a home market which would consume all his products “right at his doors;” yet at this late day it is our exports of wheat that are looked to for bringing back the immense stream of gold which has been going out of the country for several months. Nearly $60,600,000 in gold has been exported to Europe since the beginning of the year, notwithstanding that other humbug promise of the protectionists that a high tariff will prevent our gold from flowing out of the country. Protection fails to build its home market for the farmer, fails to keep the gold in the country, and then has to fall back upon the farmer to bring it back. Is not protection a rather multifarious sort of humbug, anyway?

The Oil-Cloth Trust. It is rumored that the oil-clotji trust has broken up, owing to the fact that some of the large jobbers had been selling table oil-cloths at prices lower than those fixed by the combination. It is said by the New York Carpet and Upholstery Trade Review that this combination has been in existence for six years and has proved “exceptionally satisfactory.” The Review says further: “Its record places it among the most successful trade combinations ever organized, and it is anticipated that it will only be a very short time before the manufacturers will get together again.” McKinley did all he could for this tariff trust in the way of raising duties. The old duty was 40 per cent., and the McKinley compound duties—according to the figures worked out by a United States Treasury expert for the use of the Senate—are equal to 66 per cent. While the duty on oil-cloth worth 25 cents a yard or less was left at 40 per cent, the duty on cloth above 25 cents was made 15 cents a yard and 30 per cent At this rate a yard worth 31 cents, which was the average price of the small quantity imported last year, would pay a duty of 80 per cent. —exactly double the old duty. There was no excuse whatever for raising the duty. The importations for 1889, on which the McKinley bill was framed, amounted to only 662,000 yards, worth $273,000; while it was stated before the McKinley Committee' that the domestic manufacturers produce about 10,100,000 or 12,010,C00 yards per annum. About seven-eighths of the oil-cloth consumed in this country goes into the homes of the poorer classes as table covers and carpets. Does it strike these consumers as a very decent thing for McKinley to increase the duty on an article so necessary to them, in order that the sixteen manufacturers may keep up trust prices on it? It is said that only about 1,000 laborers are employed by the trust; and there can be little question of protecting where the supposed interests of so small a number are involved, as against the interests of miLions of other laborers. But these 1,000 laborers do not get anything great out of their so-called “protection to labor,” their wages running only from 75 cents to $1.50 per day. Great is the protection humbug!

A Critic of the People’s Party. The Manufacturer, the organ of the high protectionist Manufacturers’ Club in Philadelph a, criticises the recently organized People’s Party as being “an attempt to mane the supposed interests of a single class of citizens the oasis of united political action.” Delightfully cool! What else is the g. o. p. doing but making the interests of the manufacturers “the basis of united political action?” —or, to state it more broadly, acting always in the interests of the producer, and utterly ignoring the consumer. Whatever may be thought of the People’s party and its principles, everybody must concede that the “united political action” of farmers for farmers is just as wise and reasonable as the united action of a 1 the protected interests of the country to secure and enforce equalization for themselves in the form of high tariff laws. Class legislation is bad, and class agitation to secure political action for a single class is also bad; but the People’s party is not asking for a new principle to be introduced into our legislation. It simply asks for an extension of the class legislation which has been running rife in this (Ountry for thirty years. The party of high protection has infested the people with t4e notion that they are to look to the Government as the cure-all and the give-all for the evils and the

A . - • —•— privations under which they may suffer. But lo and behold! When the farmer asks that he may take hold of the crank and hang his bag under the governmental mill in his turn, he is told that must be no class agTtaticWfor p&tical ends! And it is the ergan of the rich Manufacturers’ Club which tells him this! Perhaps, brethren, we shall all have to find our way back to the old prfnclp e of the greatest gcod to the greatest number, of legislation for the people as a whole, rather than for special classes and interest*. We are all consumers of goods protected and unprotected; but very few of us are producers of protected goods. Out of a hundred producers only five are “protected;” but the entire hundred are consumers. Let the Government legislate for consumers and it legislates for the people: let it pass McKinley tariff laws and it legislates for five men and against ninety-five others.

McKlnleyisiu on the Dinner Table. A most striking illustration of the extravagance of McKinley Ism is found in common white chinaware. Our: manufacturers ot pottery have been in the habit of claiming that they asked for no higher duties than would equalize the difference in wages between this country and England. How much truth there is in this claim may be seen from the following case: An assortment of china, commonly known as graniteware,consisting of twen-ty-two dozen pieces (flat and deep plates, bakers, bowls, dishes, teas, coffees, etc.), pays a duty of $10.51; while the labor cost for making the entire assortment in the great potteries of Trenton, N. J., is only $5 36, not including the firing, which could hardly add more than a dollar or two to the labor cost. Thus the entire labor cost in. Trenton is $3 or $4 less than the duty which was to cover only the difference between wages in this country and England. That our potteries reap the full benefit of this extravagant protection is shown from the fact that this assortment costs $32.01 in New York, and only $19.13 in England. Is it any wonder that enormous fortunes have been made in the Trenton potteries? One of the manufacturers, it is stated, who began business there not many years ago as a poor man is now a millionaire. Under McKinley’s high duties our pottery industry is an expensive luxury.

Tin Blate Figures. Our Imports of tin plate for the two years 1889 and 1890, with the duties on the same, were as follows; Imports In 1889, p0und5727,945,927 Value of the same $21,102,209 Duties paid $7,279,459 Imports In 18 <O, p0und5674,664,458 Values of the 5ame520,716,427 Duties paid $3,746,644 Imports for the first nine months of the present lical year—i. e. from July 1, 1890, to March 31, 1891—were as follows: Imports, nine mpnths, p0und5621,919,264 Valueof the 5ame529,990,663 Duties paid 6,249,192 If the McKinley duty of 2.2 cents per pound had been calculated upon the above quantities for two years and nine months, the total duties collected during this time would have been $43,627,000, instead of $20,275,000, the duties actually paid. From the above figures any one can calculate the pri< e of tin plate per pound without the duty. For 1889 and 1890 the price averaged 3 cents; for the nine months ended March 31, it was 3.34—caused by the mere prospect of the McKinley duty. These prices are below the prico of sheet-iron in the United States. How then can we make tin plate as cheap as the Welsh?

Oui: cloth manufacturers, so long schooled by protection in the notion that they have a natural right to the home mark >t, have always depended more upon the high tariff than upon excellence of design and finish in their goods. Almost nothing has been done by them to establish trade schools like those of Europe in which to educate young people in the art of designing. Such a school, however, was established in Philadelphia several years ago, but the complaint is still made that “Philadelphia manufacturers are noticeably indifferent respecting its ’uccess. ” They prefer to lean on McKinley.

The Yosemite National Park now embraces parts of forty-two townships, covering about 1,500 square miles, or 960,000 acres, fro|i which is to be deducted the Yosemite grant of 36,000 acres. About 7011,000 acres of the National Park is mountainous, well watered and heavily timbered with pine, fir, spruce, hemlock, tamarack, oak, cedar, madrona, laurel, sequoia, and mountain mahogany. Two hundred and sixty thousand acres are coxnfiosed of mountain valleys, meadows, akes, etc.

An article on the maladies of the Bonapartes shows that all the members of the great Napoleon family suffered from hereditary arthritis. Napoleon’s father died of cancer of the stomach. Napoleon himself, Lucien Bonaparte, Pauline Borghese and her sister Caroline, all died of the same trouble. Prince Pierre, Napoleon 111., Prince Napoleon and King Jerome all manifested arthritic symptoms.

Somebody has invented a method of applying a current of electricity to tbe wheels of a locomotive in such a way as to make its hauling power five times greater. This will be a great thing for promoting traffic and cheapening freights —between the different States of the Union. But if Mexico and Canada get hold of the thing somebody is sure to find that it is an evil invention, and to cry out for better protective duties as an off-set.

. Billy Radcliffe, an original character who is going up and down the State of Ohio singing songs and making speeches against McKinleyism, writes to the New York Standard as follows: “I must say that I find the protectionists very quiet and tame. I can’t get them to ask questions like they used to. lam using parts of McKinley’s speeches to prove up points that I make, and I guess that chokes them off ”

In view of the fact that Premier Rudini, after making a goose of himself, backed out of war with this country, it seems quite proper to call up the learned remark that history repeats itself. A goose, it will be remembered, once before saved Rome.

Thebe Is nothing more disgusting in all the world than the mercenary tie which, under the name of marriage, binds a woman to the bosom of one who bought her with his money.—J. Q. Holland.

THE ARIZONA KICKER. ' An Editor Possossod with a Vary Worth; Motto. “Rbo»o9«*ctivj6«—The first pighAm 3ntered this town we slept under a wagon on Apache avenue. We felt tough, we looked tough, and we had just 15 cents cash capital. We’d walked twenty-eight miles that day to get somewhere, and after getting there ths prospects didn’t seem to improve. We were sustained, however, by a determination to come out on top of ths crowd if we lost both legs in ths hustle. That determination carried ui through. “From the very first issue of ths Kicker we took for our motto, ‘Ex dono fam a semper vivat,’ which used to mean in our neighborhood in Now England, ‘ Tell the truth without fear or favor, even if you never get an offics or own a dog.’ We have stuck to that motto, and while it has made us some enemies it has also made us a host of friends and a power in the land. In pursuance of our policy we now wish to say a word about ‘The Great Arizona Home .Provider Company,’ which is advertising extensively in the East. Its latest scheme is to advertise city lots in ‘Blue Hill City’ at $23 each. The ‘city’ is represented as a hustling young town—three railroads, two banks, one theater, 3,000 people md bound to be the Chicago of the

West.’ We rode out to the site the other day. When we returned the company offered us $25 to keep still. “A Pointer for the Boys.—There are three or four tough men in this town—’way-back toughs, with cart-

loads of sand in their systems—but there are four hundred would-be toughs who are not a bit tough, and never can be. It isn’t in them, and .theyare not in it. They go around spitting over their shoulders and bluffing the Chinamen

and half-breeds, but they take good care not to run up against the man whose father owned the spring which was the fountain-head of Fighting Creek. In a fatherly way we want to say to these boys: ‘Pont. It’s a waste of time and raw material. The goods are cotton-mixed and the dye won’t stand. Come off the perch and drop your claims, and let everybody size you up for what you really are—a lot of old dead-beats who ought to be driven to the sand-hills.’ “In this connection we wish to briefly refer to the little affair of Sunday, which our contemporary will no doubt misstate in his usual fashion. We were sitting on the steps of the postoffice waiting for the place to open at the usual hour, when an individual known around town as ‘Holy Smoke Bengal Tiger Steve Johnson’ came /.long. No one knows where he came from, and some folks are very much afraid of him. He picked his teeth with a grizzly’s claw, carried a bowieknife and claimed to shoot two-handed. “In writing u.p ‘The Bluffers’ of this x)wn a few weeks ago we asked this Smoky Tiger, or whatever he calls

himself, what prison he had run from. He’s been promising the boys to slice off our right ear, have it broiled in Bill Taylor’s restaurant, and then publicly feed it to Steve Aker’s Virginia foxhound. . We haven’t been greatly worried, and we lidn’t skip a cog when we saw the Tiger rolling along toward us. He?ame to a halt in front of Us and

tried to look awfully wicked—real oh Rocky Mountain wicked, with the gore thrown in as a chromo. “We didn’t shiver. “Then he smiled—a sac-simile of the grin Kit Carson used to put on as he counted up the dead Injuns and whistled for the buzzards to begin work. “We didn’t unwind or lose any buttons. “Then he sent his deep-base roar down to his feet and brought it up again to tell us that our ear was his. He reached for it, but he never got there. We rote up and knocked Smoky off his pins at one punch, and then we walked on him and sat down on h ; m and hammered him from head to heel until he roared like a calf and whined like a coyote. We have his two revolvers and bowie-knife on our table as w'e write. We are waiting for him to prove property and take them away. “Perhaps it would be appropriate to observe in this connection that there will be a little bee or gathering or convention or some such a thing on Pawnee Square Saturday evening. Most of our prominent citizens will be there. Several of them will be provided with ropes. There will be various committees appointed to wait on various disagreeable individuals in this town and ask them how long they intend to remain If longer than two hours the committee will bring them to the bee and they will be argued with. The ‘Bengal Bluffer’ is on the list to receive callers.”—-Vew York World.

BLUE HILL CITY.

SO CALLED.

THE TIGER.