Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 July 1891 — They Dread the American Farmer. [ARTICLE]

They Dread the American Farmer.

McKinley tried to humbug the farmers t>y raising the duties on wheat, corn and .most other farm products, under the pretense that such duties would help them to realize better prices. He belittled the farmers’ foreign market and tried to make it appear that the best thing for our farmers would be to withdraw from their foreign market. At least such is the only possible meaning of the following words, which McKinley put into his report accompanying the tariff bill: “The ‘world's market,’ to which the Advocates of tariff for revenue only Invite the farmers of this country, is to•day crowded which the products of the -cheapest human labor the earth affords. All over the old world there is a rush of their surplus to that market, and it is to such a contest as this that free trade ■would allure American agriculture.” But American agriculture is and has been for years “alluded to such a contest as this,” and even now the foreign demand for our agricultural products is causing prices to rise in the home market in a way to rejoice the American farmer's heart. This same American farmer is a dreaded force in ail the farming districts of Europe. The following item has just been going the rounds of our agricultural papers: “The Austrian grain growers, through ■the official report of the Vienna Agricultural Congress, declare and complain •that ‘the grain exporting capacity of Russia and extra European countries is the source of a calamity affecting the whole of Central Europe.’ ” America is the only one among the •“extra European countries” which cuts Any great figure in Europe's grain market, and it is the American farmers to which the Austrian grain growers referred as their competitors Are not McKinley s duties on farm products the greatest humbug that anybody has ever attempted to palm off mp«n the farmer?