Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 September 1891 — THE HOME MARKET. [ARTICLE]

THE HOME MARKET.

HOW MUCH OF THE WHEAT CROP IT WILL EAT. Over 200,000,000 Bushels Will Be Exported, While Our Protected Classes Can Eat Only 15,000,000—The Truth About Wages—This Year and JLast—Foreign Trade In a Nutshell. A Dead Failure. One of the much-vaunted objects of protection is to provide a houn market to consume the produce of our farms. Impose a high tariff, say the protectionists, and men will engage in manufactures, will give employment to large numbers qf laborers, and thus a great home market will be built up to consume, all that our farmers can produ e. It|s upon this basis that they go to the fanners to seek support for our high tariff system, even trying to persuade them that they get greater advantages from it than anybody else. This thing has now been goinr on for thirty years, and it would sjem that by this time protection ought to have accomplished something substantial in the way of building up its home market. Let us see what the result so far has been. By taking wheat as the most important of our farm products, and finding out how much of this year s crop will be consumed -by the protected classes, we can form an approximal ly correct estimate of the importance of protection’s home market . How many peop e in this country are •ub ect to foreign competition, and therefore benefited by protection? In answer to this question three eminent spe iailsts in the employ of thi Un tdd States Government "have made estimates These are Worthington C. Ford, Chief of the Bureau of Statistics of the State Department; Professor Simon Newcomb, Superintendent of the Nautical Almanac, rNavy Depa tment; and E B Elliott, the United States Government Actuary. These three authorities reache.l slightly different resu ts According -o Ford the ntilnber of persons subject to foreign competition is 4.70 j er cent.; according to Elliott, 4.75 per cent.; and according to Newcomb, 5.20 per cent For our purposes hero let us lake 5 per cent, which is a little above the average of the three estimates. Now the average population of the country for the fiscal year now passing Is given at about 15,000,000, and the party dependent on protection by the above estimate is, therefore, 3,250,0 pa This is, then, the dimensions of protection’s home market. Now let us see how much of our wheat crop this boasted home marke; will ea’t this year. According to the Agricultural Department at Washington the average p:r capita consumption of wheat in the United States is now about 4% bushels. At this rate, our protected classes will consume just 15.266,000 bushels of our present large wheat crop At the same rate the farmers themselves and other unprotected classes of our population will require 288,106,000 bushels, an amount which dwarfs into utter Insignificance the consumption of the protected classes. The wheat crop of the present year has been placed by the Agricultural Department at 541,C00,00 J bushels, though some authorities put it higher. Besides this, a surplus of 20,000,000 was brought over from last year's crop. The total supply this year will, there ore, bo not less than 579,000,000 bushels. The entire home demand for this wheat will be about as follows: Bushels. Nonprotected home market 288,160,000 Protected home market 15,266,010 For seed...' 55,000,000 Total 858,432.1X0 This leaves for export to the foreign market over 211,000,090 bushels, or a quantity sufficient to feed, at our own rate of consumption, a population of 45,000.-000. This is a most astonishing result after thirty years of effort at creating a home market. According to these figures our farmers will have to sell thirteen times as much of their wheat abroad as the •protected classes of this country will consume. If protection had carried out its boasted scheme of creating a home market large enough to eat all our farmers' wheat, it would have had to bring here 45,000,000 people and put them into some form of protected manufacturing. With such figures as these before them our farmers will see what an enormous contract at market building protection has taken upon itself. Do they believe that it will ever finish the job?