Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 October 1891 — Beating Pauper Labor. [ARTICLE]

Beating Pauper Labor.

Our high tariff cranks are quite sure that the American labor cannot compete with the “| anper labor” of the old world. The “el ahs of Egypt” and the “ryots of India” are to their minds the most formidable competitors in the whole world because the most poorly paid. But our farmers t’o compete with the fellahs and the ryots and beat them in a free market. In 1896 our to ton.growers sold England 4,480,203 bales of co ton, weighing 400 pounds each, against only 1,086,376 sold there from Egypt and India together. This was done last year, and the present year will make a still better showing; and all this in the face of what Uncle Jerry Rusk calls “a well nigh ruinous competition with the labor of * * * the miserable fellah of Egypt and of the unfortunate, half-starved Indian ryot, working for pauoer wages, nog e tint all the amehities of life In order that women and children as well as men may work in the fields.” 1 efc it is a~ainst this labor that our Southern cotton-growers compete successfully without any help and with harm alone from our glorious system of “protection for Amer can labor.” If they do it, why cannot some other people? “Legitimate Fruit.” The American wool clip this year is 5,000,000 pounds less than it was last year. The New York Tribnne Das made the impudent claim that the enormous crops of wheat and corn rSised by our farmers this year are in part to be credited to the McKin ey tariff law, sin e “the principal object of the new tariff was to afford better protection to agriculture. ” The large crops appear to this blind eader of blind protectionists as “the legitimate fruit of a tariff intended for that purpose;” for the farmers, thus encouraged, increased their production in every direction. Will the Tribnne toll us whether that 5,0C0.00i) pounds shortage in the Wool clip is another “legitimate fruit of a tariff intended for that purpose?”