Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 July 1892 — HIGH PROTECTION. [ARTICLE]

HIGH PROTECTION.

R Baglaad • Tbmuad Tears of It Created Pauperism. Gentlemen who advocate high protection talk about England and the sufferings of English laborers. From the days of William the Conqueror until 1846, the highest kind of protection laws prevailed in that country, and the average wealth of the laboring people in 1840 was estimated at £44 per family. Under the high protection laws all the wealth of the country was concentrated in the hands of a very few, seven-eighths of the population being .laborers, most of whom were barely able to earn the most meager subsistence. Mulhall’s Dictionary of Statistics tells ns that since the passage of what are known as the free trade laws of England more than a million of English families have risen from the condition of day laborers to what he terms the middle class, meaning those comfortable, prosperous people whose incomes range above $5,000 a year. Mulhall also states that the rich families have decreased more than 60 per cent, and the wealth per family of this class more than 10 per cent.

He also shows that the average wealth of the working class has doubled during that period. In other words, under the English tariff laws the workingmen and poor classes are constantly getting richer, the middle class or people in comfortable circumstances are constantly increasing, having more than doubled in forty years, while the extremely rich have decreased both in numbers and wealth.

This proves that the principle of free trade, as it is called by the Republicans, or fair trade, or just tariff laws, as advocated by ns—that is, tariff levied for the purpose of benefiting the whole people—has had the effect in England to decentralize wealth and to build up a large class of that character of people which alone makes a country great, prosperous and happy. Nearly a thousand years of protective tariff prior to 1846 had divided the people of England—a protected nobility owning millions on the one side, a small middle class of moderate means, and 20,•00,000 people suffering abject poverty, many of them being little above pauperism.

Forty years of fair trade have decentralized wealth, reduced the number who possessed extreme wealth, almost abolished pauperism, and largely increased tiie thrifty middle elass. The very reverse has been the condition of the United States during the period of Republican control.—Speech of Representative Joseph Wheeler.