Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 March 1896 — The Evils of Protection. [ARTICLE]

The Evils of Protection.

“Legislation which enables a large body of rich men all over the country to calculate and enter in their ledgers the exaot sum which a certain act of congreis will put into their individual pockets,” says the New York Evening Post, “is probably the greatest indirect incentive to corruption ever devised. No popular -overnmsjnt could resist it for ten years. Not only does it give every manufaott nrer a direct commercial interes in the return of one type of man only to the legislature, and that not a very high one, but it makes it a matter of business with him to resist and wage war on every other type. More tnan this, in a country of universal suffrage, it drives the employers of labor ir» resistably into teaching not only their own employes, but all the poor and ignorant, that the chief function of the government is the making of profits and raising of wages, and causes all its other business to seem insignificant. Let a generation or two grow up under this teaching, and you soon have the devil let loose. You set every man who is not rich, at work devising plans .for making the government give him more of the money which he thinks is due to him.— You stimulate hatred and envy of tLe rich, because yon make the masses think they through governmental carelessness and apt.thy have got more than their shar % You give all the manufactures and corporations, too, an interest m establishing the boss system in all the states, so as to mole easily, through the boss, control the nom - mating machinery and prevent men hostile to their interest! from getting into office. In fact, the march of our politics under the system to its present condition has almost the order and sequence of a natural agency. * * *

“Though last, not least, the pro*, tactive policy has brought on*us the silver jraze and its aooompany* ing barbarisms. The plan of bringing in a number of smal, scantily-peopled silver states, to keep down and counterbalance the rißißg anti -protective ideas of the East, or as they frankly express it, to make sure of the MeKinlev tariff for ten years, was a device of the Republican majority in the Reed congress of 1890.”