Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 161, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 July 1913 — A Dangerous Freedom. [ARTICLE]

A Dangerous Freedom.

The Indiana State Journal In hls message to congress, delivered last week, President Wilson portrays the discomfort under which the executive and legislative departments are working at Washington, owing to the high temperature, but appeals to members of congress to make the sacrifice involved in sticking to the job until the currency bill he has prepared has been enacted into law. It is doubtless hot at Washington, but no hotter than it is almost everywhere else, and not half as hot as it will be for a good many of the members of congress when they go home to face the fellows Who want postoffices, consulships and other jobs that most of them will never get, and nothing like as hot as it may be when they are called upon to answer for pending legislation to the fplks back home. “We are about to set the business men of this country free,” declares President Wilson. ‘The tonic and discipline of liberty are about to be offered them through the induction of foreign competition—unfair foreign competition, based on lower labor and material costs. The American manufacturer is about to be blessed with the tonic and discipline of competing in an open market with foreign producers whose labor costs are not half those prevalent in the United States. His wits will be sharpened by the greatest ingenuity required to meet pay rolls and pay material bills. If he survives he will be the stronger for it. If you turn a man out doors in zero weather with ho clothes, on you will either harden him or freeze him to death. If he Objects, of course, Tt is because he doesn’t know what is good for him. And curiously enough, very few enough business men engaged in the productive side of industry seem to know what is good for them. The importers and the distributing trusts, of course, feel pretty confident of their ability to weather the storm, since they are to stay under glass. We gather from the remainder of the President’s address that what we are likely to need under the new conditions is a currency so elastic that everybody can borrow, using his new freedom as collateral. Some way or other it seems doubt f ul whether it will be possible to devise any currency scheme which will compel the fellow who has the money to lend it to the fellow who hasn’t it, unless the fellow’ who hasn’t it, under the new ,'reedom to sell at lower prices, is able to keep his business in a sufficiently prosperous state to justify the expectation of his ability to keep it profitably going. Every citizen must take his hat off to the sublime cock-sureness of a chief executive who sees nothing in the commercial expansion of the United States of America since the civil war but hobbled deformity, as compared with the enormous prosperity that is sure to happen under the tariff for revenue system. With but one serious-Interruption, and that under a tariff measure enacted by the party now in power, the industrial and commercial progresspf this country during that half century has been such as to make the achievements of any other nation in the world during the same period pale into insignificance. This is not a matter o* theory: it is demonstrated by the statistics which tell the story of the wealth of nations. But it is all going to Jook like thirty cents under the new freedom, whereby we give the producers of the rest of the wo rid the richest market in the world in exchange for no concession which means the increase of a single shipload in American exportation. But if President Wilson’s ideas of what is going to happen are as preposterously at variance with the facts as his theories of what has happened in this country during the past half centry, the people of the United States are going to undergo an‘.illustration of, the fact that in the enactment of laws affecting the welfare of a hundred million Americans, a pound of knowledge and common sense is worth a ton of theory and imagination.