Jasper County Democrat, Volume 11, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 July 1908 — LEEDS FOR ILLUSTRATION. [ARTICLE]

LEEDS FOR ILLUSTRATION.

How His m Multi-Millionaire Was Made by the Tariff. As a sample of the tariff-made millionaire, Leeds will do as well as any of them. ;6f course, he*is referred to as "the American financier,”' although he was little* more than a pocket into which vast sums of money flowed through the tariff funnel. It can ndt be claimed that Leeds btiilt up a great business, or outm'aneuve&d competitors, or devised a superior article of commerce, because the facts would not substantiate such a claim; but it can be asserted that the little struggling business he owned came under the special care and protection of the Government, the people were turned into the channel that ran through his place of business, and all he had to do was to pile up the coin. Get that well fixed in your mind—he was a tariff-made millionaire; the Government ordained that users of tin should pay their money to him, just as directly as if he had been a customs officer at the port of New A tariff wall was raised to com'pel the foreign producer to pay admission at the gate and so help nourish the Government treasury. The foreigner thereupon stopped coming, and instead erf his paying our Government, this wall operated to compel our own citizens to make millionaires out of Leeds and a score of his associates. It operated to saddle another giant trust on the backs of Americans. So that Mr. Leeds, now dead of excesses, was made a millionaire by law just as truly as if the Government has voted him the customs receipts of New York. His $1,000,000 home for his new wife was given him by this law; her $700,000 yacht was paid for through this law, and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of diamonds were gifts of the McKinley tariff. The law decreed that the housewife purchasing a dishpan, or a can of vegetables, or sardines, or a tin of baking powder, or a tin rattle or toy horn for the Christmas stocking, should drop a few sheckles tribute into the lap of W. B. Leeds and his second wife. The tariff, imposed “for the benefit of the American workingman,” for the “stimulus of American Industry,” for the “protection of the American public,” was in reality a decree creating a few more members of our American nobility. When the millions of consumers of tin, that is, those who use tin or buy articles that are packed in tin, are compared with the few thousands employed in the industry, and compared again with the score of millionaires created through a tariff monopoly, all is said that need be said concerning a revision of the tariff. When it is further shown that the tin industry has been made a part of the steel trust, it need not be asked whether this “Infant industry” needs the nursing bottle any longer. One' need not be a political economist nor know the history of the tariff from the beginning of the republic until now to form a very clear estimate of what the tariff is and what needs to be done to it. All one needs to do is to consider the career of a very mediocre man, barely an average man as a business men go, who was made a millionaire by grace of the tariff. The “protected workingmen” didn’t become millionaires. The users of tin can not show a bank account representing their savings through the home manufacture of tin, can they? Where, then, is all this tariff advantage—in the increased Government receipts? No, these receipts show a decrease. Leeds, his associates and the steel trust got it, and what’s more, they are getting it to-day, and will get It to-morrow and the day after and the next—and until some one takes hold of the tariff to make it equitable.—Detroit News.