Jasper County Democrat, Volume 12, Number 101, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 April 1910 — OUR HOUSE OF LORDS [ARTICLE]

OUR HOUSE OF LORDS

The Senate Dominated by Big Business Interests. CAUSE OF HIGH PRICES. The Beneficiaries of the Tariff Tax Prescribe Its Amount, While the Senate Looks on and Puts It Through. Beneficiaries Fix Bounty. . From the Congressional Record of Feb. 14 we clip the following extract from a speech delivered by Congressman Henry of Texas in reply to Mr. Boutell of Illinois. Every man and woman who complains of high prices should read it: It is interesting to know how the tariff act wa? framed and brought into existence, f will call a high Republican authority and permit him to give expert testimony. He is a lifelong member of that party. His indictment and narrative run: “Our house of lords is not made up of landlords, but of steel lords, woolen lords, cotton lords, lumber lords and as the latest creation zinc lords. The amount of taxes and bounties on steel, woolen and cotton goods, lumber and zinc is determined for us not by a responsible ministry, as in England, but by these lords, through the Influence they can exert on individual members of congress; still more through the pressure they bring to bear on senate and house committees and most of all by their power to dictate terms to the committee of conference which, subject to the votes of their colleagues and the presidential veto, practically determine what the tariff shall be.” Again,, with startling interest, this same author asserts:

“For instance, when the president sent his demand for a reduction on lumber to the recent committee of conference Mr. Aldrich announced that if that was an ultimatum the whole bill was at an end. The conference did nothing for six hours until one of the conferees on the part of the house, himself a lumberman, went out and labored with the representatives of the lumber interests. Induced them to withdraw their claims and reported their concession to the conference committee, whereupon Mr. Aldrich said. ‘Of course If they yield, we yield,’ and so by grace of these lumber lords we pay the Aldrich-Payne rather than the Dingley rates of tax and bounty on all sorts of things. A protective tariff is a bounty hid behind a tax, a tax concealed within a bounty, and thia, its dual nature, is not altered by the fact that bounty and tax are paid together over the same retail counter as often as we buy a woolen coat, or cotton shirt, or a steel hammer, or a galvanized iron kitchen utensil. What I am objecting to is not either the tax, or the bounty, or the mixture of the two, or the amount of both, but having these things assessed upon me by the very persons who are to draw the bounty. This Is utterly inconsistent with the traditions of Anglo-Saxon liberty on both sides of the water and is a disguised form of essentially the same tyranny as that against which when attempted by the British house of lords the English nation is protesting.” And here is the way he frames and joins the issue for the campaign, and we promise you now it shall be a “battle royal:’’

“In some form or other the tariff is bound to be the issue of the campaign of 1910. The tariff is with us, and prices are rising upon us. To be sure, the tariff is only one of three causes of the alarming rise in prices, monopolistic tendencies of both capital and labor being the second and the inflation of the currency of the world through the Increased production of gold being the third. But on the Democratic stump the tariff will figure as the sole or chief cause, and on that issue pure and simple the Democrats are sure to win. The Republicans can hardly expect to create a diversion like the Spanish war. and this not being a presidential year the Democrats are not under the necessity of-putting up a candidate for whom Independents refuse to vote.

“The only chance for the Republicans is to shift the issue from the merely economic aspect of the tariff to the political issue outlined above.” This is from the pen of Dr. W. De Witt Hyde, president of Bowdoin college, in the Outlook.