Jasper County Democrat, Volume 15, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 September 1912 — WILSON SLAPS TARIFF [ARTICLE]

WILSON SLAPS TARIFF

CALLS FOR LAWS TO PROTECT FARMER IN JERSEY SPEECH. Democratic Candidate Tells Why Aldrich Quit —Declares Small Group Have Controlled Legislation— Explains Platform. Thousands of farmers heard Governor Woodrow Wilson, Democratic nominee for president, make his first campaign speech at Gloucester, N. J. The governor spoke at Washington park, where farmers from New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania were participating in a celebration. He attacked former Senator Aldrich and his tariff making associates, urged a merchant marine in connection with the Panama canal, and blamed the influence of express companies in preventing the adoption of a parcels post. The governor declared for legislation to further the interests of the farmer, saying one of the greatest impositions upon the farmer that has ever been devised is the present tariff legislation. “I have not heard," he said, “of farmers waiting for a hearing before the committee on ways and means of the house and the finance committee of the senate in order to take part in determining what the tariff schedules should be. While you were feeding the world, congress was feeding the trusts. “It is a long time since tariffs were made by men who even supposed that they were seeking to serve the general interest, because tariffs are not made by the general body of members of either house of congress. They have been made by small groups of individuals in certain committees of those houses, who even refused information to their fellow members as to the basis upon which they had acted in framing the schedules. > “One of the gentlemen who has been most conspicuously connected with this thing has in recent “* years prudently withdrawn from public life. “I give Mr. Aldrich the credit of having a large weather eye. He saw the weather was changing in Rhode Island —even in Rhode Island —as well as in the rest of the Union; that men who had long known he was imposing upon them felt the limit had been reached, and they were not going to be imposed upon any longer. “Now there are various questions which you gentlemen ought to realize are pending, questions that directly concern the farmers of this country. The tariff intimately Concerns the farmer of this country. “Tariff measures are not measures for the merchant merely and the manufacturer. The former pays just as big a proportion of the tariff duties as anybody else.” The governor explained his idea of the benefits that might accrue to the farmer from the digging of the Panama canal if the merchant marine were restored. The governor then advocated the promotion of industrial, agricultural and vocational education, and explained that the Democratic' plank In this connection meant a system of university extension to the farmer, making available to him the knowledge stored in the universities of the country on scientific farming.