Jasper County Democrat, Volume 15, Number 53, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 October 1912 — PROTECTION; HOW IT WORKS [ARTICLE]

PROTECTION; HOW IT WORKS

Rhode Island, a Tariff-Made State, as Described By Miss Ida M. Tarbell. "The doctrine of protection Is worth looking at as it works,” declared Governor Wilson at Easton, Pa., the other day. He added, in characteristic phrase: “I haven’t any reverence for any economic doctrine whatever —except as it works.” How does the Aldrich doctrine of "protection” work? Ida M. Tarbell Is admittedly one of the foremost tariff experts who have taken sides with the people In the tariff controversy. She is a sober, thoughtful student and writer, whose conclusions, though often annoying to some highly-placed gentlemen, have almost invariably been found correct. Here Is whht Miss Tarbell says of that “tariff-made state,” Rhode Island: “This, then, is high protection’s most perfect work —a state of half million people, turning out an annual product worth 9187.000,000; the laborers in the chief industry underpaid, unstable, and bent with disease; the average employers rich, self-satisfied, and ah indifferent to social obligation as so many robber barons. It is an industrial oligarchy madfe by a nation's benficence, under the mistaken notion that It was working out a labor’s paradise. ... It is feudalism, and not even benevolent feudalism.” No one can question the justioe of Governor Wilson’s statement, that economic doctrines are to be judged by their works. By their fruits ye shall know them. The fruits of the Aldrich tariff are bloated fortunes, corrupted polities, enhanced cost of living.