People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 March 1896 — Alleged Disreputable Action. [ARTICLE]

Alleged Disreputable Action.

The newspapers that believe that a high tariff is the remedy for all our most important ills are berating the Senate finance committee because it reported a free silver bill as a substitute for the, tariff bill. It is asserted that the substitute bill is not germane to the original bill. Well, let us see. The purpose of the tariff bill is to raise revenue, to get hold of some money, is it not? If it were passed it is altogether problematical whether- it would answer the purpose or not. Importations depend upon a market for what is imported. When times are good and everybody has money to spend a tariff will produce revenue. When nobody has any money, Importations will necessarily be light and a revenue from a tariff will not be heavy. The government has asked congress to enact some sort of legislation that will relieve the financial necessities of the treasury. The finance committee had before it the simple question of how to raise money and it very wisely concluded, in our judgment, that the easiest and most certain way of raising money was to provide for the coinage of silver. It seems to us that it was the most sensible thing that the senate has done for ten years. It went about accomplishing a purpose in a direct, business-like, common sense way. The majority of the senate is in favor of free silver. The majority of the senate next year will be in favor of free silver; and to charge that the free sliver senators are obstructionists because they provide a way for raising revenue according to their financial convictions, is as silly as would be the charge that the house is an obstruct tionist because it believes in the tariff bill and not in the silver bill. When a majority of such a straight-back institution as the senate id,.in favor of free silver, it looks to us as if the gold men ought to pause and ascertain where they are at. —Chicago Voice.

Seeing that by taking in the honest elements of all parties the populists can elect president and vice president, the Wall street wolves (that is all that will be left of the republican and democratic parties after July 22) are already planning to capture the presidency by force. Wonder If they know what such a course would entail? “We have the guns,” they say, “the president is ours, the navy is ours, the army is ours. Just let them try and Inaugurate a crazy populist president of this country and we’ll kill them like cattle.” Gentle reader, the above expression comes from a third-term advocate of Mr. Cleveland. He speaks for plutocracy. Wall street has actually planned to steal the presidency in March, next year. Would not the “pitchfork” make a good and attractive addition to the plow and hammer as an emblem of the peepie’s party? J