Rensselaer Republican, Volume 20, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 November 1887 — DEMOCRATIC TARIFF REFORM [ARTICLE]

DEMOCRATIC TARIFF REFORM

New York Special in Philadelphia Press. Senator Frye, of Maine, is spending the week here as one of the speakers in the State campaign. He has been investigating the industrial situation in Europe ever since last spring, and during his tonr abroad visited every country but Russia. He came back a few weeks ago loaded down with information and statistics and in the best of health and spirits, I met him recently justashe was leaving with ex-Senator Miller for Albany. “The tariff will be the great’question before Congress this winter.” he said, “and in the nations campaign next year. Labor represents more than half the cost of every manufactured article, and I made up my mind a year ago to make a tour o> the European workshops and learn for myself and by actual observation just what Ame ican manufacturers had to compete with in the one item of wages alone. With our mountains bulging with iron ores, our earth with the best pottery elaya, onr factories turning ont as fine silks as any woman wants to wear, and our furnaces making as good steel rails

as England can. yet the dutiable pro ducts of foreign labor that reach this country in,a single year amount to over 1600,000,000. That means that the home market has been undersold by outsiders to that extent and that our industries are jnsethat much out oi pocket. • The 1 one item of labor makes this difference iu their favor, despite the great natural advantages which wepoeseeed' - ‘What did you gather from yourobseFvations in the European labor field?” 1 asked. ‘ First, that one-third qf the working people of all Europe are in the most wretched condition of abject poverty ” replied Senator Frye. “Secondly, that you may hunt over the entire payrolls, as I did, and only once in 5,000 naines can you find a laoorer, skilled or other- ! wise, who is earning a dollar a flay. In Brussels, skilled women in the lace factories get about twenty cents a day. Frhnce and Germany do not pay any higher wages in the' same line, while Italy and Switzerland pay less by five or six cents. I went over m&ny of the iron and steel factories in Belgium and could not find a single man who got more than eighty cents. The average there was about sixty cents. At the Longloan Iron Works, on the Clyde, where 'they make 300 tons of pig iron a day, the laborers get from fifty-four to sixty-two cents per day; skilled mbn earn Beventyfive cents to $1.12, and more of them the lower figure rather than the higher one. What sort of life would they Pennsylvania pig-iron makers li\je if the had such wages? Why, coal and iron miners have to work had to make over $5 per week, and out of that they have to board themselves. A good many of the free-trade orators tell us of the great Clyde and its army of contented workmen. If they would go over there, as I have, and see nearly 40,000 families in Glasgow living in one room apiece, and more than half the men and women out of work; perhaps they would charge the basis of their arguments for a tariff reduction. “The condition of the working people of England and Ireland to-day;” continued the Maine Senator, is so near pauperism that it cannot be called anything else. English industries are almost at a stand-still, and a large proportion of the wage-earners are out of work. Three dollars a week is a high aver: age among mechanics, and t the 80,000 women employed in the Manchester cotton mills make less than half that. In Germany, the women in the cott on factories earn from twenty to twenty-five cents a day and the men average fifty. In Naples, Italy, the average wages for hands are $3.50 per week taking the whole mills through; but the women tret eighteen cents a day and the unskilled men about double that. The most expert operative in a Venice silk factory that I visited was a woman who had worked there forty years. Bhe averaged 12 cents a day, while hundreds of young girls around her earned but six.” “If we paid such wages over here I suppose we could do without a tariff?” I suggested. “We certainly could,” answered Mr. Frye, "and if the tariff tinkers succeed we will have to come down to the European wage-level or else cease uom - peting and depend entirely on foreign-, era for trade. We can not appreciate the difference between the working classes here and abroad because not enough of our people have the time to investigate as I did. My trip wai the greatest investment of time and money that I ever made. I saw industrial Europe with my own eyes, and I saw the terrible place in life the foreign wage-earner holds. He is utterly without hope for the future, and would be thankful for the assurance that he wiil be able to keep poverty from his door in the years to come. The idea of getting ahead of the world, of ever getting together enough money out of his earnings to live decently and -comforta bly, never enters his head, except as a dream.”