Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 September 1888 — FACTS FOR THE PEOPLE. [ARTICLE]

FACTS FOR THE PEOPLE.

. Democracy Means Fres Trade. You would continue the high-tariff rates in the interest of labor? When the |aw you dared enact and that yon now cunningly attempt to defend, straining every nerve to maintain, is the dastard’s blow at that labor you profahe in every pulse of your high-tariff hands, that have for a quarter of a centuiy clutched at the throat of . real laborpolitical highwaymen that demanded their money and did take the industrial life of millions of those same workmen you seek to win to your rescue in this impending political revolution.—" Mr. Hudd, Dem., Wisconsin, tariff debate, April 26. Strange, is it not, that the victims of these "political highwaymen” whose throats have been clutched and whose lives have been taken by the dastardly tariff people, do not know that they have been oppressed, and are the happiest and most prosperous working classes on the face of the earth? Hundreds of thousands of them have come from the other side of the Atlantic, and instead of warning their friends in the old country against their terrible plight, they are bringing millions after them to share their prosperity. Our friends, the enemy, say, "Yes, let us build a Chinese wall around this young and vigorous people whose eager enterprise already Chafes under the bounds of nature, and if we cannot make it wholly impervious, let us make it as nearly so as we can. > Let us, if we cannot go clear back to the barbarism of China a thousand years ago, go back at least to the feudal ages, when traffic in almost every important commodity was a monopoly farmed out by the sovereign, and industry and commerce were alternately restricted and plundered under the tariff regulations of rulers extremely solicitous for the interests of the labor which thus furnished the pillage. —Mr. Scott, Dem., Pennsylvania, tariff debate, May 11. This exceeds in fanatical fury John Bright’s well-worn phrase “barbarism of tariffs.” Mr. Cleveland’s favorite statesman finds in Chinese walls and mediaeval feudalism the scale of civilization reached under protective tariffs of the present day. How little real civilization, then, there must be in this benighted world! France, Germany, Italy, Russia Austria, Spain, all have recourse to protective tariffs; all the leading British colonies, except New South Wales have adopted the same policy; the United States for twenty-seven years has made its greatest advances in material progress under the same system; yet all these countries have retrograded, according to Mr. Scott, at least to the feudalism of the middle ages, and probably have gone clear back to Chinese barbarism of the days of Confucius. England alone, then, is “civilized” and out of the slough of the Dark Ages. Everywhere else civilization is played out.