Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 June 1889 — SOUNDING THE FREE TRADE SLOGAN. [ARTICLE]

SOUNDING THE FREE TRADE SLOGAN.

The state officers have met with good success iu disposing of the new school fund bonds, in New Yoik. At last accounts $2,850,000 had -been sold leaving on hand only 8155,000, and probably purchasers have been found for that before this time. There has been a general revival of the American national spirit in this centennial year of the constitution, and this spirit is evincing itself in. preparations where for celebrating the Fourth of July with genuine old-fashioned ardor and thoroughness. From every direction come reports of elaborate preparations being made for the proper celebration of the day of all days for Americans, and we are heartily glad to note that Rensselaer will not fall out of the procession in its obsei vanee this year. Three years ago the people of Rhede Island adopted Prohibition by a vote of 15,113 to 9,230. Last week they cast, it out by a vote of 28,407 to 9,852. The experiment was a melancholy fail - ure, and there could scarcely be a stronger proof of the present impracticability of Prohibition, than is to be found in this vote in Rhode Inland. -Ontario, Canada, furnishes another recent instance similar to the Rhode Island lesson. Fifteen counties in that province voted for Prohibition, four years ago .“by a majority of 1-1, DOD votes. They have just rejected it again . rafter, a most ■ reiiuivtiy a majority-of-10,090." Constitutional Prohibition is dealt and in its grave. It has been tried and found wanting and the jieople are everywhere rejecting it. Every state that has voted upon the question for the past half dozen years has voted against it, by overwhelming majorities. Texas Tennessee, Michigan, Massaehsetts North Carolina and several others have all registered, by popular vote, their disapproval of that method of dealing with the drink problem. Rhode Island has just voted to repeal her prohibition amendment, after several years experience of its practical workings, by a vote of five thousand in excess of the majority of three fifths, necessary iu that state tn repeal a constitutional provision. In Pennsylvania the final count of the vote taker, last week, shows a majority against prohibition of nearly twjo hundred thousand votes. The truth of the whole matter is plain and undeniable. The people of this country have now had ample opportunity to judge of tfie comparitivc merits of thejpractical workings of prohibition as compared with a high tax aud rigorous regulation system, and their verdict is-overwhelmiugly in favor of the latter. Editor Stoll, in iris address to the Northern Indiana Editorial Association, saicj, “Good communities And good newspapers usually

go hand in hand. Figs cannot be gathered from thistles; neither can a good, truthful and conscientious newspaper flourish where people are indifferent to the qualities of truth, goodness and ness.” To which the Chicago Inter Oceaa adds: ‘ We believe that'the most ininfamous newspaper published in the ’world is not so bad in quality as its regular patrons desire it to be. The force of public opinion prevents the worst newspaper from being quite as obscene, quite as mendacious, quite as virulent as the worst people would wish it to be. No newspaper has dared topreach murder quite as openly as certain members of certain clans and certain orders of assassins would like to hear it preached. No newspaper has dared to preach the unlicensed gospel of lust quite as plainly as certain uuclean members of certain unclean societies would approve. No newspaper has dared to justify bribery and violence, perjury and theft quite as boldly as certain camp followers of politics desire to P hear them justified and to see them practiced. If a newspaper were personified we think it would have to be in the feminine gender. There is so much of femininity in the management of a newspaper. It is full of tact, full of delicacy, and, even in its most radical types, it is conservative. Courage, it is true, is a most essential attribute of a great newspaper, but it should be the courage oFSisera, of Charlotte Corday, of Joan of Arc, of Maria Theresa, of Elizabeth of England, the hebiism of con sevatism,-rather than the brutish valor Eugene oi; of Hotspur.”

Those patriotic citizens who voted down the foreign idea of free trade at the late election are not to be permitted peacefully to enjoy the fruits of their victory. Foreign captalists whose envious eyes have long been fixed upon the American market, and that class of advocates who find it to their interest to aid iu bringing about free foreign trade, have already served notice through the Cobden Club annexes, called Tariff Reform Leagues, that the American people labored under the disadvantage of either failing to comprehend the issue before deciding upon it, or ignorance of what was really for their own good. Consequently philanthropic English and English-loving Americans will at once renew their efforts to spread the gospel according to John Bull. So certain are they of their premises that their line of effort has been at least partially" marked. out. Election returns from the agricultural districts contributed qnii ■ • largely to lecent disappointments of those b hind' the so-called “reform” -movement,- lienee eepeeial attention will bo given to demonstrating that the country’s phenominal prosperity under Protection is but the piling up of plunder extorted from its farming population. If not a re-issue of that well worn Cobden Club pamphlet, addressed to “The Western Farmers of America,” at least its perversions of fact and pleadings for free foreign trade are to be revived and spread through every available channel. In this American farmers were to support a fiscal policy favoring foreigu markets, which consume less than eight per cent, of the our farm products, to the detriment of the home market, which consumes all the wool and more than 90 per cent, of the grain, meat, fruit, vegetables. etc.~ raised in the country. All of which is to be repeated with such variations as circumstances and location may suggest as likely to prove most effective. Farmers are again to be told, and asked to, believe, that a tariff imposed upon a yard of imported cloth, or a pound of imported steel, increases by so much the cost of all the cloth and ste&l made and sold in the United States—while the tariff of twenty cents a bushel on potatoes, ten cents a pound on wool, and four cents a pound on butter, has no influence upon the price of those articles. In phort, all the assertions and misrepresentations hitherto employed are

to be revived and applied to the conversion of agricultural voters who in the recent election contributed so emphatically to the (discomfiture of the Free Trade propaganda. At the same time they are expected to ; overloqkJthe. fact that success of the ‘‘tariff reform” they are invited to promote will inevitably force from their present occupations multitudes of workingmen now the chief consumers of food products, and that in such event these must not only cease to be purchasers as now, but many of them are likely to become rivals in farming. It remains to be seen if this renewed attack upon our American system of encouraging the home market meets with any better success than its predecessors.