Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 January 1890 — A TARIFF REFORM MEETING. [ARTICLE]

A TARIFF REFORM MEETING.

The Massachusetts Tariff 'Reform League gave their annual dinner at Bositon Tuesday. The speakers were Thos. jG. Shearman, Edward Atkinson an di Roger Q. Mills. Mr. Mills felicitated himself upon being able to touch elbows with New England on the subject that had gathered them together, and he thought it a fitting' place for agitation of tariff reform—in the -old town that once made a teapot of its harbor. Among his utterances were these: “History repeats itself,and we are here to-night remonstrating with our government for its wrongful interference With our private business, depressing our industries, paraliziag our labor, impoverishing our people and cutting off our foreign trade. And to-night we say to Mr. Harrison and Mr. Blaine, as our fathers said to King George and Lord North, you have no right to close our ports. Grover Cleveland, at the head of the Mohawks, in December, 1887, threw the tea overboard and called on the battle for the vindication of the right. We had our Lexingtons and Bunker Hills in 1888. We had our Saratoga in 1889. We shall have our Yorktown in 18892. * ♦ * * If restricting the purchase and sale of our products to American markets stimulates industry, cheapens production and in - creases wealth and wages, why would it not be A wise policy to apply the principle to each one of the States 1 If it is productive of good to forty two States it ought to be good to each one of them.” Hon. Edward Atkinson was the next speaker, and said, among other things: “All the reasonable advocates of protection consider free trade as the objective point of their system, to be attained when the time has come to make it safe. All reasonable free-traders claim that true protection to domestic industry is what they aim at. The only difference is on the time of con--cession. Why not begin now! There may be conciliation without compromise of principle. * * * The difficulty of bringing about a common consent and a common demand for reform, and the diffi cultyin putting the agreement of these two parties, so far as there is an agree ment, into the tariff measure, consists mainly of the fact that the representatives of the two sides in this discussion, who trust each other, who work together in all the other business of life, distrust each other’s methods and acts on this one subject. How shall this mutual distrust be removed? I regard that as the most important question now pending. * * * I refuse to believe that the representatives of the great na tional Republican party, to which 1 was proud to belong for so many years, have become so narrow and bigoted in their see tional feeling as to be incapable of rising to the level of their present responsibility. We only ask some of them to give their . support to measures which are consistent with their own personal convictions. In the time of danger there were seven men n the great Republican party who saved the country from what, I think, nearly all reasonable men now admit, would have been a political convulsion, when they voted on their personal convictions, but not with their party, against the impeach ment of Andrew Johnson. Are there not now seven men in the Senate and a relative number in the House of .Representatives who may, at the present time, be capable of the same independent judgment, who may unite with their party opponents in such a reasonable and judicious reform of the tariff as will put us in the way toward establishingconditions in the future in which this country may attain the paramount position to which it is entitled in tbe great commerce of the world.”