Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 July 1890 — Talking Out In Meeting. [ARTICLE]

Talking Out In Meeting.

l Evidently ,_tiin A inericaa-attoiy neys for free trade have not conducted business to the full satisfaction of their foreign principals. Notwithstanding the vigorous opposition the McKinley bill has encountered, the probability that it will v/ithout serious gmodification be enacted into law, occasions unusual anxiety among European manufactmers. The reiterated assurance of freetraders on this side that ers have but to add the tariff to their prices and purchasers must pay it, however effective for party purposes here, seems by no means satisfactory to such foreign manufacturers as have had practical experience with American tariffs. British manufactures are especially clos • sttuif.nfcs of our tariff legislation, ana cautiously shape their busiaecb acc u’dingly. - To IllualrW: Lastiall theT town of Llanelly, the center of the tin-plate manufacture, took "steps for" increasing the public water supply. No sooner was it announced that the KcKinley bill proposed to advance she tariff on tin-plate and render u. possible to manufacture them in this country, than a public meeting was called, at which, after assurances from the heads of all the large tin-plate works that under the proposed legislation “the time would come own tin-plates,” it was decided to postpone the work, “in order to see what would be the fate of the tariff bill” before the American Congress. Also in the center of the cutlery manufacture eqnal anxiety is manifested. A delegation recently waited on the mayor of Sheffield aad requested an official protest against the passage of the McKinley bill. The spokesman, who claimed to voice the sentiment of all Northern England, suscintly adfjurf, among other arguments for this proposed step, that “the action to be taken in Sheffield would strengthen the hands of the American opponents of the billJ” Just what this strengthening process was to be, though unauhounced at the time, may be inferred from a recent statement in the Tin-Plate Record; that “every tin-plate importer in the Country has been assessed SIO,OOO, and the English syndicate which controls the manufactories and mines in Monmouthshire and Cornwall has augmented the sum to nearly one million dollars in order to defeat the tin-plate danse in the McKinley tariff bill.*’ The Sheffield mayor*# reponse was equally suggestive, in which he insisted that British manufacturers could not afford “to stand

still and see protection measures adopted in America”—for the time was within his memory when the “American market found trade I for one-half the population of Sheffield” in making cutlery now supplied in most part by American manufacturers. It is in face of such facts as these that intelligent men in this country are expected to believe that the only effect of Protection is to add to the price of imported products. It is in furtherance of such presumptuous foreign interference with oar laws as above indicated that American voters are asked to second the British demand for free foreign trade.