Rensselaer Republican, Volume 23, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 October 1890 — Inconsistency of Self-Styled Reformers. [ARTICLE]

Inconsistency of Self-Styled Reformers.

A basic error in the Free Trader’s attitude is his insistence that the economic policy TJf thtgr country should be made to conform to rules prescribed by foreign statesmen and writers as best for countries altogether differently circumstanced. Hence the majority of free trade arguments are repetitions from writers whose experience was limited to nations of restricted resources and necessarily dependent upon other-countries for the means of subsisting their peoples. The conception of a continental nation like the United States, with a population combining the ingenuity and intelligence required in lines of manufactures, and the necessary resources of soil and climate for producing everything required by its people, aside from a few strictly tropical products, had no place in the visions of the writers who are now daily quoted as authority for the universal free trade toward which the teachings of self-styled reformers are directed. « _ Inspired by the Cobden Club, it is but natural that attorneys for tariff reform should persistently cite the British policy as a model for all other nations. This is to demand that a nation which is manufacturing more than it can utilize, while dependent upon other countries for products with which to feed and clothe its people shall stand as model for the United States, with more food products than its people can consume, and as yet not manufacturing - all their clothing and household necessities. The absurdity of the proposition becomes evident in the fact that the entire Kingdom of Great Britian and Ireland, with a population of 36,000,000, has less

area than the two stales of lowa and Nebraska, and probably not more ’ than half the quantity of tillable land. But still this prop, osition is persistently repeated by both British and American attorneys for free trade. There is, however, a point at which the American contingent omits a portion of the argument found potent on the pther side, Mr. Gladstone and other foreign advocates of reform in our tariff policy are candid enough to admit that the result of following their advice would be to make the United States a producer of cheap breadstuff's and other farm products and permit England to become the.workshop of the world. Free trade adx’ocates this side the Atlantic deem it prudent to withhold this evidently correct forecast until such time as voters have been prevailed on to tear down the defenses of domestic manufacture?, and theif rehabilitation has been rendered exceedingly remote, if not altogether impossible.