Rensselaer Republican, Volume 23, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 October 1890 — Inconsistent Free Traders. [ARTICLE]

Inconsistent Free Traders.

If it be true that it is the coni sumer rather than the foreign pro- | dneer who pays the tariff on competing products, as contended by free trade attorneys, these gentlemen could add an interesting chapter to their literature by telling voters why it is that so great

'"'fc solicitude is evinced by foreigners i in our tariff legislation. Last year about ten million bushels of foreign grown barley came into the United States, paying a tariff of ten cents per bushel—say about one million dollars—into the government treasury. If a tariff makes no difference in the quantity or price of what they can sell to brewers in the United States, why so much agitation among our Canadian neighbors in view of the probability that the tariff on barley will be increased? They know full well that under this additional protection our farmers will find encouragement for sowing barley -on some of the land now devoted to wheat, and that to this extent the demand for foreign barley will be diminished unless the price is put down below what they have been receiving. And farmers-all-along the Northern tier of States known it as well; and those free trade attorneys who tell them differently assume ignorance of what has resulted from every tariff laid on competing foreign products. When farmers look at quotations for spring wheat in the respective markets of Winnipeg and Minneapolis, and see that in the absence of the existing tariff of twenty cents per bushel the wheat yeild of all our Northwestern States would be diminished in value by the influence of increased supply, it is likely to require something more than the hollow promise from free trade propagandists that importers will thereafter sell goods cheaper than they can now be bought to induce the agricultural voters of the wheat growing section to join the procession of Cobden Club followers. These farmers know that the nonagricultural workman in the United States pays five dollars for American breadstuff's where the British workman pays one dollar for the same products. They likewise appreciate the fact that every Amercan workman earning wages at some employment other than farming is this sort of a customer, whereas, if crowded out of present employment by unequalized foreign competition he is likely to become a competitor in growing American wheat for sale on an already fully supplied market. And it is this knowledge that accounts for the disappointment of selfstyled reformers, from Mongredier. to Mills, whenever they have appealed for the farmer vote in behalf of free foreign trade.