Rensselaer Republican, Volume 23, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 February 1891 — PROTECTION VINDICATED BY EXPERIENCE. [ARTICLE]

PROTECTION VINDICATED BY EXPERIENCE.

There is much of method in the persistency with which free trade attorneys continue their misrepresentations of the terms and effect of the existing tariff law. Confronted by the fact that every industry hitherto adequately defended against foreign competition long enough to become established on a firm basis has responded by a lowering of prices, these brevet Cobdenites seem determined that the recently enacted law shall not have opportunity for adding one more proof to the unbroken chain of evidence as to the economy of supplying the home market from adequate home resources. Scarely a day has passed, since the passage of the McKinley Bill was assured, without seeing the columns of the opposition press on both sides of the Atlantic loaded with denunciations of that m easure, and prophecies of business disasters that were to follow its enactment. First in the list of calamities was to be the loss of foreign trade as a result of refusal of foreign manufacturers to pay the increased duty exacted in the case of a few articles, notwithstanding the fact that more foreign products than ever before were put on the free list And how has this prophecy been fulfilled? Precisely as every other one promulgated by the free trade cabal: experience has shown it to be false. Of course foreigners grumbled, as they always have done, at having to pay for the privilege of competing with our citizens in the markets of this country; but their anxiety to continue business was by no means abated. The first month’s business under the new tariff showed a considerable increase of importations over the corresponding month in 1889, and this increase was practically confined to dutiable articles. It further showed that these same foreigners, whoso trade it was prophesied would be withheld from us, bought from the United States very considerably more in October, 1890 than they did during October, 1889, and that they increased by forty-seven per cent the average of their purchases from this country during the preceding ten months in 1890. "Vain© of exports for first ten months in 1890, $660,530,49; for October, $97,061,504.

To this complexion comes the scarecrow of diminished foreign trade under the operation of a irotective tariff; and foreseeing the same fate for all their prophecies of business calamities, the enemies of our protective policy are now industnouly working to prejudice sentiment against the existing tariff, law before the wisdom of its provisions are more fully vindicated by the increased prosperity that is certain to follow its retention on the statute book, —and that, as they very rightly fear, in time for influence upon the result of the next national election. Nothing has proven so serious an inpediment to the successful propagation of free trade ideas as the imperious logic of history,—nothing so much annoys the free trade theorist as to be confronted with the solid facts of business experience.