Rensselaer Republican, Volume 23, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 May 1891 — Tariff Pictures. [ARTICLE]

Tariff Pictures.

At the Protective Tariff League banquet Senator Aldrich disposed of the absurd claim that protec lion kills foreign trade by showing that, during the revenue tariff period from 1847 to 1861 the average , yearly exports of the United States per capita were but $7.73, while in the years 1876-1890 after our industries had been builtup by our average annual exports per capita were $13.57. —.Vezr York Press.

FREE SUGAR AND PROTECTION. ’■ ; Now that the real McKinley prices are at hand, and cheap sugar is causing consternation in the -reform” camp, the enemies of protection are driven to very absurd expedients in trying to neutralize the impression which freefor.the. people .is._cr.eat.ii\g in favor or the McKinley tar-' iff. We call the attention of our readers to the following utterances on this subject from representative Free Trade sources:

“Is admitting sugar untaxed Protection or Free Trade? If it is Protection, then I am a protectionist and am willing to work for more of the same sort. If it is Free Trade, why are you so happy over it, Mr. Protectionist? Especially since you profess to believe that the foreigners pay the duty, and its removal is therefore a boon to him instead of to us.— Jfr. William Lloyd Garrison, Speech at Danvers, Mass., Aprils. The Tariff organs continue to impress upon their Protectionist readers a beautiful lesson in political economy in the repeal of the sugar duties. .This remission of taxation, they declare, will be felt by every family in the land, altogether forgetting, in their newborn zeal for Free Trade in sugar, their own assiduous teaching that the Tariff is paid by the foreign manufacturer or producer and not by the American consumer.— Philadelphia Record, April 2. Yesterday a housekeeper had to pay one dollar for fourteen pounds of white granulated sugar. Today one dollar will buy twenty jiounds of the same quality. *- * * This is a splendid free-trade lesson given to the people by the enemies of free-trade. The tariff is a tax.” —Neu York Standard, April 1. ' To make sugar free is protection just as it was protection to make tea and coffee free, which was done by protectionists years

ago*.' It is free trade, otherwise known as a tariff for revenue only, some times called Cobdenism, which requires a tariff placed on these things. Free-trade is Englan As policy’, yet tea and coffee , both bear a heavy tariff, which" is paid by the English people. ProI tectionists everywhere and always 'have maintained that the sugar tariff was a tax, and never, as these free-trade authorities represent, that it was paid by the foreigner. There is no room for controversy on this point. Anyone, by consulting almost any speech or recorded utterance of any representative protectionist, cap easily satisfy himself that we state simply the truth. That protective duties on articles which can be produced here in sufficient quantities to supply the domestic demand are paid by the consumer does not therefore follow. Because sugar dropped in price the amount of the duty as soon as it was abolished, it does not follow that wire nails, now selling at 2 1-10 cents a pound, would sell for 1-10 of a cent a pound as soon the present duty of 2 cents a pound was removed. The duty on wire nails is protective, that on sugar, a revenue duty. That is the difference. It requires a vast amount of cheek and a lamentable absence of conscience for these free-traders to so misrepresent such well known facts. Their doing so indicates’the dsperation to which the benificent results of the new tariff are driving them.