Rensselaer Republican, Volume 23, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 July 1891 — PROTECTION AND PRICES. [ARTICLE]

PROTECTION AND PRICES.

The attorneys for free trade make especial pretensions to philanthropy. If they are to be believed, the main object of those foreign traders who demand free access io our as well of those Americans who champion foreign interests, is to benefit the people of th is country. To this end clubs are organized in England with the avowed object of opposing protective legislation in this country, and arrangements are perfected for prompt response to foreign dictation by the American free trade promoters. Feigning especial sympathy.for consumers,»every free trade advocate from Cobden to Cleveland, no matter how inconsistant in other assertions, has invariably rounded up with the claim that “the amount of the tariff i» added to the price” of all products of this country similar to those thait may be

■" -- - ' • > imported. A few of the more presiimptuous among them have undertaken to fix the annual aggregate of such allegad increase in cost, though varying in their conclusions hundreds of millions of dollars. With even greater unanimity have they omitted to cite market quotations in support of their assumptions, though-having weekly revised’reports or ruling prices within ready reach. Such omission was by no means accidental; it was a necessity of the situation. . As a matter of fact, taking the experience of this country from the passage of the law signed by Washington on the Fourth of July 1789, to the present time, every page of Our industrial history furnishes proof that prices have been invariably and steadily lowered when confronted by domestic competion, which would have been impossible under a policy of free trade. ’No candid student of American history will maintain that under the policy dictated by British statesmen, and enforced by British power so long as such en forcemens was possible, the Untted States could have been other than an agricultural dependency, with foreign rfianufacturers controlling its markets, in accordance with their own notions of expediency. This result that the grasping foreigner of a past generation so sternly contended for has not yet faded from the vision of his successors, who, with zeal unabated, now seek to win through diplomacy what they no longer dare attempt to secure in the good old kindly fashion of conquest or arm ed intimidation. The changed conditions prevailing in the two countries have by no meansabated the foreigner’s desire to control our markets of manufactured products, although there is to be noted a marked departure from the tactics once employed for securing such control. It is to this enforced changing in “influences” resorted to by those who yearn for profits from American trade that so many modern writers and talkers are indebted for employment in advocacy of “tariff reform” and such temporary party advantage as they hope to realize therefrom.