Rensselaer Republican, Volume 24, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 October 1891 — WHY I AM A PROTECTIONIST. [ARTICLE]

WHY I AM A PROTECTIONIST.

BY JUDGE WILLIAM LAWRENCE, OF OHIO. I favor Protection because: It is essential to national power, wealth and independence; it makes a demand for skilled labor, including that for infirm men, for women, and children, who would otherwise be idle, secures fair wages and adds to general intelligence; it makes a home market, always reliable and the best for farm products, and for vegetables and fruits which cannot be exported, and for which there would otheiwise be no market; it improves the productive capacity, especially by stock raising and the value of lands; it saves to the world the useless expense and labor of shipping products from one country to another and turns these into productive sources of wealth; it se* cures national revenues paid largely by foreigners, and multiplies the sources which share the burdens of local taxation; its ultimate effect is to furnish more abundant and cheaper products by home competition, by preventing foreign monopoly and extortion, and by the invention of labor-saving machinery; it adds to the sources of individual wealth, educational comfort and happiness. Every period of adequate Protection has been prosperous; every period of ‘‘Tariff for revenue only,” unaided by abnormal conditions, has been attended with depression in business and consequent idleness and crime, verifying the truth that “he that provideth not for his, own household is worse than” a Protectionist—he is a free-trader or freeTRAITOR.