Rensselaer Republican, Volume 24, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 July 1892 — CURRENT COMMENT. [ARTICLE]

CURRENT COMMENT.

The Light Thrown on Some Parts of the Democratic Platform. - Wild-Cat Carrency—Ths Free Trade Platfarm—The Silver Plank—Other Timely Topic* Dlsc-nssed. Union labor will, not forget that Cleveland appointed Benedict, a “rat” printer of the worst grade, as chief of the Public Printing office, over the protest of Union printers everywhere. f ..I -.1 “FREE TRADE” DEFINED. Properly understood, the term ■“free trade” means not the abolition of all tariffs, but that import trade protect home industry. Such taxes as imports can easily bear and still monopolize the American market are said to be imposed for revenue -on ly. Th us large re veil ues may be raised by taxing imports, and yet there will be a condition of “free trade,’ 1 that is of trade free from protective, or discriminated taxes adjusted to benefit-home industries. Free trade thus means simply trade free from protective, but not from revenue taxes. The Democratic demand is not to destroy the tariff altogether, but to adjust it'ko it will not protect home industries, but merely raise re,venue and not—inter--sere wi th the control of the Amcrir can market by foreign manufacturers. '

THE NEXT DUTY OF INDIANA REPUBLICANS

( Indianapolis Journal. The Presidential and State tickets nominated and the Congressional and county —nominattons made —nr the greater portion of the State, the Re-, publicans can turn their undivided I ' a‘--ention_ tQ. the work of the cam-~l i paign. It is fortunate for the party this year that all the nominations i 4wye been made with a unanimity ; ==vHnclrYrittTec ure e been no bolts and no fusion of Republicans with any clement of the enemy, under any pretext. All this ? is encouraging. It meaiiS thaLno party vitality . Will be l_ .warjsfcltain' wasted Now for the work of the campaign. By whom and how can it be performed. There-aro local committees who will doubless attend to the work assigned to them. Already there are scores of club qrganizatipqs*which can be made most members will make them active and aggressive. A mere organization, with a list of officers and a few members, which does not meet and lay out work for each one to do is of no use. It simply cumbers the ground. The marching club and the uniformed organization have their uses, but the organizations which will win Repiib- ' lican votes will not march with bands • or burn red fire. They are the organizations which will have a few members in every neighborhood, ■ who will see to it that the ! indifferent or doubtful voters | are reached and labored with. It will be a campaign of education, and 1 the more intelligence the voter has I the more likely he will be to vote the . Republican ticket. It is a campaign I in which the Republican party stands i for American interests, and in Which the superiority of the Republican i policy is proved by the signal pros- ; peritv of the country under the Me- j Kinley law. There is not a regular reader of a Republican newspaper who cannot set forth the claims of that party to some of his associates in a manner to be effective. Itj-can not be done by banter or abused but much can be accomplished by candid talks. Th© organization which can reach every man in its vicinity in this quiet manner will be oue of the most effective forces in the Oampaign. . ; ? ; It is too much the custom to leave the work of the campaign to candidates and to.committees and speakers. Wq-must get rid of this mistaken idea. This a campaign whose issues affect the interests of every man and woman who has industrial relations with those about them—who have labor and its products to dispose of for the products of others. As all intelligent people would strive to secure industrial enterprises for their communities in order to insure a better market for their labor or products, so they should work to insure the! success of the party whose policy has brought to the State factories and markets. If the Republicans who believe that party success is essential to The general will but exert themselves in behalf ■of the ticket,-a sweeping victory can be won in Indiana in November.. -- THE DEMOCRATIC FREE TRADE PLATFORM, The tariff plank of-the Democratic 'platform means free trade, and nothing less. The convention indignantly repudiated the plank reported by the committee, because it had' a few oily phrases in it. The delegates were not disposed to butter the free trade parsnip with soft language this year. This action of the convention was most significant, and it means war to the knife on protected labor and industries. - The Democrats have made free trade their chief and almost their only issue, and on that doctrine they have at last got back to first principles. ’ .... For over twenty-five years they nave been qualifying their free trade declarations with deceptive tricks and frauds of speech, but they are . done with that now. They have caught their true voice aud talk ■plainly now as they did before the war, when one of their levhira in

Congress—Garnet, of Virginia—announted that Democratic policy aimed at duties “imposed with a single eye to revenue alone, and not an iota for protection.” \ . Since the days when “tariff reform” was advocated for the express purpose of cheapening labor and reducing wages, the Democrats have made a wide divergence, but it is now ended in. a complete return. They are tenting on the old grounds of cheap labor. Once more they even deny the Government the right or )>ower to protect labor. Like the tailors of Tooley street, who called themselves “the people,” the Southern Democrats,, possessed of cheap, “half slave” black labor, declare themselves the “American people,” who are to be blessed by free trade, while that protection “which”sustains vast Northern ~Hnd Western industries is alleged to be for “the benefit of the few.” " They sav:

... “We denounce Republican protection as a fraud, a robbery of a great majority of the people [?] for the benefit of the few. [?] We declare it to be the fundamental principle of the Democratic party that the Federai Govern ment has no constitutional power to impose and collect tariff duties, except for the purposed of revenue only, and we demand that the collection of such taxes shall be limited, to the necessities of the Government when honestly and economicaly administered.” Glorious old Democratic doctrine this 1 It means not an iota of tariff duties for the protection of labor. It means that the American labor unit and standard must be that of the “half slave” black toilers of the South. 'k.V It means that the natural labor level is that of the voteless Southern blacks, and Cobgress has no right to put any labor on a higher plane than that. It means that the Southern Democracy itntdgtyyrined to exploit labor in the future as in the past, ns|t.only. black, but. white as Ayell. They demand the right to exchange the cotton product of cheap blaekUaboe-for

teEetgasgaods and backload /the_pro~ ceeds home and hence to_sjJLaV?fttes _ X<)rtliera jodHterfaSeScunuot stand. - 1f the re is uo pawer 1 n this co untry to maintain duties for protection and to keep Northern laborabove the “natural level,” millions wii® have known comfort heretofore vVill know only misery hereafter. What is a Governmfent good for if it cannot ■'impose duties to protect labor as well as to get revenue ? DEMAND FOR A WILDCAT CURRENCY. —--- Indianapolis Journal.-.——— Th e Deino< ■ra ti c pl a t for m ado p ted at Chicago contains the "following: “We recommend that the prohibii tory ten per cent, tax on state bank I issues be repealed.” ThisTesolution ! stands by itself, being numbered Sec- I tipn Bin the platform. There is uo i introduction, explanation or qualification. It is a plain, flat, uneqiiivo- I cal demand for the repeal of the pres- * ent tax on State bank issues. We. [ call the attention of business'men to ! this plank in the Democratic plat- I form, and ask them to consider what ! it means? , \ - j At the beginning of the war. when it was decided to establish a system of Natioifhl banks and uniform National currency, it was decided also to discourage, as far" as.possible, the existence of State banks of issue. Many business men are ojd enough to remember the evils of the old State bank system. It was a hodgepodge system, without uniformitv. stability or safety. Every State had | a law of its own, and its banks issued notes at their own sweet will. Some States had a State bank system and a free banking system at one and the same time. Many of the notes would not circulate any distance from homer | They were known among the”people! as red “dog. blue pup and wildcat cur- j renpy. A person traveling across I the country did not know whether the tive dollar bill which he took in one Stafe to-day would pay for a meal of victuals in another State tobusiness man kept a bank note reporter and counterfeit J detector at his elbow and referred to it constantly. If a man came in pos- . .session—of— a -consiiUruble -sum in mixed hotek he was uneasy till he got rid of it, and always expected to suffer more or less of a shave on some of the notes. It is needless to say that this system was one of universal robbery of the people and a great detriment to business. In prrler to pet rid of it and make room ’ for a National currency oFunifortn value» a heavy tax was placed on State bank notes. In other words, t hey were taxed out of existence to the immense benefit of the people. The demand in the Democratic platform for a repeal of this tax is in effect a demand for the restoration of the old State bank system* It is partly a concession to the State * rights idea prevalent in the South, and partly a concession to the element in the Democratic party that an increase of paper currency. We believe the,feehng of conservative business men is that the currency should only be increased by the issue of good money, and not by i a return to the days of wildcat State ; banking, withltslOng train of -evils. ' The lattes, however, is precisely - what the Democratic platform demands, « , i $ WHAT THE HERALD SHOULD KNOW Inter-Ocean. The Chicago Herald has won for itself an undisputed pre-eminence ’among the journals that are intense ly ignorant of tariff and economic philosophy and legislation, and 1 has been well characterised by an East-

ern contemporary “as the paper toat knows the least of all the knownothing free trade press.” But it seeks to hide its gross ignorance under a .film of sulphurous rhetoric. Unable, because wholly ignorant of tariff principles, of foreign and do mestic prices, of any and every de tail of National or mercantileeconomics, to prove any proposition creditable to tree trade as applied to America. Or to disprove any proposition favorable to protection as applied to America, it hurls gtench potsriat the protectionism and imagines that they are thunderbolts. Its latest fulmm.ation is directed against all mdn who have made money by the developement of industries that, are protected by tariff. _ “Themonopoly tariff," our ignorant contemporary cries, *‘is a crime agfatnst the American peopte —Tris a crime involving murder. It steals and it kills.” Can our contemporary name a monopoly fostered by tariff? Can it name an American monopoly that has Lot its European counterpart? It can not. And ignorant as it is it knows that it can not?

There are somethings that even the Chicago Herald knows, or that, at any rate; all of? its intelligent readers know. We Will call a few of them to its mind, y , It knows that the sadTe’f eHts at the" Homestead iron works, which it uses as a pretext for an incendiary harangue, have been more than paralduring the past few years, with the exception that the wronged and poverty stricken workmen of Europe did not dare to use such violent resistance as was used at Homestead. It knows that protective tariff was not the cause of the London dock workers’ strike. It knows that in Wolverhampton, one of England's great centers of iron industry, the workmen have not been so well paid a& they have been at the Carnegie works, and it knows that they ai;e not now so well paid as the Carnegie workmen would be upon the reduced scale to which they object. It knows that the Wolverhampton elected a- Tory member to the British Parliament, " qndiFknbws that a cablegram to an American free trade paperattributes theTalture of Mr. Gladstone’s candidate to a growing bostilitjF of the British wbrlimen to free trade. It knows that in no country upon tire face of the earth is there so much genuine sympathy with the conditions of labor as in the Northern States of America. It knows that this sympathy is not felt in the Southern— and free trade — States of this Republic. It knows that wages are lower in the free trade States than in the protective States. t. It knows that the low price of labor in Alabama has helped to createa demand for low priced labor in Pennsylvania. r It knows that the demand for free trade in America springs from, and is confined to. these classes: British exporters. Importers of foreign goods, generally persons of foreign birth and often unnaturalized, who reside in the United States. ~ Callow doctrinaires. Money sharks who ate not factors of productive but who desire an era of low prices in order that they may purchase real estate and other property at panic rates, trusting to a return of the people to common sense and to the ancient prefer of protection for a realization of full values, upon what such agents as the Chicago Herald secured to them at fractional value. - Southern employers of cheap-tabor. Selfish people who desire to hire cheap, labor. __ There are no American advocates of free trade who do not belong to one of these classes. CONFEDERACY,-*IB6I—DEMOC-RACY, 1892. The Inter Ocean has called attention to the likeness between the nullification ordinance of 1833 anti the Democrdtic platform of 1892, and we now call attention to the~sTmilaritv between the democratic platform and the te constitution. To show this plainly we quote from article-Lsecrioa 8, clause 1, of the constitution of the Confederate States adopted March 11, 1861, and by its side in parallel column we print that plank of the Democratic platform referring to the same question : Confederate Constitu- Democratic Platform, tion, 1861: ljune 22. •Tne Congress shall. ’AVe declare it to be have power to lay aud a fundamental princicollec: taxes, duties and pie of the Democratic excises for revenue only, party that the Feder necessary to pay the al Government has for the no const! tu tional, common defense and car- power to enforce and ry on the government of collect tariff duties, the Confederate States; except for the purbut no bounties shall be pose of revenue granted from the treas-only.” ury: nor shall any duties, or taxes oil importations frdm foreign nations be • laid to promote or foster any branch of industry.”! It would seem'from all tlje circumstances that who adopted this platform, were referring to the Con federate constitution and not ttje Constitution adopted by the fathers ’of the Republic The Supreme Court, the highest legal authority in the land, has several times decided thatumlertheConstitution of thefathers the Democratic doctrine as> enunciated is wrong, but by reding the iMU'allel columns abovefft Tlßasy to soe that the enunciations of the Democracy are entirely in accord with the constitution of the Confederacy. This naturally leads oue to ask. Does the Confederacy, which capitulated to Grant at A ppomattox, and nullification, which was struggled by Jacksog, finally triumph with the Democracy in 18iF2 ?