Rensselaer Republican, Volume 27, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 October 1894 — A Farm Industry Destroyed. [ARTICLE]

A Farm Industry Destroyed.

The Ohio Wool Growers Association has just passed resolutions condemning the destruction of that industry and the injury done to the American farmers by the Senate bill. Among other things it says:

Why is free wool thrust upon the country? Not one of all the Senators who voted for the Gorman bill ventured to give, any reason in support of free wool. Their silence is a confession of its injustice, and that it means ruin. It is a conspiracy without purposes. 1. To add to the existing overproduction of cereals, cotton and other farm products, and still further reduce prices, already ruinously Irfw. 2. To alienate wool growers from the protective policy, and thus enlarge the policy of free trade. 3. With cheap foreign wool and protective duties on manufactures, to limit manufacturing to the Eastern cities and New England States.

4. Its political purpose is to win for the Democratic-Gorman party a few New England States and punish the protective-growing States. The pretense of cheaper clothing is false and fraudulent With the destructioii of American flocks and the manufactories limited to a narrow section, combinations and trusts would prey upon the people with a monopoly of wool and woolen goods. The government must have revenue. If not derived from duties, the people will pay in some other form. The wool tariff yielded in 1893, $18,147,219. The Gorman bill surrenders the wool tariff revenue, but imposes four times greater tariff by a tax on sugar of $40,000,000 annually. We indorse the doctrine announced by the national growers that while protection is accorded to any industry it should also be given to wool.

What, then, shall wool growers do? The free-wool policy cannot be reversed until after 1896. In the meantime sheep cannot be made to pay for capital invested and labor in producing wool Let all people who desire pros-

perity for Americans rather than for foreigners vote for no candidate for Congress who does not favor protections equally to all American industries, which by its aid can be made to furnish all needed supplies at fair American prices. The free-wool infamy will soon be wiped out never more to return, and the people, admonished by the ruin of the last years, will not soon demand again a change to the policy which brought it.