Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 40, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 December 1907 — THIS MAY CALL A HALT [ARTICLE]

THIS MAY CALL A HALT

RAPID DISAPPEARANCE OF OUR EXCESS OF EXPORTS. Increased Import* Are Cutting Down the Trade Balance to a Fignre Which Should Cause Tariff “Reformer*” to Seriously Consider the Situation. According to the Now York Herald, 170,000 was the number of east-bound passengers on ocean going ships from Atlantic ports for the season of 1907. It Is estimated that, including passage money, both ways, American travelers abroad will spend at least an average of SI,OOO eacto Allowing for the foreigners who have returned home, the American east-bound passenger’s will probably not exceed in number 140,000. At the rate of SI,OOO each, these 140,000 Americans will have spent American money abroad reaching a total of $140,000,000. < '"TEimwETffggnmiiinrw heretofore been estimated as the amount taken out and left out of the country each year by American tourists. It Is a big Item in our foreign fixed Charges. But there are other big items to be included. There is $150,000,000 to $200,000,000 paid to foreign steamship companies hauling American exports and lipports; somewhere

from $50,000,000 to $75,000,000 paid in interest and dividends to foreign holders of American investments; and about $50,000,000 sent abroad in postal orders and small drafts by American wage earners to foreign relatives. Thus the total of our foreign fixed charges is brought considerably above $400,000,000 annually. Protection trade balances, arising from" excess of exports over imports, have heretofore taken care of these huge fixed charges, and left something over. Will tariff reduction and reciprocity trade balances take care of them? Not if we are to have a continued decrease of exports over imports. And it is in order to increase our imports and decrease our excess of exports that tariff “reduction and reciprocity tariff concessions areadvocated. Already our favorable trade balance is 'falling off heavily—from $517,000,000 In 1906 and $478,000,000 in 1907 (fiscal years) to $225,400,000 in the first nine months of 1908 (fiscal year). This is at the rate of but little more than $300,000,000 for the full twelve .months, and at the rate of decrease in the last four months it may fall below that figure. It is not at all unlikely that the imperative needs of American finance will call a halt in the nibvement for tariff reduction and reciprocity tariff concessions.

TWO PANICS COMPARED. One Under Free - Trade, the Other Under Protection. Many have been the explanations of the stock market crash'and the runs on banks. President Roosevelt and a majority of the American people are agreed that the financial shock was due to a culmination of abuses by men who have played fast and loose with honest and honorable business principles. There have been those, however, who have blamed not the evils which were threatening our most sacred Institutions, but the President for turning the light on the evils. Some have accused newspaper headlines for announcing that t’he Clearing House Committee was throwing high financiers out of the presidencies of banks and trust companies, and for telling that there were runs on depositories when there were runs. Others have charged the disturbances to the defects of our currency system. Still others have offered different reasons—some weird, yet not Insane; some picturesque, yet partly true. But It has remained for the sapient tariff editor of the Evening Post to discover that the thing to blame for the whole business Is the Dingley law, or, since the panic befell us under the Dingley act that no one ever again shall be able to say that the Wilson law

was responsible for the bankruptcy poverty and misery which overwhelmed us at the beginning of President Cleveland’s second administration and continued to rage like a plague until the voters of the United States went to the polls in 1896 and cast their ballots for the restoration of. -the American tariff system now In operation. There are some facts of sensational difference, of course, in the two events. The Gilson law panic did not expire in forty-eight hours; It endured for several years. season after season, farmers burned their crops In their stoyes for fuel and In the fields to clear them, because ft did not pay to send them to market Now there are hundreds of millions of profits in.the crops, and at this moment the farmers, with mortgages paid off and bank accounts fat, are sending to market some six or seven billions of products bld for by our people and by the world at prosperity prices. As they receive their checks for their new wealth now pouring upon them the farmers, going to their banks to deposit the proceeds, ride in automobiles. Then the factories and mills and forgeschss6d;theyremained dosed through the gloomy weeks and months and years. Now there Is an unbroken hum of industry over the land. Then wage earners had their pay cut, lost it altogether, ate up their in the banks and jojned the Bread lines. For a full presidential term’ the most coniiplcuous thing in the world was the empty dinner pall of America, the most

active industry in this country the charity soup house. Now this is a nation of workers on full time, w’ith a surplus of wages and profits, the week after the panic as the week before, to swell the savings banks accounts by millions, to buy homes and to give -the best living anywhere on earth. Then the United States government, along with the public “went broke.” It had not enough income to equal its expenditures; it could scarcely borrow enough money to pay its bills from day to day. Now the treasury piles up such a daily surplus that it can toss a few hundred millions into the banks to supply currency and stop a prosperity panic. In the Wilson law period there was a panic of long duration, not because there was insufficient currency with which to do the business of the people, but because there was no business to I>rovide American bread and butter. Farms were wastes, mills and factories were abandoned. Industry was prostrate. And this misery—the misery of a poverty panic—was long continued. Yet the jocose free trade oracle tells us, though the facts of the two panics—the prosperity panic and the poverty panic—are different, the principles involved are the same. Wherefore is protection now banished from us as a superstition ; wherefore shall this be the end of the American tariff system. Perhaps—when*the people of the United States are able to subsist on green cheese imported from the moon.—New York Press.

Pussies tj»e Reformer*. Tariff revision puzzles the good tariff reformers. A little reduction would so stimulate imports perhaps as to Increase the revenues, and Uncle Sam does not need more revenue; in fact he has more now than he needs. A deep and sweeping reduction which would positively diminish the revenues, would stimulate Imports to the extent of closing mills and factories and throwing wage earner, out of employment Now what are the good reformers going to do aboift It. Usually any one of them Is able to solve In fifteen minutes by the meeting bouse clock, the most intricate proposition that can lie presented to the human mind.— Champaign (Ill.) Gazette. Lining Up for Principle*. There has been a lot of talk from Massachusetts that has. not seemed io chime in well with protection Republicanism ; but the lesson of the conventions Is that Massachusetts Republicans have gotten over such mugwumpism and that they are at the same time assured of more than their usual victory. Things often work out that way In politics when parties really line up for their essential and fundamental principle*.—De* Moines Capital.