KEEPING THE TARIFF PROFIT. A Cherished McKinley Formula Shown to lie False. No one point in the whole protectionist protection-ist creed ia more often or more stoutly insisted upon than the statement that, after protection has given our manufacturers manufac-turers the home market, they will reduce their prices to the foreign level. This is what they mean when they say that the tariff is not a tax, an assertion which they repeat in season and out as the corner cor-ner stone of their faith. But the matter can be tested by market mar-ket reports, and this cherished formula of the MeKinleyites can be shown to be false. Ottr manufacturers of steel rails have complete possession of the home market, the imports of rails last year being be-ing only 134 tons, a bagatelle which counts for nothing in affecting prices. Do our railmakers, then, sell rails at as low a price as we can get them in England? By no means. They are in a combine which keeps prices up as high as the market will stand. Only recently a trade journal pointed out how the railroads rail-roads were holding back in making purchases pur-chases of rails by reason of the artificial price maintained by the rail trust. The trust price is now from ten to eleven dollars above the price in England, Eng-land, as shown by the reports published in our protectionist papers themselves. In other words, a protected monopoly does not surrender its tariff profits till compelled to do so by outside competition. competi-tion. But in the casa of the steel rail trust, a McKinley duty of $13.44 a ton prevents this outside competition and the trust has everything its own way.