Show AS CLEAR A S MUD We will suppose that an American manufacturer produces an article and I makes a profit of 10 per cent upon it and sells it then at the price which it brings in England or Belgium There is a tariff on the article which prevents pre-vents the shipping in of the article from the old world Suppose the tariff is taken off and the Belgian and Englishmen for a year ship that same material into this country at 2 percent per-cent less than it costs the American to make it what is the only result possible pos-sible Is it not that the American must close down his works or be smashed f That of course is from our local advocate ad-vocate of protection and champion of McKinleyism It is great at supposing suppos-ing but very small at substantiating If an American manufacturer can sell goods at ten per cent profit and furnish fur-nish them at the same prices as they bring in England or Belgium how can the English or Belgian manufacturer sell them in this country at 12 per cent below those prices For if the American Ameri-can manufacturer makes ten per cent profit the foreigner in order to bring the goods down to 2 per cent below cost I must make them 12 per cent lower than the American manufacturer sells them for and ship them here into the bargain What a wonderful mathematician mathema-tician and logician is our high tariff local contemporary That effort at figures is intended asa as-a reply to the query of The Herald as to why the American axe and tool trust should want to maintain the present pre-sent tariff on their manufactures when they claim to control the trade of the world in their line of goods and now sell them cheaper in Europe than they do in America It does not answer an-swer the question at all but as usual our neighbor helps to prove the reverse re-verse of its ovn position The tariff is put on then to prevent the shipping in of the article from the old world Precisely It is meant to be prohibitory What for Clearly to prevent competition and thus enable the American manufacturer to charge high prices and as in the case of axes to prevent the American goods sold at a low figure in a foreign market being shipped back to this country and sold j below the robber prices charged to the American purchaser How much need an American manufacturer manu-facturer fear being smashed by the importation of goods into this country when he can compete with the foreign manufacturer sell them at foreign prices and make a clear profit of ten per cent That is the sort of bugaboo that the protectionists are holding up to scare the American people Look into it and see what a sham it is Poke it and it will be found not even stuffed with sawdust but inflated with a very malodorous quality of w dOur d-Our 2 per cent contemporary assures its readers that This is not a hypothetical case it has been done over and over a thousand thou-sand times but it is a fact which is studiously kept out of every Democratic Demo-cratic newspaper That is to say American manufacturers manufac-turers have been smashed over andover and-over a thousand times through being be-ing able to sell goods at the same price as they are sold abroad and make ten per cent profit on them the foreigner being so mad at the American Ameri-can profits that he has sold the same goods here at 12 per cent less than they fetch abroad and paid the exorbitant ex-orbitant tariff on them as well For I if that has been done over and over again so many times it must have i been under the tariffs which have prevailed pre-vailed through all those years being increased until they culminated in the McKinley enormity The foreign manufacturer must have made his pile of wealth on his exports in the same way that the old apple t woman made her fortune in letting her fruit go below cost By selling u so many ot tnem ac a tune ut course no Democratic paper tries to palm off such nonsense on the public You can only see it in the most lunatic of Republican Re-publican organs But our contemporary contempo-rary has not done yet Read this Then these newspapers which are so anxious to kill every manufacturing establishment in the United States and to build up the manufactories of the old world say there is no possible reason why the tariff should not betaken be-taken off and then they stop right there The nonsense in Its first quotation Is only equalled by Its spite in the last We do not believe there is a t ti q t newspaper in the country that is anxious to kill every manufacturing establishment in the United States Why should there be We are sure that the promoters of tariff reform can have no such desire It is worse than folly to charge them with it They want to take from the great masses of consumers 1 in the United States the burden which they bear because of the high tariff which enables monopolists mono-polists and corporations to pile up fortunes by charging the high prices which protection enables them to demand de-mand As to there being no possible reason why the tariff should not be taken off a little reffeclion will show that the Democratic party and its newspapers news-papers do not say anything of the kind because Ihey only ask for a reduction not for thabolition of the tariff The Wilson bill by furnishing raw materials free of duty and reducing reduc-ing the tariff on the menufactured article enables the American manufacturer manu-facturer to compete fairly with the foreign manufacturer and make good profIts without reducing wages That Is a plain proposition and to use the phraseology of our protectionist ob fuscator we can stop right there I |