Show A VEW DAGGER TO AMERICAN MANUFACTURES From 5 to 10 cents a daythese are the wages paid to operatives in Chinese cotton mills The industries of the United States need protection not from Europe particularly but from the results re-sults of cheap labor in the Orient Should the ports of this country be thrown open free to the oriental manufacturers man-ufacturers the producer of raw ma terials would suffer alike with the American manufacturer Free trade with China and Japan would be ruinous ruin-ous to the United States and anyone who has watched the growth of indus tries in ithe Orient will sonn pirn that there is more to fear from the latter than from all the countries in the old world This is the opinion of a Mr Lee Hunt a gentleman who has recently returned re-turned from China Heretofore it has been claimed by the protectionists and demonstrated to their own satisfaction that the great danger that threatened the American laborer and manufac turer was the pauper labor of Europe I This danger having been shown to the people to be a myth it has become absolutely necessary to locate it anew And it has been located in far off Cathay When this danger shall have been driven from its lodgment l in China it will most likely take up its residence in the Congo Free State near the sources of the great African river Dislodged from there it will be necessary for it to wander about the worid as Solathiel does Can any rational man believe that a country that only pays from 5 to 10 cents a day to its laborers if such is really the case is going to become a rival in the commercial world of a nation noted for its intelligence and inventive genius If the history of civilization teaches anything it teaches I that reason and not brute force rules the world in all things The real paltriness pal-triness of China was shown in the recent re-cent ChineseJapanese war That a nation of such paltroojis in war can I threaten danger to a nation ia peaceful pursuits is sheer nonsense The great commercial nations of this world are the great fighting nations To prove this it is only necessary to name the United States England Germany and France Yet the very paper from which these remarks of Mr Lee were taken the Chicago TimesHerald sees a great danger to American industries in the Orient and it makes this absolutely absurd statement Shanghai China will soon become a manufacturing metropolis rivaling Lowell Mass and IManchester Eng land t Very soon Certainly not until the day comes when Macaulays New Zealander shall sit upon the ruins of London bridge and gaze upon that scene which the great reviewer so graphically described Having foretold the dangers from Chinese competition in manufactures Mr Hunt had to deliver himself of his views on silver This seems to be a sine qua non to every interview nowadays He delivered himself of his views on silver in the following language lan-guage When we exchange one of our silver sil-ver dollars for two Japanese yens each yen containing as much silver as the dollar we gave in exchange for the two then we discover that it is not the character of the metal we appreciate appre-ciate but the character of the government govern-ment that gave to our own dollar its reputation In the long run the greatest sufferer if the United States were to go to a free silver basis would be labor The immediate effect would be most severe on vested rights but in the everyday struggle 4 or bread labor would get the worst of it Ninety per cent of the foreign merchants in China and Japan would today oppose a change from their depreciated currency cur-rency to one of permanency and universal uni-versal value because their profits are largely the result of chc1T Vhv made the cheaper by paying the laborer in a depreciated currency Thi shows Mr Hunts great capacity for mastering financial as well as economical eco-nomical questions His views on the one subject are as sound as the other Let him speak again |