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Show THE TARIFF. To Hon. John Sharp Williams of Mississippi, just elected chief of the Democrats in the House of Representatives, the protective tariff is Ihe sum of all infamies; he seems to have a hereditary hate of it, a hate so deep that no argument, no object ob-ject lessons of its results, have the slightest effect upon him. He takes the ground that its only purpose is to make a few rich men richer, and he will accept no reasoning that combats that idea. He must carry a pre-natal mark on his soul which, if it could take tangible form, would be a photograph of the anti-tariff plank in the constitution consti-tution of the dead Confederacy. The benefit of the tariff to the rich men who carry on the mills and factories of the country is, when the tariff is not oppressive, but a secondary benefit; the first benefit is to the employees who have to be paid first, and so soon as, through the tariff, enough manufactories are erected to make home competition, then the benefit is universal. Of course, this has been threshed over for sixty years in this country; there are no new arguments to be advanced on either side, but the facts are pronounced enough. One is that whenever free trade has been established es-tablished in any young and growing country, hard times and financial crises have swiftly followed. Another is that no article the manufacture of which the tariff first made possible, now costs nearly as much a S when it was imported. Another is that despite the wrongs which manufacturers sometimes perpetrate upon their employees, the employees in all manufacturing institutions in-stitutions in this country receive double the wages which men engaged in the same labor re- Moreover, the millions so employed in our coun- try are no longer competitors of the farmers, but ceive in the most generous country of Europe. on the other hand supply a mighty market t for the products of field arid range and orchard. Hon. Sharp Williams is conceded to be one of the very brightest, brainiest and most profound men in congress. But we have a suspicion that he has never yet patiently investigated the sigr nificance of money in national affairs; that is, how vital it is to a nation's prosperity to keep its money volume as much at home as possible; that the difference between manufacturing goods at home and paying for them, and having them man-ufactured man-ufactured abroad and sending raw material to pay for them is the difference betwc p perity arid ' stagnation and ultimate bankrupts After one hundred and' fifty y voif high', pro-tective pro-tective tariffs, after utilizing the steam engine and , building up more manufactories than all the world outside had, and covering the sea with her , jH ships, Great Britain, with her skilled workers and her mines and factories close to her seaports, sud- 'denly threw off her tariff laws, proclaimed the loveliness of free trade, and began to prey upon the world. She gave a bolt of cotton cloth for a bale of cotton, a bolt of woolen cloth for a bale of wool; a pair of shoes for a bale of hides; a string of beads for a bale of silk' and made bankrupt jH every nation that accepted her theory of trade, t H including her own colonies, for when'tKe raw-ma iH terial was not sufficient to pay her, she took the balance in cash or interest-bearing paper. She had the world in her grasp until the United States, by protected manufactories, began ;H to compete with her and through the railroads that the yield of the mines of the west made pos- fk sible, was able to lay food down in England fl cheaper than the farmers on their rented lands in fH England could produce it, and then the English agriculturist began to go to the wall. But to se-cure se-cure cheap food for her factory workers, Great I'l Britain clung to her free trade idea until, when the war in South Africa came and volunteers were called for in rural England, it was found that 'H through poverty, hope had died, the schools 'H were neglected and the fibre of rural English manhood had broken down. It was then that Mr. Chamberlain began to demand that such changes IH should be made in the laws as would permit Eng--lish farmers to get pay for their work, that hope might be revived in their souls and that they 'H might afford to send their children to school. The whole lesson is that when any nation ne-gleets ne-gleets the interests of any great portion of its j,H people, right there national decay begins. Had our government thirty years ago accep- jjH ted the policy which rules in Great Britain and H France and Germany regarding their merchant j B9 marines, by this time our country would be pretty til nearly dictating the trade of the world, but the Democratic party accepts England's free trade 'iH policy and ignores the means through which she 'H is the great shipping power of the earth. jH |