New national era. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1870-1874, 1872-04-18

/ Gradually the people in employment will be
discharged, as cheap goods from Belgium,
France, the ZOllverein, and Great Britain
crowd the more costly domestic goods out of
the market. I query, sir, whether the me-
chanics of the United States will call that
| priye them of a market for their skill and la
Dor, the only property they have to sell.
| viii they not rather regard it as foreign
monopoly?
And then, what? Then will begin con-
traction, sir, contractian such as Congress
could not inauglTate by direct financial legis-
lation. And why? During the last eleven
years, under protective tariff, with the du-
ties increased by the difference between paper
and gold, our industries have expanded, and
the increased cost of articles to the consumer
has largely gone in increase of wages to the
laborer. Our laborers are not incident, or
dissolute, or drunken. They know the value
OF home. They cherish wife and children.
They dream of leaving behind them a little
home in which the widow and orphan children
shall be donliciled after the dread summoner
shall have called them hence. And to secure
this they make timely provision. Go to the
savings banks OF New England, New York,
New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or of the Western
States, where cheap lands tempt to another
form OF investment, and YOU will find that the
than the entire volume of greenbacks. 1t is
now invested by the savings banks in bonds
and mortgages on real estate, in Government
loans, and the loans of corporate COMPANIES.
III these deposits should be withdrawn. as
they must be when an influx of cheap foreign
goods shall deprive our laborers of work.
mortgages must be called in, bonds must be
sold, and the commercial classes who will be
simultaneously called upon for heavy pay
ments, and deprived of usual bank accommo-
datlons, will feel the effects. The working
people OF this country have on deposit nearly
four hundred million dollars. Compel them
by throwing them into idleness to draw upon
their reserve, to eat up their deposits, and
where will your capitalist or your business
men get the money with which to conduct
business, now derived from savings banks, or
ma paying market for heavy impOrtations
Congress cannot by any other means compel
such contraction of bank loans as would
occur in one year if it should deprive the
laboring people of work in the mines, fac
tories, FORCES, and furnaces of the country,
and throw them upon their deposits in the
savings banks.
The gentleman from Indiana may say his
bill does not involve such consequences. |
say that it does; and therein 1 express my
opinion honestly as he expresses his. And
as proof OF the correctness of my position |
cite the experience of the periods to which !
have referred. l cite Ireland as a perpetual |
witness, and Turkey as another. India fur |
nishes perhaps still more striking proof that |
free trade is but another name for British |
Ireland has enjoyed free trade,
and what is she? Where are her eight mil |
lions OF people? In 1910 they were happy |
upon the green isle. All, sir, one million of |
them went to the grave from starvation and |
mo dor 60 L., 4
other millions have fled, and the takers
OF the last census found little more than five |
millions OF them upon the island. Turkey A.. |
Why, sir, the system under which Turkey has |
been made the sick man of Europe, and is
kept in condition which allows no conva-
is tender to her people compared |
with that which the gentleman from Indiana
would intict upon us. Turkey imposes eight
per cent. taxes on her products and levies
eight per cent. protective duties and there
she is, the helpless dependent of Great
Britain, who has shaped her legislation for
half a century. The gentleman, while grudg-
ing eight per cent. protective duties, would
$l40, 900 of internal taxes,
would impose high duties on every element
Of life and manufacture that we cannot pro-
duce, and would reduce to revenue stand
ard, >" as he calls it, the duties on all things
that we do produce. In his own emphatic
language, he would protect nothing - no.
sir, not even the right of the American Ia
borer to home and food!
If it be true that the duty on coal, which
produces 100000 year, imposes, as he SAYS
It does, tax of slS,000,0 900 on the people,
there is worse hardship imposed upon the
miners Of that coal and other laborers by the
duties paid Oh agricultural products; for /
lind by examining the tables that in order to
get 81 ,O55, 295.SO into the Treasury by duties
on wheat, rye, oats, Indian corn, barley
buckwheat, and potatoes, we pay to the
farmers, according to the gentleman's theory,
q deny the theory IN toto, and denounce it as
false, fallacious, delusive,) a bonus on those
seven articles ofsl79, 1886 1851 81. How could
the gentleman's argument be more effectually
reduced to an absurdty?