The weekly democratic statesman. [volume] (Austin, Tex.) 1871-1883, 1877-04-19
THE COMMERCIAL FREEDOM OF
TEXAS CITIES.

TEXAS CITIES.
New York importers are beginning
to complain that goods are frelghted
through from Europe to Chicago, GIN
cinnsti and st. Louis more cheaply than
they can ship them from New York to
the Western cities. The reason of this
is obvious. as it no longer obliges the
Western, either wholesale or retail,
dealers to pay tribute to the New York
middlemen. Thus New York dealer
in soda ash, which is one of the arti-
cles upon which this "nefarious inno-
Vation" has been practiced, says: eff
a man living two hundred miles this
side of Chicago wants soda-ash it is
cheaper for him to go to Chicago and
buy it, as the Chicago merchant can
sell as cheaplY as 1 can, and thus the
country buyer saves in freight. For
merly It would have paid him better to
come to New York" Northern tact
AID shrewdHess takes advantage of the
slightest, most trivial differences in
freight rates to win local commercial
independence. Chicago and St. Louis,
through agencies above defined and
through the bonded warehouse system,
to become operative in Austin when
the custom house and postoffice build
ing is constructed, hasten to free them
selves from the cost of supporting
New Y York and Boston. If the Northwest
can do this, when its route to the sea
is defined by costly railways, how in
finitely easier the liberation of the
South from this commercial thralldom
70 the East2 Now, however, railways
bear everything from Southern and
Western cities. European consumers
can only reach US through New York
and Boston. If every other port on
the Atlantic were effectually block
AIDED, the supreme taxing power OF
Boston and New York, operative upon
everything that we buy and consume,
could not be made more univer-
sal, more remorselessly exacting or
more terrible. The Grangers talk
piteously of "middle men" never
dreaming of "middle cities" infinitely
more ruinous than impotent individ-
uals who at least have the virtue of
expending profits among the people
whose folly creates these profits. 1t
costs hardly more to send bale of
goods from Liverpool to st. Louis ola
New Orleans, if the Mississippi were
open, than from Liverpool to New
York, and yet st. Louis and the South
persist not only in bending before the
political power of New York and New
England and of two parties organized
to give supreme commercial and polit-
lcal power to the East, but we de-
nounce those who seek to reform these
systems maintained confessedly for the
purpose of plundering States and cities
of the South. Tilden and Seymour
and Greeley and Mcclellan, New York
ers, were set up by that commercial
power which controls the course of
political events In New York, and
while we preferred Tilden to Hayes
because of his political liberalism,
Hayes, as a commercial fact, is to be
preferred by the Southwest to any
New York speculator in Wall street
gold and bonds or Broadway dry
goods. We are fed and fat
tened and stuffed with parti.
san and sectional passions and
prejudices and hates, while New York
shapes the course of railways, appro-
PIRATES those endowed by Texas for
Texas and for the South, and compels
the whole country to buy aud sell
everything in Philadelphia, Boston
and New York. We need political
and local freedom sadly enough, but
no more than we need commercial free
dom and an open, direct way to Eu-
rope on the one hand and Asia on the
other. Depositories for the wealth of
the Old World might as we'll be found
on the Gulf and Southern as on the
Northern Atlantic coast. 1t is quite as
easy for US 10 enrich sea coast cities
here as in hyperborean regions. But
we rush madly and passionately into
the embraces of partisans, who use our
sectional and party prejudices to SUBJ
ordinate our cities and railways to
their own commercial purposes and in
terests. We give everything and espe-
cIally our invaluable votes and loud
hurrahs, and get less than nothing.
We have cities on the sea coast, but our
railways, till Morgan seized the Cen
trail, are all employed to turn away
from Texas and from the South the
wealth ana commerce OF Iexas. UaI-
las and Fort Worth and Austin are
vsssals of New York, and We pay
New York commissions and profits
and needless and enormous railway
charges from New York to Austin,
when We have the sea beating against
the coast of Texas as if free commerce
were knocking vainly at the doorway
of the commonwealth and soft breath
ings from the sea were whispering of
our folly. Therefore, jefferson Davis
devotes himself to the purpose of in
ducing foreign wealth to construct
steamers of double keels, drawing
only 16 feet of water, that these, en-
teriHg the Mississippi and never break
ing bulk, may land at st. Louis. The
consummstion of such purpose would
be the commercial and political free
dom of the valley of the Mississippi,
and he who achieves this end will be
honored above men and spoth eosized.
AND now comes Jonathan Randolph
Tucker, the hair-sphtting professor Of
logic in some Virginia college and in
Congress, and tells rs that ''the Demo