Shepherdstown register. [volume] (Shepherdstown, Va. [W. Va.]) 1849-1955, 1888-05-11
MR.. WILSON ON TARIFF REFORM.

tives last Thursday. Below Will be
found summary of his remarks:
Mr.. Wilson said that the opponents
of the bill represented the issue TO be
between free trade and protection. 1t
was rather an effort of the people TO
recover the right TO tax themselves.
The rule that only those who paid
taxes should impose taxes was the
universal test of free government,
but after twenty-five years of protec-
ton, private interests were SO i'll
trenched in the tariff, and had so
public interests, that they
regarded it as their exclusive domain,
and resented the intrusion of the peo-
pie as that of trespassers. Six years
ago, when a demand came from the
country for reduction of taxes so
urgent that not even a Republican
Congress could neglect it, the chair
man of the committee of ways and
means came into this House, not with
a bill to reduce the peoples taxes or
stay the unneeded flow of their money
into the treasury, but with set argu-
ment TO prove that the peoples rep
were not capable Of franz
ing "a bill to tax the people. The Forty
seventh Congress yielded TO his argu
ment and humbly invited the protected
interests to make known their wishes
to Congress through a commission,
majority of whom they were permit
ted to select But privilege grows
with what it feeds upon, and even
rises to higher tones. The time was
when the test of loyalty to the country
was devotion to the Union i'll the
struggle for its preservation. Lately,
however, the country had been told
that even a Mcclellan and a Hancock
must be ranked as allies of the Con
federacy, because of their disloyalty
to a particular party; but in this de
bate a new test had been set up, and
we have heard the name of a citizen,
who stands before the world as the
foremost living representative of
literature, with long and
record of public service be-
hind nina poet whose words i'll days
past, like Luthers words had been
battles" for freedom connected with
that of Benedict Arnold, because he
would not bow down to the fetch of
protection.
He repealed Mr.. Burrows's criticisms
of the manner in which this bill was
saying that such criticisms
could not justly be made by those
who stood for the defense of the exist
ing law He said that while our tariff
rates were running up from Is to As
per cent. during the war and immedi-
ately thereafter, every interest that
wished to become parasite on the
people was permitted to dictate It's
own terms, and those terms still re-
The so-called revision of
1888 soon turned into a struggle be-
tween the captains of industry for an
increase of their bounties. and was
finally thrown into a secret confer
ence committee, where higher rates
We're given than either house had
dared TO vote in public, and was then
hurried through Congress without
being sifted or read. Suppose the
pending bill was prepared in secret
There was all the difference in the
world between a bill prepared i'll
of debate and examination in Con
gress and before the people, and "a
law made in secret and hurried on the
without anybody but the
conclave that made it understanding
its provisions.
He criticised the claim of the minor
ity that it had reduced taxes, and said
that whatever reductions had been
made had relieved property and
thrown the burdens on those least
able to bear them, SO that the tariff
could well say, Whoever else escapes
my eXactions, the poor | have always
with me-" There was nothing he
said that so veXed a genuine protec-
ZIONIST as a tax that went into the
treasury If he could not invent a
law for transferring a large part of it
from the pocket of the man who earned
it to somebody's pocket who did not
earn it, he wi ped it from the statute
book, and in this way alone had taxes
been lessened since the war. He de-
clared that as i'll the past, so now,
there was no craftsmanship in the
party. Each speaker, so
far as he gave any hint of his plan,
had different one.
Mr.. Kelley had called his Demo
cratic colleagues Bourbons, and then
almost Immediately said he would
deal with the surplus after the princi-
Piles of Colbert and his great pupil,
the Emperor Napoleon. But Colbert
was the minister of the chief of the
Bourbons, and neither Colbert nor
were teachers to whom the
citizen of free republic could turn
for instruction as to laying or eXpend-
ing taxes. 1t was Colbert who built
up his masters navy by claiming to
the galleys thousands of innocent citi-
zens, just as protection had built up
by claiming millions of
farmers and laboring men to its ser
vice. 1t was Colbert who defined the
art of taxation TO consist in so pluck
ing the goose as to get the greatest
possible amount of feathers with the
least possible amount of squalling
There never had been a more apt or
definition of protective
tariff.
Privilege had never released peo-
pie from its tribute without assuming
the role of Cassandra and prophecy
ng unutterable woes as the immedi-
ate consequence. Those who were
going to blot out the sun, moon, and
stars from our industrial armament if
this bill passed might quiet their fears
# they read a few chapters in the past
of England and this coun-
try When it came to dealing with
our own history, protection acted on
The rule of the Ohio politician, TO
claim everything. Whatever we had
gained in common with all other Ell
ightened peoples by our efforts and
theirs, by mans growing control over
the powers of nature, from the ad-
vance of science and of invention
whatever added wealth had come to
Us from the rapid settlement of great
the enterprise and industry
Of its people and its mineral and other
these it calmly pointed
out as its fruits, although it had moth
ing more to do with them than with
the motion of the planets and the
tides of the sea. But those things for
which it is chiefly or partly response
BILE it studiously ignores. 1t says
of the growing antagoniSm of
capital and labor, Of the twenty and
odd thousand strikes and the twenty
and odd hundred lockouts in our in