Democratic Northwest. [volume] (Napoleon, Ohio) 1869-1894, 1888-05-10
Facts for Wageworkers.

The strength of the high-tariff doe
trine, says writer in the Philadelphia
Record, lies chiefly in the blind ac-
ceptance by the workingman of the
arbitrary assumption that the tariff is
just and necessary, and accounts for
the fact that somewhat higher rate
of wages prevails here than in foreign
countries. Dissipate this error and the
doctrine of reform will gather converts
with such rapidity and profusion that
its opponents will scarce have time to
think ere they will be routed horse,
foot and dragoon.
do not pretend to be advancing any
thing new in these papers, but L am
trying to so present well-known facts
in such language as will make their
bearing upon the great question at
issue and the full significance of its
comprehension to the commonest un-
derstanding. Of the workingmen who
are foolishly victims of the insidious
fallacies of high tariff doctrines I ask:
Why is it if high tariffbe the secret of
high wages, that of all the countries in
Europe that one which has the least
tariff, which fully and absolutely dis
cards the so-called protective system,
pays very much higher wages than any
of the other? In every department of
industry the English emplOye is paid
at higher figure than is the employe
on the continent, at the same time that
British goods undersell home manu-
features in nearly every European
market. England pays higher wages,
sells cheaper goods, and yet between
1860 and 1875, according to the figures
of Sir John Lubbock, she increased her
population from 20, 100000 to 36,OO0,-
900, her exports from Gl65,00,000 to
e290, 900, 900, her shipping from 4,600,-
900 to 100000 tons, her savings bank
deposits from $40, O,000,0 900 to 100000, 900
and decreased her paupers from $4,000
to 100000, and her convicted criminals
from $4,000 to II, 900. Let workingmen
study these figures dispassionately and
without prejudice. No other European
country has made or can make so satis-
factory an exhibit, and what England
has done has been done in the face of
the fact that, between the same years
above mentioned, her imports in
creased from e21O, 900, 900 to e39O, ,OOO, 900,
or G49, 100000 more than her exports
Ii GIlC tlCISdSC tlttbIItS
of the high tariff men be as infallible
as they would have us believe, such an
excess of increase in imports should
and would have brought her to abso-
lutte ruin.
To be sure, we have read cable dis
patches recently ofa great army of un-
employed in London, and of the meet
ing of angry mobs of hungry men on
her streets, of collisions of these mobs
with the police, but such things are
the necessary and inseparable Incl
dents of the monster urban growth
London exhibits. The population of
that city is in an aggregation so vast
that the highest human wisdom would
not avail to keep it free of such upris-
ings. There isa point beyond which
cities may not grow-even in lands far
more favored by nature than England,
far larger and richer in proportion to
the people they must feed and clothe-
without involving just such problem
as that which the municipal authori-
ties of London are now facing, and the
wonder is not that that problem is
there to be solved but that it is not an
infinitely greater problem in every cne
of its features.
England. let the workingmen always
has no part or parcel with
the protective doctrine. All the other
European countries resort to it in
greater or less degree, yet the London
poor are no poorer and no greater in
number than those of other capitals
and metropolitan cities. while the
average workingman all over England
is better paid, better housed, better in
every condition, than his fellow in
France, Germany, or any of the others.
All the sophistries of which the tariff
men are capable cannot avail to balance
the force of this one fact as proof that
high wages or low wages are not con-
tingent upon high tariffs or low tariffs,
but come from causes often wholly in
dependent of tariffs.
Wages in the United States are
higher than those elsewhere because it
is a newer and richer country, because
it has no expensive royal family or
standing army to support, because of
the systems that make its people the
freest and most intelligent people on