The Forrest City times., 1891-01-16
TARIFF LETTERS TO FARMER
 BROWN.
No. 1..
Dees a Tartn Restrict Foreigr Trader

DEsS N AArth HNeNiTlCt FOFetEN lFaueF
 BEAR FARMER BRowN: The question which put at she head of this letter rlay seem to be an entirely needless one; since most intelligent men, whether pro tectionists CT tariff reformers, are agreed 9hat protection does restrict i'm portation, and moss of those accepting this conclu- sion agree also that the restriction of importation must necessarily, in the long run, restrict exportation. I say the question may seem needless one. but when l take up the protectionist jour nals and see what they are trying to teach the people, and when l read the utterances of their leading men, l can not regard the question propounded as being unworty of treatment in these let ters.
 Alas what confusion there is in the camp Of the protectioniStsl Some of their leaders blow hot while others blew cold, and still others blow both het and cold at the same time. Protection raises prices and lowers prices; is given to the farmer under the pretense that it will eLable him to sell his products. more prottably, but when giyed to the manu- facturer the farmer is told that protec- tion lowers prices. Some tell us that imports are hindered and may be pre- vented; others tell us that protection does nothing of the kind.
 Two such eminent protectionstS as President Harrison and Mai. Mckinley are not agreed as to the simple question whether q tariff dminishes imports. In his speech in the House of Representa- tives on the 7th of last May, Mckinley combated the opinion of the Democratic minority of the Ways and Means Com mi that tho JrnnASah to rf not reduce the revenue. saying: "The very instant that you have increased the duties to h fair protective point, putting them above the highest revenue point, that very instant you diminish importa- tions, and to that extent diminish the revenue" This is very clear and true proposition, Upon 1t Mckinley proceed ed to reduce the revenue by increasing taxation, and thus in so far to prevent the people from buying the things which they want.
 On the other hand, when President Harrison came to write his message to Congress he found that the imports at the port oi New York for the first three weeks of November were actually greater than for the corresponding periods in 1889 and in 1888; and he called attention to this singular fact with evident satis- faction as showing that "the prohibitory effect upon importations imputed to the act is not justified" But the President was too nasty in his conclusion that the Mckinley law is not reducing importa- tion. Taking as an example the dry goods schedules, in which the increase of duty was relatively much greater than in other parts of the tariff, we find that for the two weeks ending December al, hn .,-tg nt Nax l..x xsa 959, 33s worth, against S5, 376, 641 for the corresponding two weeks in 1889, or difference of sl,f17. 3o3. When the President wrote many manufactured goods were still coming in from orders sent off before the new tariff law went into operation, with the expectation that the goods would be landed be- fore tho eXpiratonof the old law The goods did not get in in time to avoid the extra Mckinley tax, and there was thus no longer any motive to hurry them in.
 If, however, it should turn out at the end of the fiscal year that our imports have gone on increasing, will this fact prove that the Mckinley law has not re- Strictod imports? Our population con tnued to grow during the four years of the war; can any sane man claim, there lore, that the war did not diminish the population? The thousands who fell on the battletields were not so many as the children that were born at the same time, Yet we know that the war caused loss of population, and this loss was revealed in the census of 1870 in the relatively lower rate of increase for the previous decade than in the earlier decades.
 You arc not a horse-racer. but yo>. know what handicap is. When one horse Is lighter or swifter than it's com petltor it is sometimes agreed to handi- cap the former. A certain quantity of lead is fastened to the saddle in order to diminish tho speed and give the other horse chance to win. Now if the handicapped horse wins the race. not witstanding that it lis weighted with lead. who but fool would claim that the handicap had not lcssened it's speed? Yet 1t is such monstrons claim as this that the protectionist sets up who claims that the tariff does not diminish imports.
 Such claim was made in the latest number of the AD,erican Economist, the organ of the Protective Tariff League, in an article entitled sDoes Protective Tariff Curtail Foreign Trade?s It's answer to this question is, .Nsver