The Providence news. (Providence [R.I.]) 1891-1906, 1892-06-03
TO MINNEAPOLIS.


| two o'clock the Rhode Island delegation
to the Minneapolis Convention left this
city, by way of Woonsocket, Worcester
and the Fitchburg route.
Every step of the way will furnish its
eloquent reminders of the value of the
protectionist policy which the conven-
tion will endorse again in the most en-
phatic terms. From Providence, itself
mile of the beautiful river valley will
fit by without its tall chimneys, its
many windowed mills and its pretty
cottages. Worcester completes the
story. The Hoosac tunnel was dug and
blasted i'm the solid rock to furnish one
more outlet for the products of the east
to flow westward and for the crops of
the mighty west which in Washingtons
day it was the fashion to say would
never be inhabited by white men, to
flow east. Cohoes, with its mills and
Troy with its iron and linen factories snp-
port large and prosperous population.
Rome and Utica pass and Rochester is
reached. The flour city once, the flower
city now. Ii seems hard to realize the
change that has come over the country
since Southern Vermont, Western New
York, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota and
Dakota Were successfully the granaries
of the country. But for the tariff and
he -.
pire might not be SO completely thing
of the past.
Buffalo-famous as the home of two
Presidents, Fillmore and Cleveland.
Buffalo, city more than twice as large
as Providence, and supported in its
every brick and pane Of glass either by
manufactures or the carrying trade be-
tween East and West. It's emblem
canal boat, Buffalo is a standing monu-
ment to Dewitt Clinton, who would
have been a Republican if he hadn't
been born too early.
Here a long run through Canadian
soil will remind the delegates that
country with natural advantages almost
equaling our own, but not so long pro-
tected, and still in leading strings, has
five million souls where we have sixty,
and an insufferable burden of national
debt, while ours is being paid too quickly.
Detroit, the only old city one sees
west of Albany or Rome, has an anti
quarian flavor Ann Arbor has, in the
heart of the trackless woods of fifty
years ago, great university rivaling
Harvard and Yale. Grand Rapids is
the chief furniture making town in the
world, and Chicago = it takes ones
breath away-stands the Queen City of
our inland seas, with over million of
the most energetic people on the globe,
forever handing to the East the beef
and wheat of the West and to the West
the shoes and ginghams and worsteds of
the East.
Chicago is the focus of home markets.
More than New York, more even than
Washington, she is the typical city of
our civilization and the mighty proof of
the value of our commercial system.
Who eat the beef and pork? Europeans |
to comparatively small extent, Cen
tral and Southern Americans, thanks to |
Blaine and reciprocity, take rapidly |
increasing quantity Of our food surplus, |
but the most of it is eaten by Eastern |
saddlers, machinists, mill |
operatives and the tradesmen of hun
dred kinds. These in turn sell to the
West. The home market works both |
ways. 1t is secured to Americans by |
the American policy which the Mime
apolis convention will uphold, and which
the Chicago convention, in the very face
of the prosperity which it alone has
caused, will condemn.
One step more and the stupendous
twin cities, st. Paul and Minneapolis,
stand the keys of the Northwest. One
grinds the wheat, the other sells the
goods which pay for the wheat. They
are like the venous and arterial system
of the circulation of trade. They are
what Rochester and Albany were n gem
Grafton ago, bat grander and bigger and
finer and more enterprising than either
Rochester or Albany will ever he.
il is no wonder that with this pano-
ramic object lesson behind them the
delegates who go 10 Minneapolis, what
sl.tr