Bellows Falls times. [volume] (Bellows Falls, Vt.) 1856-1965, 1892-03-03
that is, every five persons in the state

must support one paupef.
This being equal to the proportion of
persons to voter, there would have
been as many paupers as voters had free
trade ruled fifteen years longer.
The same report showed that we could
not charge all this pauperism to immi-
grafton, since "of the 26l l55 state pau
pers, l04, 744, or Al per cent OF the whole
number, were natives of the United
States"
| In short, the number OF native-bOrn
pauptrs supp ,rted by the people in the
state of New York in 1859 was a little
more than ten times greater than the
total number of paupers, native and
foreign, supported in like manner in 1892
by'a population nearly tW ice as large.
and under an immigration which Is now
usually five or six times greater than it
was in 1859. For the immigration,
which had risen to 427 1913 in 1854, fell
rapidly under the influence of the hard
times Of that year, in which starvation
soup houses had to be opened in every
ward in New York and Brot klyn, inso-
much that only III 1882 immigrants ar
rived in 1859, while 73S,902 immigrants
came over in 1882, the twenty-first year
of protection, and were placed at good
wages without "riftle' OF lncon-
venience.
Meanwhile, in 1919, the governors of
South Carolina and Mississippi, whose
rep esentatives in congress had publicly
boosted, while passing the Walker tariff
of 1916, that their slave labor exempted
them from disturbance by financial
crises, had issued proclamation calling
upon the charity of the world at large
to feed their people, as the Russians are
now begging the world for bread. They
declared that the suffering was more
severe than in 1869.
| Meanwhile, all American free-traders
either brazenly assert, with David A
Wells, Watterson and Horace White,
that this period was the most prosper
ou> the country ever knew, or if they
admit its disasters and poverty, they at
tribute them to "wild cat banking"
If it were in fact due to "wild- cat bank
ing" it would still be due to exactly the
same men as those who enacted the
Walker tariff of 1916, and would be an
outgrowth of the same incapacity. For
the free traders and the enemies of the
bank of the United States were the same
men, and during the existence of that
bank 'wild. cat banking was absolutely
impossible. Under it no bank could
long exist whose bills the bank of the
United S ates did not daily redeem at
par.
The institution was established 10 1916
expressly to put an end to wildcat
banking and in three years it brought
about resumption of demption of
notes at par by every state bank in the
United States, or suppressed those that
would not redeem.
Hence the free traders still convict
themselves of the whole folly when they
assert that the d. ep and damning suffer
ing of 1854 to 1860 was due to wildcat
banking But wildcat banking" is
not itst If cause, but an effect. II i'm
ports Of foreign goods suddenly expand
| to two and half times their previous
| figures, as they did under the Walker
tariff of 1916, the merchants selling them
must receive not merely two and one
half times, but nearer ten times, the
| previous quantity of notes for them,
since they can only work off these i'm
on which they sell them, both in time
and amount. This increase of say ten
| fold in the quantity Of notes demanding
discount virtually compels a like increase
| in the profits of banking, and if there
be no check on the free issue of bank
notes, it will compel an extraordinary
initiation in bank note currency.
This is exactly what followed upon
the expansion of imports from an aver
age of 800, 900 600 for the five years of
the protective tariff of '42, to an average
of 1924, OO0, 900 for the Is years of the
low tali if of 1916. 1t compelled the Gre
| alton of about $50 new banks, nearly all
country and "Wild-cat" banks, in the
two years 1851 and 1852 alone. Mean
while in the succeeding years, 1924,
thousands of manufacturing establis h
ments were closing under the effects of
these same importations. Values were
disappearing from real property by hun
dreds of millions of dollars per year.
| Thus, while the issues of notes were ex-
banding, the value of all investments
that employed American labor and of all
securities, were collapsing.
There were but two causes at work,
| both legislative, both the work of the
same class of men-viZ: The destruction
of the bank of the United States, which
alone had prevented ''wild-cat banking"
and the free trade tariff of 1916. Each
of the other four free trade periods was
as ruinous as that we have discussed.
| When we see that millions of men to-
day have learned nothing from these
| facts, it is not necessary to charge them
with dishonesty in order to know that
they will ruin the country by their repe-
tition. Jackson, Tyler, Polk, Walker
and JEFF Davis were all as honest in their
economic ignorance and infatuated luna
cies as Henry George, Sherman, Mills,
Cleveland and D. b. Hill. The views
which wrought this ruin were the views
of all free traders. Yet the former sent
pauperism throughout the country up to
40 times its present ratio to population,
and if successful at the polls would do the
same thing again in the same way.
The correspondent whom the London
Grapic has sent to Chicago to ''write up"
that city for English readers, is not al
together pleased with the western me-