Democratic Northwest. [volume] (Napoleon, Ohio) 1869-1894, 1893-05-25
REFORM THE TARIFF.
The Democratic Party Should Knock on
Unearned Profits on Manufactures.

The Democratic Party Should Knock on
Unearned Profits on Manufactures.
The abnormally low prices of grain
and the ebbing markets for cotton, while
the prices of all manufactured goods are
kept at high water mark by class tariff,
make condition of things that cannot
last forever. The agricultural interests
of the United States and the interests
Immediately dependent upon and identi-
fed with them are strong enough to
overthrow any system that opposes them,
and sooner or later they will do it.
Whether the remedy shall come on
lines of conservatism and broad wisdom
or with the energy Of blind Samson de-
pends largely on the Democratic majori-
ties in the two houses of the Fifty-third
congress. If the Democratic party uses
the power intrusted to it to wipe out
class distinction in the tariff taxes, to
knock off unearned profits from manu-
factured goods and enhance the prices
of farm products by opening the mar
kets of the world to the west and south
to buy and sell in, the whole country
will be prosperous, and the Democratic
lease in Washington will be long one.
If this is not done, if the tariff is not
radically reformed in the interest of the
consumer and of wider markets for the
products of American farms, the only
thing certain is that the work of reform
will be turned over to rougher hands.
The election returns of 1890 and 1899 say
this much as plain as print.
Enormous as their yield already is, the
farm lands of the United States are not
half developed. The men who till them
are shut out by their environment from
recourse to the devices by which, in many
other industries, the output is kept down
and prices up. They follow natural law
in sowing and reaping all they can, and
their only way of salvation lies in find
ing purchases for all that they produce.
That is an ideal which may never be
attained, but the nearest approach to it
can be made only by giving everybody
chance to buy what they have to sell-in
other words, by throwing down the Chi
nese wall of protection and allowing peo-
pie who have anything that we want to
send it here and take our farm products
our chief exports-in exchange for it.
This was the principle of the Walker or
free trade tariff, under which the United
States throve as they never throve before
or since, and speedy return to that prin-
ciple is the only way to solve economic
and political problems that are becoming
graver than some wise men in Washing
ton believe.
The emotional era of American poll
tics is closed. The era at hand is of dol
lars and cents, and the problem it has to
solve is to keep mercenaries and para
sites from consuming the substance of
unfavored producers by juggling with
the treasury and the taxing power of the
United States.
This problem will be solved. 1t is for
Democratic member of the Fifty-third
congress to decide in the next few
months whether it is the Democratic
party that shall furnish the solution. If
the Democratic party is to do it at all,
it must before the close of the first regu-
lar session of the Fifty-third congress
enact into law the reforms that the peo-
pie voted on the 9th of November last.
It is not day too soon for members to
begin to think about these things.-St.
Louis Republic.