The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1894-02-04
AS CLEAR As MUD.

We will suppose that an American
manufacturer produces an article and
makes a profit of 10 per cent upon it,
and sells it then at the price which it
| brings in England or Belgium. There
IS tariff on the article which pre-
vents the shipping in of the article
! from the old world Suppose the
tariff is taken off and the Belgian and
/ Englishmen for d year ship that same
material into this country at per
cent less than it costs the American
to make it, what is the only result pos
sible? Is it not that the American
must close down his works or be
smashed?
That of course is from our local adj
vocate of protection and champion of
EicKinleyism. 1t is great at suppos-
ing but very small at substantiating.
If an American manufactures. can sell
goods at ten per cent profit and fur
nish them at the same prices as they
bring in England or Belgium, how can
the English or Belgian, manufacturer
sell them in this country at II per cent
below those prices? For, if the Ameri-
can manufacturer makes ten per cent
profit. the foreigner in order to bring
the goods down to . per cent below cost
must make them u per cent lower
than the American manufacturer sells
them for, and ship them here into the
bargain. What a wonderful mathema-
tician and logician is our high tariff
local contemporary!
That effort at figures is intended as
a reply to the query of The Herald as
to why the American axe and tool
trust should want to maintain the pre-
sent tariff on their manufactures,
when they claim to control the trade
of the world in their line of goods, and
now sell them cheaper in Europe than
they do in America. 1t does not an
swer the question at all, but as usual
our neighbor helps to prove the re-
verse of its own position
The tariff is put on, then. to prevent
the shipping in of the article from the
old world. Precisely. 1t is meant to
be prohibitory What for? Clearly to
prevent competition and thus enable
the American manufacturer to charge
high prices, and as in the case of axes,
to prevent the American goods sold at
a low figure in foreign market, being
shipped back to this country and sold
below the robber prices charged to the
American purchaser
How much need an American manu-
facturer fear being smashed" by the
importation of goods into this country
when he can compete with the foreign
manufacturer, sell them at foreign
prices and make a. clear profit of ten
per cent? That is the sort of bugaboo
that the protectionists are holding up
to scare the American people. Look
into it and see what sham it is!
Poke it and it will be found not even
stuffed with sawdust but inflated with
a very malodorous quality of wind.
Our 2 per cent contemporary assures
its readers that
This is not a hypothetical case; it
has been done over and over thou
sand times, but it is a fact which is
studiously kept out of every Demo-
cratic newspaper.
That is TO say American manufac-
turers have been smashed rover and
over thousand times" through be-
ing able to sell goods at the same
price as they are sold abroad and
make ten per cent profit on them, the
foreigner being SO mad at the Ameri-
can profits, that he has sold the same
goods here at u per cent less than
they fetch abroad and paid the ex-
orbitant tariff on them as well. For,
if that has been done over and over
again SO many times, it must have
been under the tariffs which have pre-
vailed through all these years, being
Increased until they eliminated in the
Mckinley enormity.
The foreign manufacturer must have
made his pile of wealth on his exports
in the same way that the old apple
woman made her fortune in letting
her fruit go below cost. BY selling
so many of them at time Of course
no Democratic paper tries to palm off
such nonsense on the public. You can
only see it in the most lunatic of Re-
publican organs. But our contempo-
rary has not done yet. Read this:
Then these newspapers which are so
anxious to kill every manufacturing
establishment in the United States,
and to build up the manufactures of
the old world. say there is no possible
reason why the tariff should not be
taken off. and then they stop right
there.
The nonsense in its first quotation
is only equalled by its spite in the
last. we do not believe there is a