The Saint Paul globe. (St. Paul, Minn.) 1896-1905, 1897-05-10

through abuse and oppression, against
which the whole world cries out in
horror
OUR GREE BREAKFAST TABLES"
When, twenty-five years ago, the Re-
publicans, controlling congress, felt the
inconvenience of having too much
ternal revenue, they enacted the ''lit-
tie tariff bill' of that year which en-
larged the free list and made many
other duties 80 per cent Of the former
rates. 1t was during the debate on
this bill that Sherman, Allison and
other senators and representatives ex-
pressed those opinions favorable to free
trade as an ultimate end which have
risen from their slumbers in the Rec
ord to perpleX them since they surren-
dered to the campaign money power
party to free trade. Then it was the
favorite boast of their papers and
speakers in ensuing campaigns that it
was their party that had given the
good people of this country free break
fast tables by removing the taxes on
tea and coffee. Eighteen years later
the Mckinley bill added unrefned
sugar to the freedom of the breakfast
tables, and, although the sugar thus
set free Of tax was of a quality any
farmer would be 10th to sweeten swill
US of the beneficence of this guardian
of the public in thus further freeing
the tables of the morning meal from
tax.
Now, however, the senate, securely
manipulated by Hanna to insure the
passage of tariff bill, reverses the
process and begins to enslave the
breakfast tables of the country. The
process begins at the primary function
and increases the tax on the coal used
to prepare the meal to IS cents ton,
and takes anthracite coal from the free
list, so as to make either kind Of coal
pay tribute, always a badge of serf-
dom. The pottery and glassware used
by the cook and on the table get a
larger tax laid on them, while the ia
BILE cutlery is swathed in one of the
most adroitly drawn schedules in the
list, cunningly designed to conceal the
increase in the tax. While coffee is
not taken off the free list, being held
back to form the trading stock of the
reciprocity attachment, those morning
meals that provide tea as the beverage
will have 10 cents added to the cost
of each pound of tea bought. But the
fact that in this country the habit is
to have tea for the noon or evening
meal, or both, makes the matter only
the worse, for it deprives not only the
breakfast, but all the tables of the
day around which the family gather to
break their fast, Of freedom.
Then all these tables, from break
fast to supper, are made tributary not
only to the treasury, but also to that
other silent partner of the government,
the sugar trust, in a manner that full
ly corroborates the prediction made by
Wellman of the Times erald, when
the sugar schedule was made by the
house committee. He noted that the
trust made no effort to get what it
wanted in the house, but would wait
until the bill got into the senate,
where it knew what it could do. There
it's deputy from Connecticut, Mr.. AL
drich, aided, We may we'll believe, by
the adroit Mr.. German, so deity ar
ranged the graduation of taxes to the
degrees of polarization, Supplementing
them with an ad valorem tax of 35
per cent, that the trust feels that it's
interests have been properly taken care
of. But where, in this whole scheme,
from inception to finish, do the free
breakfast tables of the country come
in?
NO MORE JOBS LIKE THAT.
A Minneapolis paper discussing the
paternalistic proposition of the Pioneer
Press that the federal treasury bear
the expense of erecting one big dam
between here and Minneapolis, instead
of two small ones, to provide water