The Saint Paul globe. (St. Paul, Minn.) 1896-1905, 1897-09-18
ONLY Il PLuRIRUs uNUM.


apolis a few days ago and solemnly re-
solved to advance the price of lumber from
81 to 81 per thousand. The fellows in con-
gress who fought so hard to protect these few
money-bags, at the expense of the millions,
must feel very proud of their work. The out
rage is almost enough to condemn the gen
eral good accomplished by the passage of the
Dingley bill. A defrauded people demand
the early repeal of this internal blot upon
otherwise meritorious laW.-PreSton
Times.
While Halverson, of the Albert Lea
Enterprise, is now cooling to the lumber
barcns as gently as a sucking dove
and vowing that the tariff he denounc-
ed as an outrage is just the thing the
country has been hankering after for
years, Langum, of the Preston Times,
stands doughtily by his battery and
loads and fires at will, and he uses
no blank cartridges either. His col
league, Roverud, Of the CALIFORNIAN
Journal, is just now engaged in a bat
tie of words with George f. Potter,
Houston county's pantata and Jim
Tawney's most faithful and obedient,
whom Henry Castle once characterized
as 1.-The ubiquitous f1ea;" but when he
gets through with George f. and my
son Fred" We shall hear mis- guns
roaring in unison with Langum's I'M
less we mistake the quality of his
backbone
1t is encouraging, of course, when
Republican editors discover that
tariff for protection on one of the sew
eral thousand articles in the s2hed-
ules is an outrage that defrauds it's
victims, because it warrants the expec-
tation that, when they discover that
it is but a case of pluribus unum and
that the least of most Of them, they
will raise up their voices against the
whole noisome brood and the system
that breeds them. For many people
the tariff is like one of those puzzle
pictures in which, amid a tangle of
lines, one is to find the outlines of
cat or other animal. Gradually ore
and after a while the whole is seen,
and one wonders why it was ever in
visible. Langum sees the tail of the
cat now very clearly; in time he will
find the claws.
We say that this lumber tax is but
one outrage among many, and it is
the least of most of them. The aver
age value of our lumber imports last
year was 5000 a thousand. On this
valuation a tax of 81 IS nearly 20 per
cent. Assuming that the lumber bar
ons will take the full benefit of the
tax by increasing the price of their
lumber 81 a thousand, the consumers
will pay them a bonus of 20 cents on
every dollars worth of lumber they
buy. Now, if Langum regards the
compulsory contribution of 20 cents for
each 100 cents worth of lumber bought
as a fraud and an outrage-in which
we fully agree with him-what, we
would like to ask him, would he term
the similarly enforced contribution of
SIPS with each dollars worth Of glass
the consumer buys to admit light into
the house he builds with the lumber?
If 20 per cent is an outrage, where in
all the vocabulary Of our language is
the word that will fittingly character
ize the 126 per cent? What would he
call the 35 per cent allowed the nail
barons on the wire nails bought to
construct the building? Or what word
would he use to describe the 100 per
cent the same law allows the sugar
trust to exact from the consumers Of
that article of prime necessity? And
but the subject would exhaust the en-
tire schedules and nowhere, except dla-
monds, would we find an outrage so
moderate as is this lumber fraud. We
invite Langum's attention to the others
and would like his candid opinion OF
them after he has finished his inspec-
ton. We doubt not he will need
Century dictionary to aid him in ex-
,,raSSipc his Conclusions