The Montgomery advertiser., 1903-03-22

have boasted seven years agot hat it had | admirably accomplished its purpose. The | economic dream of Hamilton. Lincoln.
 and Blaine had become an acknowledged 1 fact. The people of he United States
 would compete with the world in the | manufacture of ai! staple products, ana | that with little or no prote sion. There | had been no general consolidation Of in- | terests to defeat oppsutfon. small man
 ufacturers could still do business tp the | open market. What are the facts today? | There Is no longer competition, either In
 production or in distribution. The intel | ligent independent citizen, without whom l no Democratic Government can survive,
 has been largely eliminated by combina-
 tions of individual capital. which have l crowded him aside. He is now, really or
 practically. only a clerk. His place has l been taken by gigantic organization in | restraint of trade. With a tariff to all
 intents prohibitory of outside rivalry and
 no home competition, such an organiza- | ton raises the price of all manufactures l from 30 to 50 per cent above fair and nor
 nal profit. Not content with this, it cap | of inflated securities which hang as a | constant menace over the financial and | industrial markets
 Today many staple articles manufac- | tured in the United States are sold as cheaply in England, Japan, or India. as | they are supplied to our people. Iron | rails have been shipped to England. re- | turned to the United States. paid the | E less than rails which have never left | the country. An iron manufacturer in- | forms me that he sells his surplus | abroad at cost, so that the prices may not be reduced by competition of these
 articles in the home market. By fair | price at home. he means a price that will | pay 90 per cent. net on his real capital or 10 per cent. on his stocks and bonds, | whose face value Is three times what the | property is worth. Competition under | the protective system is a dead letter.
 The American Workingman Showed Aside.
 | What of the American workingman, l whose welbeing was to be protected | against cheap foreign labor? Puritan | New England is no longer American. It | swarms with Italians, sBohemians. Poles | and miscellaneous mixed races, whose in l heritance of bad morals and bad govern | ment is a menace to democracy. In one | of the manufacturing cities of Connecti- | cut a leading manufacturer told me that | he largely supplanted American laborers | with Italians. He said that, though they | were treacherous they worked cheap. At | New Haven I saw twenty Slav working men escorted from the New York train, | all tagged and numbered, in care of an | interpreter who was taking them to some | smaller manufacturing town. I was in- | formed that such conveys passed through l there once or twice a week. In North | Adams. Mass, one hears all the lan- guages spoken from the Pc to the Bos- phorus. In Maine one may ride through miles of deserted farms to reach small
 manufacturing villages, whose inhabit-
 ants are chiefly French-Canadians. Pat
 erson, N. J.. is largely an Italian city. | Nearly every manufacturing town within
 a hundred miles of the Atlantic Coast Is overrun with lowclass European labor.
 most of which has been introduced within
 the last ten years. The Pennsylvania
 coal fields are filled with hordes of Slavs
 whose low intelligence and stil lower ct pH rA nf 1fNyfn tn hn
 margin of bare existence, and is rapidly
 brutalizing the social condition of the
 commonwealth. The coal magnates plain
 lively remark that there Is a surplus of
 labor in the coal regions. This surplus
 exists largely because 1t was brought
 there in defiance of the Contract Labor
 law, to supplant American labor and
 reduce wages. Of what value is the high
 tariff in supporting the standard of
 wages paid to American labor?
 The manufacturer has secured the eou-
 ble advantage of cheap labor and exorbi-
 tant prices for his products. The occa-
 tion whatever to the enormous advance in
 profits. All this points to the gradual
 absorption of the profits of the land by
 a handful of men. It means the up | growth of a class of working people to-
 tally unfit to ssutain our form of gov
 ernment It means the aggrandizement of small upper class. whose idleness al ready leads to the licentiousness and the . , its climax in certain Eastern cities. It is apparent, therefore. that Hamilton s
 dream of high-paid labor and high paid
 labor and high minded Iaborers has not , been realized under the protective sys- : tenn.
 , Agriculturists Not Reapirg Their
 Share.
 What of the agricIlturists and the nopma manufacturing classes resident in the
 Mississippi Valley? It may be admitted at once that times are now apparently good in that region. Why not? It con tains 6O.0OO,00O people. who produce three- quarters of all the natural wealth of the United States They have done well since the hard times, but they could have done better They have rec sived nowhere near the amount of profits to which their en- terprises and their natural resources en- title them. They are now waking to the fact that their energy produces the wealth
 upon which the commercial prosperity of the nation depends.
 Under the present tariff system they } pay exorbitant prices for manufactured . articles. but sell their own staples at . prices made in the cheapest markets of the world they must compete with the
 cheapest labor in the world Commer-
 cially, they are caught both coming and ! going While they have always sup ported protection, they now sec their for eign markets gradually closed against 2 them in retaliation for a tariff which shuts European ma nufa cturers oUt of the . markets of the United States One may | not have commerce without exchanging . commodities. It Is ridiculous to suppose that Europe will indefinitely submit to
 our present prohibitory tariff and still l give us free access to her own m rlyets