The Colville examiner. [volume] (Colville, Wash.) 1907-1948, 1909-05-08

colne 10 alexandra. overthrow Scraps, eaftf
and heavens would lapse into original chaos.
One day mob of riotous Christians defyine
the priests, challenging those pagan prophecies
sent Scraps topplng. The earth stood firm the
skies remained Only horde of rats rushed from
the statutes base.
Tariff ~ protection the modern Scraps.
Each campaign, and in the months between, we
are told of what destruction will descend if we SC
much as disturb even tariff top rail. Some day
we shall see. Fear not! 1t will be but to repeat
the old, old Alexandria story of Serapis No one
will suffer disturbance save what horde of gray
whiskered paunchy old rats of protection have
had for so long their holes and secret places about
the tariffs base.
Certainly, this great day is years away Just
now an implicit majority of the people believe that
tariff and prosperity" are synonyms, and that
man grows richer in precise proportion as he is
taxed. By the way, how we in our thickness
would have warmed the cookies of Machavelli's
heart!
There can be no better illustration of what pro-
tective tariff does, and ought not to do than the
story of the Sugar trust The Havemeyer Sugar
enterprise is now more than century old. 1t
didn't discover that it was an Infant Industry -
and would perish without 'protecton, ," until after
it had seen it's 60 years. | am inclined to less
patience with the public than with the Have
meyers The public is the author of it's own trust
eaten ills In our own hands we carry the remedy.
Our failure to apply the and correct the other
is to be laid at own door, Impatience is the born
foe of sympathy, and confess to scant pity for a
public that does so little for itself Indeed we as
a public do worse than nothing, since it is by our
invitation, expressed in our laws, that the trusts
as l write this grind us under their feet We
have bowed our necks to the yoke, placed the
driving goal of power in their hands. All of which
is as though banks furnished burglars with Jim
mics and similar cracksmen tools gratis or
bounty were paid footpads for every pocketbook
they took.
Death and taxation are of such even emphasis,
and sit so together in the general mind, that one
finds them arm in arm in proverb | should say
that taxation, as the frequent cause of the other,
is the more balefully important of the two. Four
fifths of all history swing hinges of taxes The
first Charles lost his head because of taxes. The
French revolution was born of taxes. Our own
revolution confessed similar source.
Taxes have had 40 fashions. There have been
hearth taxes, window taxes, chimney taxes ('smoke
farthings"). There are poll taxes and income
taxes and tariffs. And the most vicious, because
the most nsidious and most hungry, is tariff.
Come to man at noon and in front and while he s
awake and he'll submit to but little bood-letting.
Come at night, come while he sleeps come like
the vampire bat, and you may have what measure
of his blood you will And so with tariff that
vampire bat of taxes. 1t fans a slumbrous public
with cooling wing, pretending to give more than
it takes. 1t huns lullaby of Protection, -
promising strength while bringing weakness.
Finally. by stopping one artery of commerce to
abnormally swell another, tariff C'protection")
produces as an incident more disastrous by 20
fold than the tax itself, those trade cancers, the
trusts. Also it is from these last we have our
Carnegies, our Havemeyers, our Rockefellers,
our Morgans, our Schwabs, our Stillmans, our
Harrimans, our Ryans, and what others make up
our Yankee royalty and rule America
Tariff produce trusts? | have the Havemeyer
word for it, wrung from that Sugar king with a
resentful roar as the red hot iron of investigation
scared him.
This was what Mr.. Havemeyer said or rather
shouted on that probing occasion decade and a
half ago: 1T is the government, through its
tariff laws, which plumbers the people. The trusts
are merely the machinery for doing it. The true
Communion of Pelf' is the customs tariff bill.
It says to the people: Here is the law we have
enacted for your robbery. Do not complain of it.
Steel rails were exported, at the time the steel
schedule was under discussion and about being
voted for, to England, where they can be produced
at Sis ton. Here they are worth $24. The rails
are sold here for $24 ton, and the people, under
the tariff, are mulcted the difference. l have got
Carnegie and can quote him, that he can export
steel rails to any part Of the world. What does he
want tariff for? am not talking about things
that are ancient history l am talking about the
anfnauu of the tariff of todn arhich is The aather