The Alaska citizen., 1911-02-27
WAS A WAR MEAS
 URE.

corporations who receive the unjust and unfair benefits have always re sorted to any kind of an argument
 no matter how inconsistent in order 10 befog the public mind as to the real facts The system of a tariff for protection had it's birth dur | ing the civil war: and il was only as a war measure that it could ever 1 have gotten planted at all in this | country When the first high tariff measure was presented to congress ! during the war. congress promised i the people that il would be removed i Immediately upon the termination of | the war. stating at the same time | that ii was only on account of the 1 extraordinary expenses of the gov ernment that such tax upon the consumer could be justified, and | they appealed to the patriotism of the citizens to bear temporarily with { the unjust discrimination. and the people periodically submitted to it i justifying the action as a war meas ure. No one that advocated that ! first war tariff in congress had the hardihood to argue to the people that il was just measure in any sense IL was conceded by all that it was unjust in every respect, but argued that it was only as temporary arrangement that it was justified because through il they would raise the funds to pay the cost of keeping the flag floating over the united nation. Upon no other condition of circumstances could the terrible system ever have been engrafted into our laws
 Have the promoters of the sys- tenn kept faith? On the contrary
 it has been systematically increased and widened from that day until the adoption of the Payne-Aldrich tar if. the most damnable of them all. And they have worked the system by first one argument and then an other at right angles with it. Inn mediately after the war was over, and the public mind was still en- of tariff simply slipped hy. It was overlooked and the thieves who were getting tribute from their fellow man immediately began to intrench himself in his unjust position. The government gave him a monopoly which enabled him to lay tribute up from him a portions of what he earned by the sweat of his brow, and he waXed fat and became powerful and soon all of these leeches got together and entered the political field, and got control of the great Republican party that had it's birth on account of chattel slavery and have used that party ever since as the means of collecting tribute from all of the citizens, not one dol of whicl it ever earned It was quite easy to keep the Republican party in power for considerable time after the close of the war. The common people quite naturally sup ported the party that abolished slavery and preserved the union. By appealing to the patriotism of the people on account of those accom- plishments. these beneficiaries of the tariff system succeeded for time in keeping an issue from being made on the tariff thievery. But finally it was forced to an issue and the older ones of us well remember that those devils first met the issue by arguing that by means of tar if they compelled the foreign shipper to pay our taxes. They stood squarely upon the position that the consumer did not pay the tariff, but that the foreign shipper did. They did not attempt to meet the issue that the foreign shipper did not pay the tariff on goods that were made at home upon which the tariff was paid directly to our man. ufacturers. They passed that issue up and shouted from the house tops that We were making the Euro pean shippers pay our taxes for us, and together with the blOOdyshirt argument they won and thereby made the proposition of high pro tective tariff the fundamental prin- ciple upon which the Republican par ty stood After that the falicy of the foreign shipper paying the tariff was completely exposed and those devils come up smiling and say, yes we admit that the foreign ship pers do not pay the tariff, but you see that unless this high tariff is kept on, We will have to close our factories. Our factories are infants and they must be nourished until such time as they can be weaned;
 and by this argument won again, and succeeded in keeping the tariff so high that they collect hundreds of millions of dollars per annum over and above what they claimed they needed to keep the infant alive.
 The next time they had that skill