The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1911-11-28

the IonoWIng question. Did not Pres ioent Taft say that his object was to oreah up the British Empire, and did not Ambassador Bryce give his assist anee? This thorough bounder, who IS believed in London to be one of the Hard" hooligans who howled down the prime minister last July, is faIsely held up as competent author fly by the Courant. He is far from it. He never got into parliament until 1903, and his chief distinction in life hitherto has been that he was once master Of the Shropshire F'oxhounds. He is sore to the raw, because under the budget, he and other large land owners like him, after exemption of their lands for century from tax alton, are at last to have their lands valued once in five years as they are Tn this country, and to pay the slight tax of two mills ont the dollar
 The fallacy of the Courant's argu- ment, when it praises MT. Hunt, that the low wages of railroad wOrkmen are due to free trade and would be in creased by high protective tariff is clear to any earnest student of econo- mics. It says, because the United States has protective tariff, there fore a protective tariff would make railroad wages rise towards the Unit ed States standard. The Courant nev- CT makes any comparison with the pro- tected countries of Europe. where it well knows that both railroad ein- ployes and all wage earners as a rule earn less per day and work longer hours than they do in Free Trade Englard. It also conceals from it readers two vital facts which vindi cate the policy of Golden and Bright, two noble English statesmen and two loyal friends of this country. These two facts supplement each other One is that the repor's of trade in Eng fircf nj he Ch that the volume of exports and i'm ports is much greater than ever before in England's history. Nineteen hun dred and ten was the banner year in this respect, but 1911 already has gone beyond that. The second ;s that Inc curve Of unemployment in England in October, 1911, touched the lowest point 1n any year on record. We do not think that the same can be said of the United States.
 The trouble with the railroad ~sys- tenn in England is that the great landowners, whose cause the Tory writer for the Hartford Courant de- lights to champion, has swindled the public in England just as the Hartford owners of the land for the approa cnes to the bridge have in some cases swim dled Hartford. But ten times worse. They milked the public .oth ways. They seldom, paid more than the mer- est pittance of tax on the real val ue of their land, but they sold it tc the railroads at fancy prices. The fig ures show that often in England the permanent way through open agricul- tural country, before a sod Was turn ed for grading, cost for strip mile long, twenty. thirty and forty thousand dollars.s When the Courant denounces the men who hell up Hart ford and advocates a law to prevent such injustice, it is pleading right eOus cause.
 Yet the prejudiced Tory writer is constantly. reviling MT. Lloyd George for his Limehouse speech, when the whole burden of that speech is the same righteous cause, advocated by the Courant in it's editorials on the tation will prove it. In speaking of some land owners in Wales who, had charged county council $10,000 per acre for land on which to build a police station when they had paid only fifty cents as the annual tax on that same acre, he said: "All we say is this: If their land is as valuable as all that, let it have the same value on the assessment book that it seems to have in the auction room."
 But the dislike of the welfare of the working people of England that this editorial writer has in common with Tory editors in England, is shown in his parrot-like repetition of the com mon <ridicule of the Liberals taxed food" argument or bogey, as the Tories call it. He laughs at it as good joke, denounces Golden, who spent his life in cheapening the cost of living to the working classes, and praises Bonar Law, who jauntily said six years ago that it only needed two bad winters to convert England to protec- tion, and who strove with all his might to continue for millionaires, like r, Duke of Sutherland, the same exemp- tion from just taxation of their vast estates which their ancestors had en- joyed for two centuries. It is lmma- terial to him that a four pound loaf of bread, made of wheat grown west of Chicago, costs in England practical ly one-half what it costs in Chicago, and that all wool suits made to order in London cost one-third what they cost in New York. To this writers soul, the noble utterance of MT. Ar thur Chamberlain, the noble brother Chamberlain, T would rather die than tax the food of the working classes is as a ''tale told by an idiot
 Enough has been said to show clear ly that this Tory editorial writer is, like Comus in his spacious arguments to ruin the lady in Milton's famous Masque. He blurs the mental facul- ties of his readers by concealing or distOrting the truth about the noble effort now being made in England by the Liberals to widen the privileges and improve the lives of the many, and at the same time to lesson the unjust privileges of the few. His sins against the truth are all the greater because he has before him in the Springfield Republicans editorials on English politics model of proper ex- position. These are judicial, we'll in formed, fair to both sides and thor oughly conscientious.