The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1912-10-11
SCORES POLICY OF PROTECTION
PROT. IRVING FISHER COMPARES STANDARD OF LABOR WAGES
 IN ENGLAND AND GERMANY
LABOR IS NOT PROTECTED
Fraud To Persuade Laborer That En- ployer Is Making Tariff To
 Help Him.

Prof. Irving Fisher, of Yale in a speech made yesterday at the Democratic chamber of tariff horrors, in New York city, compared the, condition of the wage-earner in this country with that of workers in England, Germany and France. He asserted that in free trade England wages were IT per cent. higher than in protected" Germany and 25 per cent. higher than in pro tected France. He also charged that the cost of living in Germany was about IT per cent. higher than in Eng land, making the actual difference in the purchasing power of a wage-earn CT some 40 per cent. less than in the free-trade country.
 He denounced a tariff for the pro lection of special interests as ''atroc- ious and as being doubly so when man believe that he is the one who is being protected. He said:
 &It is right and proper that we is a good way to raise money for the national government. But when the tariff is used for the purpose of pro- comes an atrocious misuse. It is doub1y atrocious when the special in terests try to make the workman be- lieve that he-tha worknan-is the man who is protected.
 But the advocates of protection put up another very pretty argument. They say that labor is benefted by protection, because protection makes factories and factories give worknen jobs. They say that if you reduce the tariff you will ruin many industries, and if you ruin these industries, all the men now working in them will be out of work.
 This argument sounds well, but it is wrong in every way. In the first place the tariff could be lowered a long way without ruining. any of the industries which are making this argu- ment.
 s'These trusts do not need protection against foreign goods imported into America. They are able, on the con trary to export their goods to Europe eign goods in their home towns. At the same time they charge much higher prices for the same goods to the American workman, and so raise
 "These trusts want protection, not because they need it to keep going, but because it gives them more pro- fits: to charge all the traffic will altogether, most of them admit, without reducing their business or the number of men they employ This for the steel industry, and by MT. Havemeyer for the sugar industry.
 Moreover, even if tariff reduction should, in some instances, destroy or hurt a few small hothouse industries which cannot get along without such artificial help, the result would simply be to shift the employment of labor from one industry to another.
 ITO get an increase of wages the laborer has to make demand for them and often to strike. If by dint Of these efforts, he gets at last higher wages, the employer is apt to reduce them again by importing for eign workmen free.
 'Tf the American workman was regulating our imports instead of his employer, what would he do? In stead of free trade in labor and a high tariff on the necessities of life, he would lower the tariff on the ne- cessities of life and have a protective tariff on the importation of labor.
 we have left out tariff to be set tied by the protected interests, who have paid the campaign bills of the Republican party, and these interests have arranged the tariff to suit them selves, and not to raise workmen's wages.
 ssNo greater fraud on the American public has ever been attempted than to persuade the laboring man that his employer made the tariff to help the laI1Orer.''