Harrisburg telegraph. [volume] (Harrisburg, Pa.) 1879-1948, 1914-05-27
WEDNESDAY EVENING

WEDNESDAY EVENING
and his associates gave them change,
but they are still far from salts
fed and they are now ready for an
other change return to the sanity
of Republican administration. Dis
tress inevitably follows Democratic
tariff tinkering. This is not the first
case of the prostration of the industries
of Pennsylvania through the theoreti-
cal foolishness of free trade expert
ment. Older men remember the un-
fortunate experiences of other Demo-
cratic experiments and now the young
er men are feeling the pinch of condi-
tions resulting from the anti-protec-
tion tariff.
Horace Greeley in the New York
Tribune of January 10, 1855, gives a
pen picture of that period, so true,
so vivid, that it is one of the unfor-
gettable passages in the English Ian
guage:
Who is hungry? Go and see. You
that are full fed and know not what
1T is to be hungry-perhaps never
saw a hungry mango and see. Go
and see thousands, men and women,
boys and girls, old and young,
crowding and jostling each other,
almost fighting for a first chance,
acting more like hungry wolves
than human. beings, in, a land Of
nVn kt..rx tr
for distribution. Such scene may
be seen every day between IL and 2
o'clock around the corner of Orange
and Chatham streets, where charity
gives dinner to the poor, and soup
and bread to others to carry to
their miserable families. On Satur-
day we spent an hour there at the
hour OF high tide. We have never
ward of a thousand people were fed
with plate Of soup, a piece of bread
and piece of meat, on the prem
ises, and in all more than sixteen
hundred.
There was much more of that vivid
picture from the pen of Greeley and
all this was prior to the financial
cataclysm of the autumn of 1857, when
the successor to the tariff of 1S46 was
only few months old. That panic,
which men of business held to be a
direct result of years of tariff for rev.
enue only, began in September. Presi-
dent Buchanan, in his first message to
Congress on December s, 1857, was
not yet willing to hold the new tariff
law accountable for the fearful dis
aster with which he was confronted
but this is what he said:
In the midst of unsurpassed
plenty in all the productions and
elements of national wealth. we find
our manufactures suspended, our
enterprises of various kinds aban-
doned, and thousands of useful
laborers thrown out of employment
and reduced to distress.
According to history, President
Buchanan in his message a year later
practically repudiated the tariff for
revenue only policy of his party and
the South, and appealed to Congress
to enact new tariff measure, whose
Incidental protection" would ito some
extent increase the confidence of the
manufacturing interests and give a
fresh impulse to our reviving busi-
ness"
History repeats itself, it is said,
and history Is doing some repeating at
the present time. Yet in spite of the
conditions we are told by the Palmers
and McCormicks and their associates
in this great manufacturing State that
President Wilson must be supported; ;
that his hands must be upheld and
that his administration must have the
endorsement of the thousands of work
ing men of Pennsylvania who are
either altogether idle or working on
half time.
President Buchanan himself in his
message at the end of the dark pc
riod on December "A, 1860, said:
Panic and distress of fearful
character prevail throughout the
Land. Our laboring population is
quently deprived of the means of
earning bread. Indeed, all hope
seems to have deserted the minds
of men.
That was an epitaph pronounced on
the tariff for revenue policy only on
that day by the Democratic President,
but the present occupant of the White
House continues to insist that business
must be given more jolts; that there
has not been enough of the naggins
of those who give employment to the
idle and who are responsible for the
prosperity of this nation. 1t was at
the end of the Buchanan administra-
ton and at the beginning of Presi-
dent Lincoln's term that Lincoln gave
voice to this economic gem:
I do not know much about the
tariff, but l know this much: When
we buy manufactured goods abroad
we get the goods and the foreigner
gets the money. When we buy the
manufactured goods at home we get
both the goods and the money.
Democratic experiments follow, d in
later years, but always with the same
results. The first Morrill, protective
tariff of 1S60-'61 marked the end OF
that terrible distress which Southern
tariff for revenue only had created. I,
was when these Southern theorists
were driven out of Washington thai
protection as the policy of the nation
was established, and for a generation
after 1850 this policy remained domi.
nant in our national legislation.
History records that it was not over.
thrown until the German Wilson tar.
iff law of 1894, another Southern ex.
pertinent, and, according to Winthrop
/. Marvin in recent address, it was