Cresco plain dealer. (Cresco, Howard County, Iowa) 1913-1945, 1915-12-17
Sedition in the Tariff Baliwick.

Issued on Friday OF Each week.
Sedition in the Tariff Baliwick.
.It is hish time for William Edison
Wood, head of the wooden trust ano
alleged to have inspired Schedule X
of Payne-Aldrich tariff fame, and Ma
than P. Folwell, leader of the Philadel'
phia textile manufacturers and sup.
porter of Penrose, to sound the tocsin.
It is imparitive that the Home Market
club and the Union League club mobil-
iZe.
..Their danger, says the Sioux City
Tribune, ''is not foreign invasion but
domestic sedition. Just as these IN
terests and gentlemen were preparing
to take the newly assembled congress
out some night in the dark of the moon
and show it the hobgoblin of utter in
dustrial ruin that is to snatch this ma
ton Immediately peace is declared in
Europe, along comes the American
Wool and Cotton Reporter, textile trade
journal of high standing and.no politics,
published in Boston, with these re-
marks:
eve are as we'll informed as any
amateur economist as to when the war
in Europe will end-that is, we know
nothing about it. We do know scores
of thousands Eof European workers
have been killed, and that other scores
of thousands have been so manned that
they can never figure in the competi-
tive industries. A man with poor eye
sight or minus limb cannot card, spin
or weave. We know that the product
i've capacity of industrial Europe has
diminished in far greater proportion
than has the demand for it's products.
Stocks and good in which we are most
intimately interested-textiles-in all
the belligerent Europe must be exhaus-
ted. There can't be any truth IN the
statement that European countries are
ready to dup upon US, at the lmmedl-
ate close of the war, great volume OF
textile products. Such dumping can't
come from England, or we would have
felt it long since.
''It is practically impossible in this
country today to hire textile machinery
on commission basis; it is impossible
to secure used or secondhand machin-
erv: within month we have been told
by cotton yarn producers that business
is in such condition that anyone VINO
can make yarn can sell it; we have
been told by wooden yarn spinners that
they will not consider new business for
months to come, and we know that old
wooden mills that were actually down
and out are at present busily employed.
sIf there ever was time when Eng
land could dump stuff on us, now is
that time, because we need the mer-
chandise, and there is nothing in the
lack of shipping facilities that would
prevent the goods from coming here,
if England had them to spare. But she
hasn't and will not have. 1t can't be
that Germany is ready and willing to
deluge us with stocks OF textile pro-
ducts. She hasn't any cotton and she
hasn't any wool to spare, and the same
is true of other belligerent manufac-
turing nations.
eve know from experience in this
country that whenever textile pro-
ducing section is badly upset by de-
preston or labor trouble it takes long
while before the organization can again
be put together to produce profitably.
How much longer is it going to take
the European manufacturers to organ
ize their forces after the war, first to
supply their own wants, and second to
build up their own stock, and later to
tax care of the easiest procurable export
business? 1t will be long before they
will hunt for chance to battle in this
country with our own efficient manufac-
turers.
Declaring the American manufac-
turers to be efficient and perfectly cap
able without any government assist
ance, of competing with European in
dustries manned by cripples and taxed
to pay off billions upon billions of war
debts, is lese majestic that must hor-
rify the wooden trust and the House
Market club.
''To order tue high tariff censor to
suspend the publication of the Ameri-
can Wool and Cotton Reporter or turn
ing its editor over to a firing squad
armed with fountain pens loaded with
high tariff editorials would not be ade-
quate punishment. Why not force the
dispenser of this seditious literature to
subscribe to the campaign of John
Wingate Weeks and compel him to
read all the political speeches of that
nrosidontia1 candidate from MasSa-