The Bozeman courier., 1921-10-12
OLD INDUSTRY DESTROYED

of industrial depression and unemployment, Is
being given to the fact that hundreds of thousands
of the men now out of work in this country have
been robbed of their jobs because the American
market, under free trade tariff law, is open to
the invasion of foreign commodities, cheapy
made abroad but sold in the United States to
WHOLESALERS and jobbers just enough below the
domestic price to destroy the market for articles
of American production. When these imported
articles are offered at retail they go at price
based not upon the cost abroad, but upon what the
market will bear in the United States.
A big publicity movement now in full swing
is intended to take the minds of the people off
the tariff as a solution of our economic diff
culties developed under the existing free trade,
and lead them off into fog of big talk about
adjustments, etc.. etc., as a means of getting
the country back to normal industrially.
The problem is as simple today as it was in
the time of Mckinley when protective tariff
supplanted free trade tariff and started the
country back toward the highway of prosperity.
American industries are being injured and des-
troyed today, with consequent impairment or de-
struction of employment, because we have on
the statute books of the nation a tariff law
framed to destroy American productive industry,
and there is delay in enacting tariff law, in
conformity with Republican platform and cam
paign pledges framed to encourage and promote
American productive industry.
The BROOKLYN Eagle of September 21st
states that the machinery in half a dozen big
jute bagging mills in the country is now being
shipped to Calcutta, India, and set up in mills
built there, because mill hands can be hired in
India at from 10 to Is cents day and the placing
of jute bagging on the free list has destroyed the
jute bagging industry in the United States after
it has existed for century.
The removal of this industry from the United
States will throw five thousand American oper-
atives formerly employed in the plants engaged
in making jute bagging, out of work The duty
on jute bagging existed from the Civil war period
until the Underwood tariff law was enacted 1t
was then removed, ostensibly in the interests of
cotton growers. Of course the cotton grower
now that the American industry has been de-
stroyed, is paying and will continue to pay for
bagging all that the tariff will bear. The i'm
porters and distributors of jute bagging are not
in business for their health, and they are not, as
free traders hold, philanthropists whose main pur.
pose in life is to give the consumer something
cheap.
What has been so thoroughly accomplished
in the case of the jute bagging industry is gradu
ally being brought about in many other lines Of
domestic production. The mills are being closed
in this country under the operations of a Demo
cratic tariff law, just they were closed in 1894
and 1914. The depression resulting from this
cause will continue to widen and deepen unit
the party in power puts upon the statute books
of the nation tariff law in conformity with Re
publican doctrine, tradition and plain pledges.
; What lot of trouble those heavy thinker
would have been saved, who are now trying t
estimate the exact location of this earth in tn
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