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the passage of an emergency revenue bill, instead of a protective tariff act. What a spectacle this would be! What a mockery of justice! We have just passed through one of the greatest political contests that this country ever witnessed. The fight was against free trade and free silver (or debased currency). We have buried them both. The Fifty-fourth Congress must bury the Dingley bill in its present shape, which is a debased revenue measure, for it does not give the protection as contemplated on its face.

If the Dingley bill, or any other emergency measure, should be brought up by the Senate it is the duty of Senators to see to it that daylight is let in and that proper amendments are attached to it, so that no substitutes or adulterants can come in without paying a proper duty. It should be made so plain and so protected with amendments that no wrong classification or fraud could be attempted.

WESTERN SENATORS AND REPRESENTATIVES.

Western Senators and Representatives should bear in mind that this Dingley bill was railroaded through the House, and no committee from wool men was allowed the pleasure of exposing to the committee the discrepancies in the wool schedule. They were completely ignored, eastern sentiment prevailing. Now they intend to be heard. Any tariff bill or substitute tariff act that should become a law must be for the benefit of agriculture as well as manufacture.

13. NO SECTION HOLDS BALANCE.

The time has gone by when any section of this country holds the balance of power. The east can not elect a President without the great agricultural States. So it is with a tariff bill which Mr. Watterson so dreads. If it should be passed, it must be a just one, but it should be of the McKinley type, with proper safeguards thrown around our tariff system, so that no attempt to defraud could be accomplished. Mr. Watterson, born a free trader, can see no future for this country except under his pet tariff for revenue only. History and past records stand as monuments against his theories.

WHAT PROTECTION HAS DONE.

Protection has made the Republican party what it is. It raised a revenue to keep an army in the field and paid off a large part of our war debt. It has filled the country with diversified industries, so that we are able to compete with the world in any class of products when we protect our industries against foreign pauper labor.

have

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It has placed this country in the front rank for wealth and prosperity. Never, except under a free-trade policy or a tariff for revenue only, our industries languished, and only under that Democratic free trade and tariff for revenue only, did our industries ever get a setback. * ** *

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The Republican party was elected to restore the home market to our people, to throw the arm of protection around all our industries, and to see to it that our laboring classes are protected against the low-priced wages and pauper labor of the Old World.

On the strength of the election of McKinley the wheels of trade are starting up. Laborers that have been unemployed are now going back

to work by the thousands. The star of prosperity is in the ascendency, and the throttle in the new valve of increasing trade is wide open. Let us have no setback. *

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NO REST UNTIL FULL PROTECTION.

Ex-Senator Paddock, of Nebraska, says:

The country wants a rest on the tariff; the business interests want rest. If the Dingley bill, or something else like it, can be passed this winter, giving enough money to meet the expenditures, the tariff should be let alone for a few years.

Did the country carry the last election for a revenue bill or a protective tariff? How little the ex-Senator understands the temper of the people on the subject of protection. The country wants no rest, neither does the business world want rest, until we pass a reasonable and equitable protective tariff act.

SOME OTHER GUIDES.

Such expressions as the above show conclusively that the honorable Senator is unable to grasp the situation. Like Comptroller Eckels (a gold Democrat), he does not want a great revision of the tariff system, except to give revenue sufficient to meet the expenses of Government.

* *

Michigan cast her vote for a protective tariff law that would properly protect her manufacturing and agricultural industries. This State can only be carried by the party who carries out the principles of protection to the letter.

14. SILVER REPUBLICANS FOR PROTECTION.

Many Republicans who voted for McKinley believed in free silver, but they could not sacrifice protection for the new issue. The same feeling existed in agricultural districts in many of the Western States, but when the time came to cast their ballots protection saved the party. It was the main issue in the campaign just passed, and Major McKinley was never afraid to meet the question in any speech he made during the great political contest. He never flinched in his duty in advocating protection to its fullest extent. He fully comprehended that free-trade theories and protection were barriers that could not bring together the leaders of gold Democracy and the Republican party when they met in the legislative branches of our nation.

15. CHANDLER STRIKES THE KEYNOTE.

Senator Chandler, of New Hampshire, struck the keynote, when writing to the Tippecanoe Club, of Manchester, N. H., when he says:

We rightly based our principal arguments against Mr. Bryan upon the unwisdom of the immoderate free coinage of silver by the United States alone; but I much fear upon that issue alone we should have lost States enough in the Mississippi Valley to have defeated McKinley. What then saved the fight? Simply the tariff issue.

We

These are facts and truths that can not be gainsaid. It was the tariff question that saved the Republican party, and to the great protective party is consigned the wishes of the majority of the American people. Proper protection once more must be given to the home market. want no low tariff or prohibitory one. But we want a reasonable statute, equitable in all its schedules. No sectional bill, no patched up measure, but an act that will satisfy all our diversified industries. The

good work commenced in the election of Major McKinley on November 3, and now let every legislator that has been elected in this fight for protection represent his constituents to the letter, and we shall have a tariff law that will make prosperity boom, the same as in 1892, employing all of our labor at good, honest wages.

16. SPECIFIC DUTIES REQUIRED.

Sheep husbandry, as well as the textile industry, want specific, and no more ad valorem, duties. Wrong classification of goods or wool only favors the foreigner and importer. Proper protection can only be by specific duties. Ad valorem duties engender fraud and are a scheme to destroy the intentions of a proper and equitable tariff law. The Republicans want no revenue bill to help along the Cleveland Administration during the few months it remains in power.

We want protection for our industries and protection for our laborers. In Major McKinley the country has perfect confidence. His stability of character and honesty of purpose is a talisman of what is to come. Over the great ocean of distrust coming in with the tide rolls the wave of better times, with peace and plenty for the home circle. We welcome the glorious halo the future has in store for our distressed country. With McKinley will come a new day, whose light will penetrate our sorrows and scatter the mists overhanging our diversified trade. Sunshine is already breaking through the rifts in the long-threatening clouds. Soon they will be dispersed. Then will come a grand awakening. The fruits plucked from the bright morning of hope will soon be seen in flourishing times for our traders, prosperity to manufacturers and agriculturists-happiness to all our people.

WILLIAM H. B. THORNTON.

XVI. WALLACE ON THE DINGLEY BILL.

Hon. George H. Wallace, Ex-United States Consul-General to Australia, Discusses the Tariff Question.

Very Able, Lucid, and Thoughtful.

Dingley Bill Condemned as Patchwork Framed to Benefit Woolen Manufacturers Regardless of the Wool Producers.

[From the Santa Fe Daily New Mexican, Santa Fe, N. Mex., Saturday, December 5, 1896.] SANTA FE, December 2, 1896.

To the Editor of the New Mexican :

Every representative of an agricultural district and state in the United States Congress should enter his emphatic protest against the enactment into law of the so-called Dingley bill. The plea made twelve months ago for its passage without amendment or debate that an emergency existed will not now hold, for the bill failed to become a law and the Government still exists. We know now that it would not have furnished the needed revenue and we also know

ITS RANK INJUSTICE.

The suspicions of the woolgrowers were first excited when, in answer to the request of their representatives to be heard by the Committee on Ways and Means before the bill was formulated, they were informed that the committee did not need their help and could and would report a bill without their advice and assistance.

Our suspicions were confirmed when the bill was reported horizontal in its general effect upon customs duties-a scheme or method of changing rates which protectionists have ridiculed and condemned as not meeting the constantly changing conditions and developments of trade and commerce, both foreign and domestic. Protectionists have always affirmed that no tariff law could be enacted which would not need continual revision, yet this bill would perpetuate for two years all the proportionate and relative rates of the condemned Wilson bill, enacted two years previous.

Our suspicions were intensified when we discovered that Schedules E and K, especially the latter, which is

THE WOOL AND WOOLEN SCHEDULE

had been singled out for special treatment by the committee, and when we found its terms were so involved by combinations of the act of 1890 and the act of 1894; by the use of a per cent of the specific duties on the pound or square yard of one law, in addition to the ad valorem rate of another law; and by the insertion of provisos which might mean something else entirely.

Our suspicions were established when we sat down and carefully figured out the effect of this queerly constructed bill. The most astonishing result was to learn with what ingenuity the manufacturers' interest are cared for, while the woolgrowers are cajoled with a fraction of a law against which they have always protested and which

WAS FORCED UPON THEM.

Let it be remembered there are several features of past tariff legislation, inserted at the demands of the importers and manufacturers, to which woolgrowers earnestly object, viz:

First, the classification of wool.

Second, the exemption of skirted wool from the penal cla use.
Third, the compound duties on woolens; and

Fourth, the verbiage through which duties have been evaded.

The distinction made between first and second class wool was one only of manipulation in the factory and has passed away, owing to the improvements in machinery. Thirty years have made prodigious changes in woolgrowing, and the distribution of merino blood all over the world has almost obliterated all traces of so-called third class wool. Hence the reasons for lower rates of duty on such wool have ceased, and were utilized to bring in clothing wool at such low rates.

The skirting wool as "heretofore practiced" was not objectionable, as it separated only the stained portion from the fleece; but, "as now practiced," Australian wool was imported, according to The Manufacturer, of Philadelphia, "ready for the cards," the only "shrinkage" being of the protection to the woolgrowers.

We object to the system of compound duties in the woolen schedule for the reason that gross injustice upon the consumers and the revenue has thus been perpetrated. "Ad valorem rates

"NOT ONLY PERMIT BUT INVITE FRAUDS

through a system of almost undiscoverable undervaluations." (See report of general appraisers.)

The compound (specific and ad valorem combined) duties make a rate of duty which must be altogether beyond the bounds of reason, certainly beyond what the taxpayer is willing to pay, if he knows it.

The statistics of the Treasury Department show large transactions in the custom-house, where these rates, computed to an ad valorem basis, run from 100 to 180 per cent, and in single instances to 275 and even 323 per cent. The manufacturers have hidden behind this system of compound duties, and we and the public generally could not know what rates were being paid, nor what amount of protection the manufacturers were receiving.

LET THEM COME OUT BOLDLY

and say what they want and must have to continue in business, as other industries do. * * * It is a fact, that the sole and only argument for placing wool on the free list was the high rate of duties on woolens.

PUT A GOOD DUTY ON WOOL TOPS.

We are tired of the use of terms making the duties to apply specifically, such as "ring waste," "garnetted waste," and then have "tops," the most highly purified and partly manufactured wool, admitted as "waste" because the sharp importer added "waste" to its designation. These and other objectionable features of past legislation the Dingley bill proposes to reenact by its words: "And subject to all the conditions and limitations thereof;" referring to the act of 1890.

THE MANUFACTURERS CLAIM

the specific duty on woolens is merely to compensate them for the duty on wool and the ad valorem duty is their protection.

When they import Australian wool "sorted and skirted" so as to shrink little or nothing in cleansing, and ask for four and one-half times the duty on grease wool as a compensatory duty, we feel disposed to discuss the matter with them, and when they get a specific duty of 44 cents per square yard on Brussels carpet to offset the duty of 21 cents to 5 cents per pound on the wool entering into composition, we wonder if it required 12 to 15 pounds of wool to make a yard of Brussels carpet.

The Wilson bill-the act of 1894-placed wool on the free list, and therefore rejected the specific or compensatory duties in the woolen schedule, but LEFT THE PROTECTIVE OR AD VALOREM DUTIES PRACTICALLY WHERE THEY WERE IN THE MCKINLEY BILL.

Section 1 of the Dingley bill imposes "a duty equivalent to 60 per centum of the duty imposed on all imported wools of classes one and two" etc., etc., "by the act of 1890,” or

THE M'KINLEY BILL.

Section 2 imposes "60 per centum of the square yard or pound duty imposed on" "all imported articles made wholly or in part of wool, worsted, or other material," etc., "by the act of 1890" or the McKinley bill, "and in addition the ad valorem duty imposed on such articles by the act of 1894" or the Wilson bill. The language of the Dingley bill when divested of its entangling terms, gives the woolgrower 60 per centum and the manufacturer 100 per centum of the protection afforded by the McKinley bill. The per centum, when exactly calculated, of advantage given the manufacturer over the woolgrower owing to dif ferent values is 38, 42, and 45.

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