Having seen Mr. Havemeyer's extraordinary statements in the public prints, I am at a loss to understand his motives, unless it be spite and the desire of the American Sugar Refining Company to get rid of Louisiana and the Western beet sugar industry, natural competitors of the Sugar Trust. It would seem that Mr. Havemeyer, in his anxiety to divert the attention of the public from "trusts," per se, went out of his way to attack Louisiana and the West, who stand as only competitors of the Sugar Trust lowering the price of sugars to the American consumer.

Mr. Havemeyer makes the broad statement that "the mother of all trusts is the customs Tariff." This statement is easily controverted. The greatest trust of the country, the Standard Oil Company, does certainly not owe its existence to any Protection received from the Tariff. There are many other industries in the United States not specially benefited by Protection that are in trusts, and public statements to that effect have been made in the newspapers.

It is quite likely that one-eighth of a cent Protection to refined sugar is not sufficient, and that one-quarter of a cent would be nearer right; but Mr. Havemeyer has no business to conclude that 10 per cent. Protection is sufficient for any and all industries of the country, and that any higher duties must necessarily produce trusts. Even with the Protection afforded now to Louisiana and Western beet sugars these industries have hard work to compete against the semi-slave labor of the trop

ics, and against the cheap skilled labor of Europe. And yet, with this Protection, so unnecessary, according to Mr. Havemeyer, there is no trust and never can be among the producers of cane or beet sugars in the United States.

Mr. Havemeyer makes the gratuitous and utterly outrageously false statement that the United States Tariff law puts into the pockets of a few Louisiana sugar planters $10,000,000 annually on their crop of 250,000 tons. The sugar industry of Louisiana is the mainstay of the State. It employs over half a million of people directly and indirectly. Over $100,000,000 of capital is invested in the cultivation of this staple; 300,000 acres of land and 400 factories are required to turn out from three hundred to three hundred and fifty thousand tons of almost refined sugars, which, for over two months of each year, supplies the wants of the American people.

Need I say anything of the great and growing beet root sugar industry of the Western States ? Millions of capital are being invested in modern plants, thereby encouraging the farmers to put their lands in beet culture, promoting diversification of crops, and insuring higher prices for wheat, corn and oats; the employment of large numbers of skilled men, engineers, mechanics, chemists, sugar makers, etc., opens up new fields, and keeps busy the iron, steel and other manufacturing plants of the country.

The interstate trade created by the Louisiana sugar industry alone has been estimated at $25,000,000. We raise scarcely anything but the sugar cane, and purchase nearly all our supplies of meats, grain and clothing from the East and West. A great deal of machinery comes from the East, and all our coal, mules, cooperage, lime, etc., are purchased from many of the Eastern and Western States.

The sugar producers of this country, both in the cane and beet industries, would be entirely destroyed with a Protection of 10 per cent., which Mr. Havemeyer says is sufficient, and then the consumer would be entirely at the mercy of the refiners. What the latter want is free raw sugar and a duty sufficient on refined to Protect them against foreign refined.

Sugar producers, sugar refiners and every other industry needing Protection against the cheap labor and cheap capital of the world should and will receive fair and adequate Protection, and our country will continue to prosper, and in the course of time produce all the sugar and every other article needed for the use and comfort of our growing millions of population.

HENRY MCCALL.
MCCALL P. O., La., June 19, 1899.

MR. HAVEMEYER CONTRADICTED.

Wants to Divert Attention from the

Sugar Trust.

Henry T. Oxnard, president of the American Beet Sugar Association, has prepared a reply to H. O. Havemeyer's recent argument before the Industrial Commission at Washington. He flatly denies many of Mr. Havemeyer's statements, and accuses him of seeking to destroy the American beet sugar industry, in order to foster the refineries that handle foreign raw material, besides attempting to divert public attention from the Sugar Trust by attacking the Tariff. Mr. Oxnard says:

The two largest-in fact, the pioneer trusts in the country, as every one knows-are the Standard Oil and Sugar 'Trusts. The Standard Oil Company does not enjoy its monopoly from the Tariff, and the American Sugar Refining Company, according to Mr. Havemeyer, receives only 32 per cent. protection. How absurd, then, is it to say the Tariff is responsible for trusts. But right here I wish to dispute Mr. Havemeyer's statement regarding the Protection afforded to sugar refining in claiming that it only receives a Protection of 32 per cent. In the Dingley Tariff act sugar refining receives a Protection of an eighth of a cent per pound, and the testimony produced before the Ways and Means Committee, of which Mr. Dingley was chairman, brought out the fact that sugar in a modern refinery, with the best machinery, well located, can be refined at a cost of about a quarter of a cent per pound. We therefore find that sugar refining under these conditions is receiving a Protection of not 31⁄2 but 50 per cent. ad valorem, based on the cost of refining sugar.

The Protection granted to sugar producers who make the article of sugar itself is 50 per cent. on the cost of raw sugars to-day, or identical with the Protection granted to the sugar refining companies."

Mr. Oxnard declares that American sugar producers would suffer and the development of the beet sugar industry be retarded by the admission of raw sugar free of duty.

In conclusion he says: "I will not dispute Mr. Havemeyer's claim that 10 per cent. is sufficient Protection to the sugar refining interests which he represents, but I do assert that he cannot make the American people believe that the industries and business of this country prospered during the years we were struggling under the Wilson law, when the average Protection amounted to 40 per cent. ad valorem. If Mr. Havemeyer had said that keen and losing competition in business led to the formation of trusts he would be right, for the Tariff has nothing to do with the formation of trusts."

AS VIEWED IN THE SOUTH.

How Havemeyer's Outbreak Was Received by the Louisiana Sugar Interests.

[Contributed.]

Taking a leaf out of General Eagan's book, Mr. Havemeyer, when called before the Industrial Commission, produced a written statement and proceeded to attack the revenue policy of the Republican party.

This is styled the "testimony" of Mr. Havemeyer, just as Eagan's screed against Miles was styled "testimony," and we may soon expect prisoners under trial, when allowed to testify in their own behalf, to deliver philippics against the mode of administering justice, organizing of courts and impaneling of juries. It is quite fin de siècle.

Nevertheless, the statement is worth criticising, for it is evident that Mr. havemeyer put into it all the logic at his command. Unfortunately for him, he begins with a "half-truth "-viz., that "the mother of all trusts is the customs Tariff bill." Nobody has ever predicated for trusts anything like immaculate conception, so if they have any 'mother" at all they must have also a "father," and as the eldest of the brood is the great old "he" trust of them all, the "Alkali Trust" of England (with a "kid " on this side of the water), papa's name must be "FreeTrade."

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If such be the pedigree of these cormorants, to rush from Protection to Free-Trade would simply be placing the children under the care of the father instead of the mother. This is not what the people want. They do not want to provide for the brood but to strangle it, and eventually the people are going to do just that thing, on the very highest Protective ground-self-protection.

Of course the people will have to act through their representatives in Congress, and so far as Mr. Havemeyer's particular bantling is concerned the people can safely put their trust in a Republican Congress, for they have been educated up to the point of fully comprehending the iniquities of an "ad valorem" system. Indeed, the discussion in the present Congress, when the DingHey bill was up for debate in the Senate, was a "post-graduate" course in revenue and Protection.

In the hearings before the Ways and Means Committee in January, 1897, speaking for the American Sugar Refining Company as its secretary and treasurer, Mr. Searles said (wrote): "In conclusion, the American refiners ask that in fixing the duties on raw sugar they be based upon the intrinsic value of the various grades." For good and sufficient reasons, supplied by the domestic

sugar producers and the importers of foreign sugar, the committee refused this plea for "ad valorem" duty, and Mr. Havemeyer has been sore ever since.

At the same hearing, Mr. McCahan, an independent refiner, when asked, "Who has taken the 40 per cent. of your customers, which you say you have lost?" replied, "I suppose that we have that much more capacity than the country needs, possibly." Since then Doscher and Arbuckle have built refineries, so that the possibly" is now "actually," if not more so. Yet the Sugar Trust

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goes right along declaring dividends of 7 per cent. on preferred and 12 per cent. on common stock.

Mr. Havemeyer boasts that the public invests in trust stock, and won't touch the stock of the independent refineries, and then admits that while the refineries could be replaced for $35,000,000 they are capitalized at $73,000,000; this, too, under a Tariff law which gives a differential of only 1 cent between raw and refined sugar.

"Testimony" like this can only be compared to a dog chasing its own tail. If the Sugar Trust be a fair sample of trusts in general, we are forced to the conclusion that by this system of organizing industries stock can be issued on four or five times the value of the plants employed, and dividends approaching 10 per cent. or more may be earned. Clearly, then, either the consumer must pay higher prices, or the labor employed and the raw material to be converted into

finished products must be cheapened. The trust must have a three-fold toll, and it may make it four-fold or five-fold, and neither consumer, laborer nor producer must get excited about such a trifle.

Although high authority in the United States Senate proclaimed, in 1897, that customs dues must no longer be depended upon for the support of the Government, but that excise taxes must be substituted, and although since the outbreak of the so-called war with Spain the United States has relied upon that mode of taxation to raise adequate funds, the "new policy" is by no means permanent. Customs dues have been and will continue to be the mainstay, and no amount of Havemerican poppycock is going to wreck the good old ship of state on the scraggy rocks of "FreeTrade."

If trusts be permitted to exist for a few years longer, with their present system of controlling the values either of raw material or of finished products, merchants will be their hirelings and producers their slaves, or, failing to find relief from Congress, and knowing nowhere else to turn, brute force will assert itself and all laws will be set aside save the lex talionis. It makes no difference to a people whether it be rich or poor, but it does make a difference whether it be bond or free. Before it is too late the people hope that Congress will smash the trusts just as it smashed the Louisiana lottery. It is a patient and long-suffering people, but it already begins to wonder how long this hornets' nest" is going to be tolerated in the State of New Jersey. This is their testimony." Weigh it against that of Monseigneur Havemeyer.

Mr. Havemeyer's attack on labor organizations will be expunged from the records of the Industrial Commission at his own request. That part which was calculated to give the greatest offense to labor was the paragraph in which he expressed the conviction that associations of workingmen tended to degrade labor by destroying individual independence. He realized he had been Imprudent by giving utterances to the theory and candidly said he wished he had not gone into the subject. Although that section of Havemeyer's testimony will not be in the official record it will not be lost, for a dozen stenographers were there to send it broadcast. Mr. Havemeyer is apparently in favor of organization in everything except labor. He thinks workingmen's organizations are bad because they destroy Individuality, yet in another part of his testimony he blurted out the expression "the day of the individual is passed," meaning that affairs of the world are to be hereafter controlled by combinations.

This phrase of Mr. Havemeyer will be remembered as long as the remark of the late William H. Vanderbilt, "The people be dd!" It will form the text for thousands of editorials and campaign speeches.San Francisco "Chronicle."