And yet, for years and years in this House, gentlemen have refused even to consider the advisability of reducing the one or raising the other of these taxes and harmonizing their discordant elements: Duty on articles of luxury. Ottar of roses, free. Neroli, or orange flower oil, free. Diamonds, 10 per cent. Raw Silk, free. Jewelry, 25 per cent. Gold studs, 25 per cent. Finest still wines, in bottles, 29 per cent. Finest thread lace, 30 per cent. Finest India Shawls, costing abroad, say Silk Stockings, 50 per cent. Finest Broadcloth, costing $5 a pound Pate de foie gras, 25 per cent. Duty on a quart bottle of champagne, cost- Curry and curry powder, free. Duty on articles of necessity. Castor-oil, 180 per cent. Linseed Oil, 62 per cent. Common window-glass, 87 per cent. Steel rails, 85 per cent. Horseshoe nails, 116 per cent. Cheapest mixed woolen goods, costing abroad 24 cents per yard, 77 per cent. Spool thread, 51 per cent. Common druggets, costing abroad 28 cents a yard, 86 per cent. Common woolen shawls, costing abroad 68 cents a pound, 86 per cent. Common worsted stockings, costing 26 cents a pound abroad, 73 per cent. Common cloth, costing 65 cents a pound abroad, duty 35 cents a pound and 3 per cent. ad valorem, equal to 89 per cent. THE AD ABSURDUM. It would be a very difficult task to persuade men who are selfish to indulge in self-love, much less in disinterestedness. Perhaps the most cogent reasoning upon this subject would be after the manner of our humorists, known as the ad absurdum, which Aristotle ranks among the best rudiments of logic. We have a humorist known as "Bill Nye." This clever writer has been acting as a rural gentleman. He has ideas of stock-growing, garden sauce, and other home-spun matters about farming in the West. I quote: "Well, farmin' is like runnin' a paper in regards to some thinas. Every feller in the world will take and turn in and tell you how to do it, even if he don't know a blame thing about it. There ain't a man in the United States to-day that don't secretly think he could run airy one if his other business busted on him, whether he knows the difference between a new milch cow and a horse hay-rake or not. We had one of these embroidered nightshirt farmers come from town better'n three years ago. Been a toilet-soap man and done well, and so he came out and bought a farm that had nothing to it but a fancy house and barn, a lot of medder in the front yard, and a southern aspect. The farm was no good. You couldn't raise a disturbance on it Well, what does he do? Goes and gets a passle of slim-tailed yeller cows from New Jersey, and aims to handle cream and diversified farming. Last year the cuss sent a load of cream over and tried to sell it at the new crematory while the funeral and hollercost was goin' on. I may be a sort of a chump myself, but I read my paper and don't get left like that." "What are the prospects for farmers in your State?" "Well, they are pore. Never was so pore, in fact, sence I've been there. Folks wonder why boys leaves the farm. My boys left so as to get protected, they said, and so they went into a clothing store, one of 'em, and one went into hardware, and one is talkin' protection in the Legislature this winter. They said that farmin' was gettin' to be like fishin' and huntin', well enough for a man that has means and leisure, but they couldn't make a livin' at it, they said. Another boy is in a drug store, and the man that hires him says he is a royal feller." "Kind of a castor royal feller," I said with a skriek of laughter. He waited until I had laughed all I wanted to, and then he said: "I've always hollered for high tariff in order to hyst the public debt, but now that we've got the national debt coopered, I wish they'd take a little hack at mine. I've put in fifty years farmin'. I never drank licker in any form. I've worked from ten to eighteen hours a day; been economical in cloze and never went to a show more'n a dozen times in my life; raised a family and learned upwards of two hundred calves to drink out of a tin pail without blowing all their vittles up my sleeve. My wife worked alongside o' me sewin' new seats on the boys' pants, skimmin' milk, and even helpin' me load hay. "For forty years we toiled along together and hardly got time to look into each other's faces or dared to stop and get acquainted with each other. Then her health alled. Ketched cold in the spring-house, prob'ly skimmin' milk and washin' pans and scaldin' pails and spankin' butter. Anyhow, she took in a long breath one day while the doctor and me was watchin' her, and she says to me, 'Henry,' says she, I've got a chance to rest,' and she put one tired, wore-out hand on top of the other tired, wore-out hand, and I knew she'd gone where they don't work all day and do chores all night. "I took time to kiss her then. I'd been too busy for a good while previous to that, and then I called in the boys After the funeral it was too much for them to stay around and eat the kind of cookin' we had to put up with, and nobody spoke up around the house as we used to. The boys quit whistlin' around the barn and talked kind of low by themselves about goin' to town and gettin' a job. "They're all gone now, and the snow is four feet deep on mother's grave up there in the old berryin' ground." Then both of us looked out of the car, window quite a long time without saying anything. "I don't blame the boys for going into something else, longs other things pays better; but I say-and I say what I know-that the man who holds the prosperity of this country in his hands, the man that actually makes money for other people to spend, the man that eats three good, simple, square meals a day and goes to bed at 9 o'clock, so that future generations with good blood and cool brains can go from his farm to the Senate and Congress and the White House-he is the man that gets left at last to run his farm, with nobody to help him but a hired man and a high protective tariff. The farms in our State are mortgaged for over $700,000,000. Ten of our Western States -I see by the papers-have got about three billion and a half mortgages on their farms, and that don't count the chattel mortgages filed with town clerks on farm machinery, stock, wagons, and even crops, by gosh! that ain't two inches high under the snow. That's what the prospects is for farms now. The Government is rich, but the men that made it, the men that fought perairie fires and perarie wolves and Injuns and potato-bugs and blizzards, and has paid the war debt and pensions and everything else, and hollered for the Union and Republican party and high tariff and anything else that they was told to, is left high and dry this cold winter with a mortgage of $7,500,000,000 on the farms they have earned and saved a thousand times over.' Yes; but look at the glory of sending from the farm the future President, the future Senator, and the future member of Congress. "That looks well on paper, but what does it really amount to? Soon as a farmer-boy gits in a place like that he forgets the soil that produced him and holds his head as high as a hollyhock. He bellers for protection to everybody but the farmer, and while he sails round in a highty-tighty room with a fire in it night and day, his father on the farm has to kindle his own fire in the morning with elm slivers and has to wear his son's lawn tennis suit next to him or freeze to death, and he has to milk in an old gray shawl that has held that member of Congress when he was a baby, by gorry! and the old lady has to sojourn through the winter in the flannels that Silas wore at the rigatter before he went to Congress. So I say, and I think that Congress agrees with me, Damn a farmer, anyhow! IV. SOME OF THE RATES OF TAXATION. LOWEST DUTIES ON LUXURIES; HIGHEST ON NECESSARIES-AS A RESULT OF THE PRESENT METHOD OF LEVYING TAXES. Senator Zebulon B. Vance, of North Carolina, January 13, 1888. Amount imported in 1887... Duty paid thereon.. Being an average of 41 per cent. IRON AND STEEL. ..... JEWELRY AND PRECIOUS STONES. Amount imported in 1887.......... Being a duty of 10% per cent. $50,618,985 20,713,233 .$10.981,191 1,162,300 This shows whatever be the excuse for it, that the iron and steel, without which no industry can move, and which are an absolute necessity of life, are made to pay four times as much as the adornments of the rich. Cheapest, valued at 30 cents or under, per pound. Valued at above 60 cents and not exceeding 80 cents per pound. Women's and children's dress goods, Italian cloths, etc.: All above 20 cents per square yard........ All woolen goods or mixtures of alpaca and other material: Blankets: Worth 30 cents per pound or under.. Whilst the woolen shawl of the poor woman is taxed 88 per cent. the silk shawl of her wealthier sister is taxed only 50 per cent. Whilst the cheap alpaca of the laborer's wife is taxed 83 per cent. the silk or velvet dress of his employer's wife and the laces and ribbons with which it is trimmed are taxed but 50 per cent. Whilst the plow-boy's coarse wool hat is taxed 75 per cent., the shining silk beaver of the dude is taxed only 50 per cent. Files are taxed 56 per cent; trace-chains, 47 per cent.: horseshoe-nails, 76 per cent.; whilst sporting fire-arms, pistols, etc., are taxed only 35 per cent., and iron rails continue to pay 93 per cent. and steel rails 84. Window Glass: Cylinder, crown and common window, unpolished, not exceeding 10 by 15 inches square.... Above and not exceeding 16 by 24 square. Cylinder and crown, polished, unsilvered: 10 by 15........ Not exceeding 16 by 24. Plate-glass, rough: Not exceeding 10 by 15 inches square... Not exceeding 16 by 24 inches square.. Plate-glass, polished, unsilvered: 10 by 15 inches, square.. 16 by 24 inches.. Plate glass, polished and silvered: 10 by 15 inches square... 16 by 24 inches square.................. 60.71 ...... 93.11 7.28 16.79 14.16 23.88 17.39 ... 20.15 10.85 18.44 HOW THE POOR PAY THIS TAX. These are only a few items showing the manner in which these taxes are levied, ard how anyone so thoroughly familiar with the whole subject can conclude that these taxes are levied mainly upon articles of luxury is another mystery that the friends of protection alone can explain. The heavy taxes placed upon iron, farming implements, cotton-ties, coarse blankets and coarse woolens, and the comparatively light tax upon jewelry, plate-glass, silks and velvets contradict the proposition and show that it is the reverse of true. The effect of this arrangement of duties is, whether intended or not, to compel the poor and laboring classes to pay not more taxes to the Government perhaps, because they purchase but few imported goods, but to pay to the manufacturers of American goods a sum far in excess of the entire sum collected by the Government upon imported goods over and above that which they would be compelled to pay for these necessaries if this duty was not imposed. And the amount paid the Government as a tariff upon imported goods is about $220,000,000 annually. V. ENHANCING THE COST OF LIVING. THE PAYMENT OF EXORBITANT TAXES MAKES THE CONDITIONS OF LIFE HARDER AND HARDER IN AMERICAN CITIES. Representative Ashbel P. Fitch, of New York (Republican), May 16. The upper part of the city of New York is mainly a residence district. The majority of the people who live there live on fixed incomes paid them as salaries or wages every month, or by the proceeds of professional employment in which their incomes are limited. Some of them are architects, artists, clergymen, clerks in banks, insurance and law offices, journalists, musicians, lawyers, physicians, teachers, book-keepers, railroad employes, drivers, conductors, policemen, firemen, telegraph and telephone operators, salesmen, mechanical engineers, civil engineers, stenographers, printers, and skilled mechanics of all sorts not employed in industries which have protection under the present tariff. A WORD FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE NO PROTECTION. In that district lives, too, an army of deserving women who earn their living by unprotected labor, and often that of others dependent upon them. There is perhaps a necessity within the course of this long debate that somebody should say a word for these people. The farmer has his eloquent advocate trained in the county and State fairs, who is in arms to defend every product of his ground. The workmen in factories and the manutacturers have their special advocates, who lie awake at night to study their interests and whose voices have been heard here every day since the beginning of this session, asking for one measure or another for their protection. Almost every class has had its advocates here, except perhaps the millionaires, whom nobody will own to represent, and who have no friends in this House. Suppose, as examples of the class of people to whom I refer in the city of New York, we take the policeman, who guards our houses; the fireman, who will risk his life for our children; the reporter and the printer, who spend the night in preparing our morning papers; the carrier, who brings it through all kinds of weather, and the locomotive engineer on the elevated railroad, who takes us up and down town. These classes of workmen have no direct protection. They are not overpaid, nor is their life more luxurious than it ought to be. The money which they draw at the end of every month is not more than they need, and they are often sorely pinched to buy even the taxed doll to fill the taxed Christmas stocking or to pay for the taxed medicine necessary for any member of the family. DESERVING OF CONSIDERATION. Perhaps an impartial examination may show that these people are as intelligent, as patriotic, and as deserving of consideration in the matter now before the House as are the Rhode Island mill operators or the Kansas farmers. Their wishes and views may be even as important to the Republican party. If you are to get any Republican votes in New York City you must get them from these people. These classes gave you under the wise management of Arthur votes enough to keep down the Democratic majority in the city so that a Republican President was elected by the vote of the State of New York. They gave in my district a Republican an election to Congress, largely because his Democratic opponent refused to support any measure of tariff reform, and voted against the consideration of the Morrison bill. You can hardly afford to pass these voters over in your desire to conciliate the factory operatives and the farmers, unless, indeed, you have decided to elect your candidate without the vote of New York State. I have had it explained to me that this can easily be done. It is a favorite theory apparently of the same gentlemen who have decided that the city workingmen who gave the most outspoken and determined free-trader in this country, Mr. Henry George, 68,000 votes at an election when we could only get 60,000 for so good a candidate as Theodore Roosevelt, are wild with enthusiasm for the absolute maintenance of the present tariff; and of those other wise leaders of the party whose declared policy is to alienate the German voters who are still true to the Republican party, in order to please the Prohibitionists, who laugh at their concessions and have always sought and always will seek the downfall of that party. PAYING ON EVERYTHING THEY TOUCH OR HANDLE. I for one am not willing to accept such theories or acknowledge such leadership. In the interest of the Republican party, and in the interest of common fairness, I propose to ask gentlemen on this side of the House to consider for a moment how the present tariff, which we have promised to revise, now affects the people whom I have described, and to consider what they pay taxes on in the general distribution of the customs taxes now in force. They pay upon everything. Look for a moment at what they eat. There is a tariff duty on beef, on pork, hams and bacon, butter and lard, cheese, molasses, grapes, wheat flour, osts, corn meal, rye, barley, potatoes, raisins, vinegar, honey, rice and rice meal, sugar, extract of meat, pickles, currants, apples, salt, and condensed milk. The list is substantially an inventory of the stock of the grocery store at which they buy. There is a duty on the coal which warms them, on their cooking and household utensils, on their entire clothing from their hats to their stockings, on the medicines given them when they are sick, and on the roofs over their heads. The commerce of New York, where most of the customs duties are collected, while it asks in vain for the money which is necessary to improve the water ways where $147,000,000 of our revenue is collected every year, pays cheerfully taxes which are used to keep up custom-houses where nothing is ever collected, and to carry the mails on routes which use up the great profits of the city offices, to build harbors in Texas, where a sailor who happened to be stranded would be lost and lonesome, to improve rapids in Tennessee which no one but the lumberman ever sees, and to dredge out creeks in Georgia which the Government engineers who are given charge of the work spend a month in trying to find. Just so the people of the city of New York, sooner than object in any way to the protective tariff, which they believe to be, if properly laid and fairly administered, for the good of the whole country, have paid without objection and cheerfully, on everything they use or touch or handle, from the beginning, these customs duties for the benefit of the manufacturer and his employe and the long-suffering farmer. WHY A READJUSTMENT IS ASKED. The time has now come when a revision of the tariff has been promised by both parties, and when the present duties yield so large a revenue that its further accumulation has become admittedly dangerous. Is it strange that at this time and under these circumstances they ask that a readjustment, partially at least, in their interest, may take place? And is it unreasonable to ask that a tariff which puts jewelry at 25 per cent. and oil-cloth for tenement house floors at 40 per cent. ad valorem; which brings in silver-plated harness at 35 per cent. and children's |