silk and hemp, with our diversity of soil and climate, we can produce all that we need to consume.

It is the duty of every government to protect the industries of its people as well as its territory. We do not need, nor is it for our interest, to "carry on trade negotiations under promising conditions" or any other conditions.

Our

Other countries will buy our products if they can get them lower than they can get them anywhere else, and not without. English bridge builders had the first offer of the famous bridge contracts in Africa. builders got the contracts because their bids were lower, everything considered, than any others. We feed neary half the people in the United Kingdom, because we can do it cheaper than any other country. No other nation buys a cent's worth of us because they love us. Our balance of trade last year of $600,000,000 shows this to be true. We might increase this balance to the full amount of our exports, and foreign nations would be just as friendly toward us as they now are, and (as power and wealth beget friends) probably more

So.

Our experience without a single exception has proved that defensive tariffs "enacted by Congress" have given us industrial prosperity. In the last twenty-five years, under the defensive "Congressional enactments" (with the exception of the threat and fact of the Wilson tariff), the United States has increased her domestic exports 192 per cent; Germany, 73 per

cent; the United Kingdom, 34 per cent, and France, 5 per cent.

Under the McKinley tariff our domestic exports were $1,030,278,148 in 1892. In 1895, under the Wilson tariff our exports fell to $807,538,165. Last year under the Dingley tariff our exports were $1,453,013,659. We are the largest exporting nation in the world. If we have surpassed all records in the third full year of the Dingley tariff, why not let the Dingley tariff alone? Why will not the advocates of lower duties and no duties give us some tangible reasons for the change they ask for? It would certainly be strange if foreign exporting nations did not ask the why of our success, and adopt our course to build up their home markets. It is right that they should do so. We have found by experience that a rich neighbor is a far better customer for our products than a poor one.

So far as we know, all the defence that our producers have asked for, is a duty high enough to offset the difference in wages paid by our producers, and the wages paid by our competitors. From this point, our duties are not as high as the duties imposed by other countries against us, instead of being "twice as high" as the Herald claims. The fact that England, Germany, Switzerland and other countries buy our cotton, pay the freight home, convert into fabrics, pay the freight and duty here, and undersell us in our own market to the extent of $41,296,239 last year, shows that the Dingley tariff

does not in all cases protect us. The same may be said of all of our defensive duties. None of them "prohibit" and hardly any of them are adequate for protection.

To us it seems far from an “equitable basis" to let the foreign producer into our markets scot free, while our producers must pay heavy taxes, a high rate of interest, and a labor cost from two to twenty times as high as they pay. From our view point, civilization does not rest on "proclamations or preaching," but on an income received by the masses that will give them an abundance of the things that make up the sum of civilized life. The ability of the masses to consume the products of this country is what makes the market of the United States by far the best market in the world. This ability is wholly due to defensive duties. Producers in this country cannot, even approximately, form an estimate of the foreign market for any length of future time, neither can foreign producers know what will happen in the American market at any future time. A few years ago we were practically import ing all of our consumption of silk goods. Now we are the largest producers of the manufactures of silk in the world.

In 1889 we imported $21,222,653 in tin plates. In 1899 we imported $2,613,000 in foreign tin plates. It is evident that a foreign market is always uncertain, while it is equally certain that the home market, if defended, is always to be depended on, and to always increase. An adequate

duty is in no one's way in any respect, except the foreign exporter. Our foreign trade is always greater per capita under periods of protection than it is under periods of free trade. The best thing that can happen to us is that our producers shall have a monopoly of the home market. The worst thing that can happen to us is to have foreign producers occupy our market so largely that our producers must cut wages below the civilization point.

M. Leroy-Beaulieu proposes a commercial union of Europe against the United States. He says: "They (the United States) are on the point of becoming the most important economic factor in the world. They may henceforth be regarded as the first industrial nation, and their superiority will become more strikingly evident year by year." There is not a free trade nation in the world of whom the French economist would make the above assertion.

The

United Kingdom is proposing a union of the Empire on a free trade basis among its own states, with defensive duties against the world. "Those of our economists who are proposing to depend on foreign trade for our producers are reckoning without their hosts. Instead of the world tending towards free trade, it is likely to adopt a better and a more comprehensive system of protection than we have yet seen." The best possible thing that we can do is to develop the home market by keeping labor so well employed, that every person in this country will be able to always in

crease his consumption of American products. GEO. W. RUSSELL. HAVERHILL, MASS., March 5, 1901.

WHITE ASCENDENCY IN THE SOUTH.

THE

[From the Boston Transcript.] 'HE Republicans of Virginia and Alabama have decided to nominate candidates for membership of the constitutional conventions, and to oppose in every way the proposed disfranchisement of the colored voters in those states. The probability is that in neither state will more than a handful of Republicans be chosen to the constitutional conventions, for these bodies will do little more than register the will of the Democratic ascendency that the colored men shall be excluded from the election booths. Constitutional conventions are laws. unto themselves, and it is not likely that the colored voters will be allowed any voice on the question whether they shall or shall not be disfranchised. That will be settled by the white Democrats, for the white Republicans would be in a hopeless minority if all of them were solidly opposed to disfranchisement.

Unfortunately, there is a very considerable element of Southern white Republicans who are possessed with the delusion that when "the nigger is out of politics" the whites of the South will divide on national party lines, thus making states now solidly Democratic either doubtful or Republican. We call this a delusion because it is opposed to the common

sense of politics. The Southern Democratic leaders are very shrewd men. A Southern Democratic leader knows the sentiment of the South much better than a Northern Democratic leader knows the sentiment of the North. The aim of the Southern Democrats is to keep what remains of the old "solid South" solid. Whatever they may say in public, in private they laugh at the idea that they are animated by any purpose friendly to a division of the vote which will remain after disfranchisement has been accomplished.

White ascendency means to them Democratic ascendency. If they thought it could mean anything else they would never for a moment consent to a programme of disfranchisement. This is shown by the fact that disfranchisement has moved northward. The movement had its inception in Gulf States, where Republicanism had long been virtually extinct. North Carolina held out after South Carolina had established white supremacy by constitutional amendment. Virginia is about to come into line, with many misgivings. The Maryland Democrats, under Gorman's whip and spur, are seeking to disfranchise the colored people by indirection, and the Democratic managers in Delaware make no secret of their intention, in the event of recapturing the state, of eliminating “the colored vote."

Not even the hopelessness of the Alabama Republicans pleads for them with the Democrats. The ultimate scope of the disfranchisement.

movement will be "the old South," with the possible exception of West Virginia, where the experiment, in view of Republican strength, is scarcely likely to be undertaken.

PROTECTION MUST STAND. [From the New Haven Palladium.]

THE country does not look for the

abandonment of the protective principle, in response to the demands of Democrats and free traders, who are fond of charging upon this great principle entire responsibility for the results which are at present causing some changes in industrial methods. Protection is only at the beginning of its success. The statesmen of England and their friends in America, who have been denouncing it as unwise, ruinous and detrimental to the prosperity of American labor, are now in a state of terror over the inroads it is making upon their markets. The policy that has already made us the first commercial nation in the world is not going to be abandoned at the behest of the party that enacted the Wilson bill, transferred our national prosperity to Europe, and filled the manufacturing districts with idleness and poverty. A million trusts could not be so fatal to industry and the general prosperity as one Wilson bill.

[From the Rochester Democrat and

Chronicle.]

With protectionists the tariff is a business proposition. Protection is not a sacred principle; it is a policy,

or a method for bringing about certain results, to be employed with reference to the ends in view. And experience has shown that the country is immensely better off when the tariff is thus intelligently treated than when it is made an instrument of fierce and unreasonable assaults upon the entire protective system.

The people of the United States believe that protection is good as long as it produces good results. They are not devoted to any particular schedules. They realize that rates should be adjusted to changed conditions. But they have no patience with those who would tear down the whole structure of customs duties, and they are not disposed to permit another experiment on free trade lines. They believe that their interests are safe in the hands of law-makers who are favorable to protection as a promoter of prosperity and who will sagaciously utilize it in the interest of American business and industry.

The cry for the abolition of protection is feeble and unpersuasive. It has no facts or merits behind it. It is a mere dogmatic preachment, taking no account of realities, and appealing with no force to practical people. Whenever the protective system is modified or readjusted the work must be done by its friends, not by its enemies.

[From the Worcester Spy.]

The New England Free Trade League is showing renewed activity. It is issuing a lot of tracts designed to show that the great corporations of

capital known as trusts are due to the present tariff law.

This is undoubtedly true. If the Cleveland ideas of tariff had continued, no such combinations would have been possible. Men owning idle mills and smokeless chimneys have no reason for increasing capital and hustling for the world's markets.

If you kill manufacturing in the United States you kill off the trusts. The fact that incidentally you return to the condition of a hundred or a thousand years ago when every man got on with as little as possible instead of with as much as possible, will not disturb those people whose ideas seem to them more important than the facts of life. Faith, hope and credit are as important in the manufacturing and business life of the United States as the mathematical calculations of the free trade leagues.

Tariff laws ought to be left alone until the conditions of manufacturing and trade demand a change. The government has plenty of power to curtail any abuses of the trusts. The fact that both political parties are against trusts and neither of them finds any opportunity to present a real indictment or try any charges is some guarantee against the worry clubs and the calamity howlers of the nation.

Chicago has a club that is trying to show people how to live on $2.50 a week. This can be done, no doubt. But it would be much more to the purpose to expend time and effort in teaching people to fit themselves to earn incomes that would make the process wholly unnecessary. Philadelphia Bulletin.

THE USE OF SHODDY.

[New York Commercial.]

Chief among those who "view with alarm" the present per capita consumption of shoddy, which, they imagine, is the result of the duty on wool, is the Boston Herald. It declares that no civilized country except the United States imposes a duty on wool, and that our policy has held the price of wool in this country "artificially" high, with the result that "we are now using to an unparalleled degree substitutes for wool in the manufacture of our textile fabrics." This, it adds, is unlike our experiences in the past, "and, we imagine, the experience of all civilized countries."

Now, as a matter of fact, shoddy, cotton and mungo are used to a far greater extent by the woolen manufacturers throughout most of the countries of Europe than they are used in the United States. Yet those countries are not only "civilized," but admit wool free, as the Herald says. It would thus appear that, if tariff duties have anything at all to do with the consumption of shoddy, free wool is equally guilty with the tariff.

industry and population, as compared The slow development of Canada in with the United States, is largely due to the fact that the crude products of Canadian farms, forests and mines have been shipped to the United States to be manufactured into finished products. Hitherto the immigration projects of the Dominion and Provincial governments have been worse than useless. The people's money has been wasted in bringing laborers to a market already glutted with laborers. If the Canadian government will only encourage the establishment of manufacturing industries for the utilization of Canadian raw materials it will have established an agency for immigration more efficacious than a legion of lectures and a million of maps. To substantiate this, one has only to look across the border at the immense Canadian population in the manufacturing towns of New England.-Correspondent Boston Transcript.