world to trade with. can get clear of the 13 per cent. of her exports that we now take much easier than we can get rid of the 60 per cent. of our exports, nearly all of them the product of unprotected agricultural industry, which her people take, even if we give her no credit for buying our beef and pork and giving it character and standing in foreign markets as being sound and wholesome, when the leading continental nations of Europe are prohibiting its sale to their people on the ground that it is diseased and unfit for use.

Turning from these general questions, even if I have to be guilty of repetition, to a more careful examination of the effect of restricted markets on labor. It is hard to speak in respectful terms of the false pretenses by which the protected monopolists seek to delude the people. I have read about Pharisees, hypocrites and wolves in sheep's clothing, but history shows no such instance of unblushing and shameless effrontery as the Republican platform proposes. The proposition which the protected organizations make to the laboring men of America, indeed to all the people, stripped of its varnish, is: If you will enable us to exclude competition from abroad, give us control of the American market for home-made goods, and enable us to sell what we manufacture at our own prices, which we through trusts and combinations know how to maintain at satisfactory rates, by limiting production through closed doors and strikes to the wants of the home market, we will agree that you shall have all the whisky, beer, and tobacco you want at the cheapest rates, free from all taxation.

The insincerity of the assumption that the Republican leaders propose to restrict the sales of manufactured goods to those they produce in the interest of American workmen, is intensified tenfold by the fact shown by the record, that they struggled for years to flood the country with the most degraded character of Chinese labor, and as soon as the war tariff gave them a monopoly of production on their own terms, they passed laws which they maintained and enforced for over twenty years, authorizing the importation, free of duty, under contracts to be enforced by penalties and liens upon property acquired, the cheapest and most depraved class of pauper labor from all parts of the earth, in order to force American workmen under pressure from such competition to accept the lowest wages they could force them down to by this competition, or be driven out of their protected establishments. Yet they pose to-day before the country as the special champions of American labor. Do they propose to secure or guaranty to the American laborers they employ, out of the bounty, subsidy, or protection they demand that Congress shall force the tax-payers to give them, either steady work or higher wages than they can get any foreign pauper imported, duty free, to do it for? Will this legislation they demand secure to American workmen any rights which they are bound to respect? Of course not. They protest against his right to buy anything required for the comfort or want of himself and his family as cheaply as other people obtain

them because that would diminish their profits. They will cheerfully consent to let him have free cheap whisky and tobacco, because all the tax collected from them goes into the Treasury, which they regard as an outrage on them, and they thank God that they are too virtuous and patriotic to deal in such products, except in their "pluck me stores," where most of their laborers' wages are swallowed up. They parade their contempt for cheap goods for workmen on all occasions.

The political biographers of General Harrison quote with pride and satisfaction the profound statesmanship and intense interest exhibited by him for the working classes, when he announced in what they call his great speech in March last:

I am one of those uninstructed political economists that have an impression that some things may be too cheap, that I can not find myself in full sympathy with this demand for cheaper coats, which seems to me necessarily to involve a cheaper man and woman under the coat.

If that means anything it means that the man who gets a coat for 10 bushels of wheat, or the woman who gets a dress for 50 pounds of butter, is a cheap man or woman, while they would be highly respectable in General Harrison's estimation if they had paid 20 bushels of wheat and 100 pounds of butter for the same coat and dress to some protected pet of Congress, to whom they are compelled by law to pay double what the people to whom they are obliged to sell their wheat and butter offered them the same things for.

Machinery is, day by day, supplanting human factory labor. It neither eats, drinks, nor wears any product of human industry except coal, and needs no protection against any other like machine anywhere. As the proportion of machine work increases and human work decreases the proportion of increase of price which protection gives goes in a like or greater ratio into the pockets of the machine-owners. The machine is the laborer in whose behalf the organized bands that fill our lobbies are so clamorous in their demand for protection. Of course, as the owners of the machinery control the work of both hands and machines, when demand for products is slack or the supply exceeds it, the owner drops the human labor first as far as possible, and limits products, if he produces at all, to what the machines, aided by the least amount of human labor, can do, so that all, or the lion's share, of the high price which protection secures may be retained by him.

It will be a striking evidence of the power of employers over their workingmen, or of the credulity, not to say ignorance, of that class of men, if the organized lobbyists succeed in making them believe that their welfare, or the desire to keep up their wages, enters into the contest now being waged. The contract-labor laws under which they imported pauper labor during all the years they controlled the Government; the struggles made by their leaders, General Harrison included, to flood the country with Chinese, sending the money to China and importing ten thousand of them at a time, as the managers of the Central Pacific Railroad did, give the lie to all their professions

of sympathy with high-priced American labor. The records of the country show that while they require all the people to pay them 47 per cent. more for their goods than they could be bought for in the markets where cotton, wheat, and all other farm products have to be sold, they required Congress to maintain and enforce laws enabling them to im port the cheapest and most degraded foreign labor, duty free, to run the machinery, and thus drive out the American workmen, or reduce their wages to starvation rates, and they do it all under the guise of philanthropy and patriotism, and in the name of the Lord.

The time has come when even the colored men who labor from January till December in the cotton fields owe it to themselves to ask General Harrison and his supporters what justice is there in forcing them to pay to a few American manufacturers 47 per cent. more for the clothes they wear and the things they must have than they were offered the same things for in the foreign markets in which they are compelled to sell the cotton they labored so hard to raise and prepare for market. The farmers of the North and West may well ask the same questions. They know that they only receive for their products so much of the foreign open market prices as remains after deducting therefrom all costs of transportation, insurance, commission, interest, and the buyer's profit; and after all that they are to be forced for all time to come to pay $147 to home manufacturers for the same things they were offered at $100 where their products were sold; their only consolation being that the American home market is protected, and a few hundred pets of Congress are made millionaires at their expense, and are thus enabled to contribute liberally to Republican campaign funds and literature, to buy the votes of all who are purchasable and corrupt all who are corruptible, and through a venal hired press deceive the ignorant, and denounce as enemies of their country all who oppose their schemes of plunder.

The machinery of the capitalist is the only laborer that is really protected. It has secured to its owners, by the aid of Congress, the colossal fortunes so many of them have built up. The free pauper labor of the world, which regulates the wages paid to the human labor employed here, on the universal principle of supply and demand, does not and can not compete with or diminish the profits Congress gives as a subsidy to protected machinery. The Republican party have for a long time secured the lion's share of the home market to the machine owners. They propose now, under the false pretense of protecting American. human labor, to give them the absolute power to plunder the American consumers of the products of their machines to any extent they please by imposing stronger prohibition than ever against their right to buy elsewhere; yet they have the audacity to appeal to the laboring men of the country to help them to do it, while they openly threaten to cut down the wages of all their employés and thus retain the protection to their own machine-work as high as it is now if the representatives of the people dare to curtail their present extortions. They have hundreds of millions at stake, and they will spend their money freely to win it.

The American Protective Tariff League boasted some months ago of having $100,000 on hand for "educational organizations," and Mr. Foster's "fat-frying" process will doubtless produce ample corruption funds, while some campaign secretary may again enlighten the country by publishing the correspondence of distinguished aspirants for Cabinet positions or foreign missions as to the amounts they agree to pay for public offices. Fortunately the great mass of the American people are not for sale, and neither Mr. Carnegie nor any of the subsidized band can either buy, delude, or frighten them. With the markets for protected products restricted to home consumption the employé whose daily bread is earned by his daily labor is at the mercy of his employer.

Trusts and combinations regulate production as well as prices. Shops, foundries, and factories may be, and often are, closed for months or worked on half time, and the owners make money while they are closed by the enhanced price of the product as the supply diminishes. The laborer gets no part of it. He is the victim of enforced idleness. The wages he earned while at work are consumed while he is idle. The protection of 47 per cent. only protects the goods. Every laboring man would rather contract for steady work all the year at $2 a day which he was assured of than take the chance of getting $3 a day while at work, with the risk of idleness or half work half the time. If, added to steady work, he could buy all he needed for himself and family each day for a dollar and the same things now cost him a dollar and a half, he surely would be better off. While all these questions have been argued with great ability, both in and out of Congress, and will doubtless be presented with much elaboration all over the country, no one has presented the false pretenses of the protected classes with more power, or shown more clearly by official statements the small proportion that labor bears to the value of protected manufactured products, than the distinguished Senator from Texas, Mr. Coke, in a speech made during the present session, from which I take the liberty to quote as follows:

Of the 17,392,099 of our people engaged in all kinds of industry, only 2,623,089 are employed “in such manufacturing industries as are claimed to be benefited by a high tariff." The farmers, persons employed in professional and personal service, domestic servants and laborers, merchants and tradesmen, carpenters and joiners, masons and bricklayers, blacksmiths, tailors, butchers, bakers, plasterers, milliners, and people engaged in railroading, and other forms of transportation, and in other miscellaneous occupations, numbering altogether 14,769,010, the people who perform six-sevenths of the labor done in this country, are thoroughly skinned and fleeced under the operation of the tariff. They are taxed in everything they eat, drink, and wear; in everything that enters into the construction of their houses; in their furniture; in their tools and implements; in everything they handle or tonch while living, and in their coffins and grave clothes after their death, they, American laboring people, not engaged in any protected industry and not benefited by the tariff, are thus taxed in all they consume in the name of protection to American labor.

Six-sevenths of our American laborers, groaning and staggering under the burdens of a war tariff which enriches others but impoverishes them, after the war has been over for nearly twenty-five years, are solemnly informed that they

must continue to bear the burden for the sake and good of American labor. The ax ioms of good government, which among other things demand such measures of policy as shall produce the greatest good for the greatest number, have been reversed in the tariff legislation, which taxes oppressively the great mass of the people in order that a few may become inordinately rich, and all is done in the name and is alleged to be for the benefit of the American working-man, who in fact suffers more than all others from it, while his employers, the lords of the loom, and of the foundries and furnaces, have become the richest people in America.

These self-constituted guardians of the laboring man, who have become so sleek and fat, while their wards, the laboring men, are thin and lean, the advocates of a high tariff from pure charity to the American working-man, as they would have us believe, inform the country, that the sole purpose for which they desire a highly protective tariff is that they may be re-imbursed the difference between the high wages paid American working-men and the low wages paid European operatives. This, they say, is all they ask or desire. With the difference between American and European wages placed in the shape of a tariff tax on foreign goods brought into our markets, high protectionists tell us they have no fear of the competition of the foreign goods with their domestic products. Always and every time their argument centers in and is based wholly on the interests of the working-man. Capital desires nothing and receives nothing through the tariff, and the working-man gets all, says the protectionist. In order to show the utter falsity and groundlessness of this claim, I read a tabulated statement furnished me from the Bureau of Statistics, which throws a flood of light on this subject, as follows:

Table of specified manufactures, showing amount of capital, value of materials, amount of wages, and value of product, with the per cent. of material and wages, also the average ad valorem rate of duty on similar importations for the fiscal year 1887.

It required either unparalleled impudence or profound contempt for the intelligence of the people, or a combination of both, for the Republicans to declare in their platform that the Mills bill is a free-trade