half the trade and commerce of the world; and it is equally absurd to insist that protection and restriction which produced nothing but pauperism while maintained in England in the interests of their aristocracy, will either develop trade or commerce between us and other countries, or add to the wages or comforts of our laborers in any broad sense, so long as we maintain it alone in the interest of the machinery owned by the manufacturers of this country, to the destruction of all other interests and industries.

If anything else is needed to show the value of trade and commerce to a people, the official statistics of England's progress prove it. They show that while her population has increased from 26,500,000 in 1841 to 35,000,000 in 1881, the able-bodied paupers who had to be supported by taxation in England and Wales decreased from 201,000 in 1849 to 111,000 in 1880, and the number of criminal convictions from 34,000 in 1840 to 15,600 in 1881. The taxable incomes of her people, excluding Ireland, increased from £251,000,000 in 1842 to £582,000,000 in 1880, an increase of 130 per cent., while her population increased only 33. The value of her annual exports was swollen from £51,000,000 in 1840 to £223,000,000 in 1880, an increase of 450 per cent.; while the annual savings of the working classes, leaving out of account the increased comfort and advantages afforded by cheap food and materials, are estimated to have increased from £24,500,000 in 1840 to £76,500,000 in 1880.

Mr. Gladstone, who is recognized by all men everywhere as an intelligent, far-seeing statesman, made a speech at Leeds, a few years ago, in which he contrasted our trade under protection in the neutral markets of the world with that of England, now and at the periods when our tariff was at the lowest and their protection was the highest and the most prohibitory. He said:

As for America and her system of protection, he pointed out that in those countries or markets where they met on comparatively equal footing the exports from America amounted to only 4,751,000 pounds, while those from the United Kingdom to the same quarter amounted to 78,140,000 pounds. "America," said Mr. Gladstone, "is a young country, with enormous vigor and enormous internal resources. She has committed-I say it, I hope not with disrespect-I say it with strong and cordial sympathy, but with much regret—she is committing errors of which we set her an example. But from the enormous resources of her home market, the development of which internally is not touched by protection, she is able to commit those errors with less fatal consequences upon her people than we experienced when we committed them; and the enormous development of American resources within casts almost entirely into the shade the puny character of the exports of her manufactures to the neutral markets of the world."

He similarly contrasted the trade of Germany, France, Russia, and Holland, and proved that they as well were entirely thrown into the shade by the maligned free-trade of Britain. Not only so, he pointed out that in 1842 America controlled four-fifths of her shipping trade with Britain, while now, in 1881, the scales were exactly reversed, and

Britain did four-fifths of the business, and that the best, and America only picked up their leavings.

The statesmen of England who broke down the long-cherished protective policy of that country met with an opposition as determined as the monopolists of this country now present to any attempt to curtail or diminish their privileges, and on the same grounds. Joint debates were had before the people. There Mr. Cobden, Mr. Bright, and their adherents laid down the following proposition:

That in the opinion of this meeting the corn laws and every other law which protects one class at the expense of other classes must prove injurious to the national prosperity, and therefore, all monopolies, whether passed under the pretext of benefiting the agricultural, colonial, or manufacturing interests, onght to be immediately abolished.

They were met by the advocates of the landed aristocracy and other protected interests with the following counter-proposition, which every protectionist in America repeats to-day as an answer to all propositions for relief:

That protection to native industry, particularly to the agriculture of the country, is essential to the well-being of the state, and any attempt, however plausible, to abolish that protection and further depreciate the productions of our own soil will only end in the spread of inevitable ruin throughout the rural districts, and ultimately deprive the manufacturers of their best and surest customers.

In this country, to-day, the protected combinations are struggling for the maintenance of their right to rob, through Congressional subsidies, all the consumers of this country, as earnestly as the landed aristocracy of England struggled to maintain the right to force the mass of the people to pay double price for their products, and they base their demands on the same patriotic pretenses.

No higher evidence of the prosperity brought to a country by unre stricted trade and the reflected benefis derived by other countries from its enlarged commerce can be furnished than is exhibited by our own official reports of our exports and imports to and from foreign countries. So long as England maintained her high protective tariff system, her purchases from us outside of cotton amounted to comparatively nothing. Last year our total exports were, in round numbers, $703,000,000, of which England and her possessions bought $424,000,000, and all the balance of the world took only $279,000,000. Our imports from the British possessions were $244,000,000, so that they bought from us $180,000,000 more than we bought from them. Our imports from Great Britain proper were less than 13 per cent. of their exports, while they took over 50 per cent. of ours.

If protection to home markets is to be the international policy hereafter, and that is the demand now made by the Republican party, its rainous effect upon all American industries outside of those protected or licensed by Congress to rob our own people must be apparent to all thinking men. Surely England with more than half of the world's trade and commerce in her hands, and with all the other nations of the

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 competi tion, 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 coa

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 import 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 aud 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.