WHAT PROTECTION HAS DONE FOR AMERICA.

Evening Star, Issue 6761, 28 November 1884, Page 4

WHAT PROTECTION HAS DONE FOR AMERICA.

The state of trade in the United States is so bad, notwithstanding a more than usually abundant harvest, that it can scarcely fail to communicate a strong impetus to the Freetrade movement, which is rapidly gaining ground in the Western States. Manufacturers, especially those whose industries are heavily protected, are shutting down their mills. In Pennsylvania half the ironworks and glass factories have been closed. The Edgar Steel Company, which employs 5,000 men, has given notice to its operatives that they must either accept a reduction of wages, or the works will be stopped. In Pittsburg, the great manufacturing centre of the State, there are, it is estimated, as many as 4,000 tenements which have been vaoated by their recent occupants, owing to their inability to pay rent for them. So great, indeed, is the poverty, and so urgent the distress which prevails in that city, that at the close of the financial halfyear the poorhouse officials had pretty well exhausted the sum appropriated for the relief of the destitute during the current twelve months, leaving the second half of the year unprovided for. The depression in the steel and iron trade has become almost chronic. Eleven years ago Mr Powell, superintendent of the Clifton Ironworks, declared that "the entire rolling-mill, nail factory, and foundry interests of the Weßt were completely paralysed and rendered unproductive." In nine years, he said, Protection had augmented the cost of production 60 per cent.; not only so, but it had increased importations, and had permanently enfeebled the industry. At that time fully one-third of the American furnaces were out of blaßt; and in the following year, i e., in 1874, the trade journal of the Iron and Steel Manufacturers Association announced that half a million of workmen were out of employment, 200,000 of whom were iron-workers, coal and ore miners, and mechanics and laborers connected rfith this branch of industry. In March, 1876, the president of the Iron and Steel Association of Pennsylvania addressed a memorial to Congress, in which he stated that " one-half the furnaces and rolling-mills of the country were standing idle" ; that iron-master after iron-master was failing; and that the "wages of ironworkers were necessarily reduced so low that they and their families could scarcely escape destitution and starvation." Eight years previously, the Hon. John Covode, one of the protectionist representatives of Pennsylvania in Congress, had publicly declared that "American workmen were in deeper distress than ever before in the history of the country;" and since then, writes Mr T. 6. Shearman, in the September number of the 'North American Review, 1 "we have gone through still more distressing and disastrous periods, lasting from 1873 to 1878, and from 1882 to 1884, until to-day multitudes of protected American miners and mechanics are working for 50c or 80c (2a to 3s 4d) a day, without steady employment at those rates. The average rate of wages in American cotton mills, in proportion to the number of hours of work, is actually less than it is in England, and in marjy large branches of protected industry the rate of wages has fallen almost to the starvation point." In fact, American manufacturers are simply repeating the unhappy experience of the Mother Country from 1815 to 1846, while her principal industries were under the ban and blight of Protection. As a matter of course, the depression spoken of above has had a most injurious effect on the retail trade of the United States, where the failures during the first six months of the present year have been abnormally numerous, while those of Great Britain for the same period have been only 2,368, as compared with 6,662 for the first half of 1880. Several town and country banks in America have succumbed to the pressure of the times ; and the collapse of a great manufacturing firm like that of Stafford and Co., who have been losing money by their cotton mills at Fall River and Rhode Island for the last two years, and of the house of Burger, Hurlbut, and Livingston, an old sugar-refining firm in New York, was expected to be followed by the fall of many other establishments of equal magnitude. But the most alarming feiture of the commercial and manufacturing crisis in the United States is the probability of its being followed by a serious calamity in the grain trade. For, while it is stated that wheat ia cheaper in Chioago than it has been for a quarter of a century past, it is also cheaper in England than it has been for the last hundred years. In the former market it is 22 cents a bushel than it wbb a twelvemonth ago ; and we read of a railroad car of winter wheat, somewhat out of condition, having been sold at 45 cents per bushel. From this had to be deducted 35 cents for freig u t, leaving 10 cents (or sd) for the grower, out of which he had to pay commission and other incidental expenses. And for the time to come, American wheat will be exposed year by year to an increasingly active competition with that of India, where wheat can be grown, as has been shown by Dr Hunter, at Is 61 a bushel, and where there are thousands of square miles of fertile soil, which would speedily be brought under cultivation if the native farmer could calculate upon from 16s to 18s per quarter for his produce, Let the cry of agricultural distress once be raised in the Central and Western States of America, and the people of that country will make short work with the tariff. Already, as we learn from the letter of Mr Bookwalter, of Springfield, Ohio, manufacturer of agricultural machinery, published in the 'Pall Mall Gazette,' the Freetrade doctrine hai rooted itself so deeply in the popular mind in that part of the Union "that whole communities are already as much for Freetrade as Great Britain herself. There are at least 24,000,000 of the population engaged in agricultural pursuits, he tells us, and for every LlO invested in manufactures, there are L9O invested in land, while the mainstay of the railways, which have cost L 1,400,000,000 sterling, is the traffic in grain. Hence, when the battle comes to be fought out, there will be an immense preponderance of strength arrayed on the side of commercial freedom. At present, it appears, the American farmers are taxed to the extent of L 120,000,000 a-year in order to provide the protected industries with L 70,000,000, and it is suggested that it would be better to pension off the whole of the privileged manufacturers and their workmen than to submit to the existing system of spoliation. —'Argus.'