THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN.

Evening Star, Issue 10055, 11 July 1896, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN.

WHY M'KINLKY IS ULTRA PROTECTIONIST.

As to the question of M'Kinley’s stand upon Protection, it is but natural that he should be a high Protectionist. He is the great-grandson of an ironfouuder —a man who moulded bullets in the Revolutionary War. He is the son of one of the pioneer ironmasters of Ohio. All of his father s early enterprises grew out of the tariff on iron. M‘Kmley J s father was a Henry Clay Whig. Not one of the iron industries in Eastern Ohio, by which the elder M'Kinley made his bread, could ever have existed if it had not been for a high protective tariff. When MTvinlcy was a boy he was surrounded by men who made their living and supported their families out of industries which existed only by reason of Protection. As a youth, lie saw in the Mahoning Valley the beginnings of the iron and steel industries, which made out of the little village of Youngstown a city of 40,i»0'J inhabitants. His birthplace, Niles, was by protection converted from a country cross roads into a large manufacturing city. When he began practising law in Canton, 0., in 1807, that town had less than 4,000 inhabitants. Now, through protected industries, it counts a population of So,ooo. The Eighteenth District, which sent MTvinley to Congress, is covered with prosperous manufacturing towns like Massillon, Alliance, and Salem. The whole country surrounding Canton is a rich farming section, and the farmers have grown rich selling their farm products to the workmen in protected industries. Had it not been for protected industries, the population which now buys the farmers’ products would not bo there. E. V. Smalley, the well-known writer, was horn in Stark Comity (O.), and he says that in ids boyhood the farmers were so poor that he never saw among them a mattress or a single upholstered piece of furniture. The beds were of straw, and the ticks rested on cords strung to the bedstead rails. He contrasts the condition of the fanners then with the Stark County farmers now. Most of them, he says, have good banking accounts. The farmhouses are large, square brick structures, looking not unlike the homes of the small country gentry of England. It is in the heart of this prosperous and thriving manufacturing district that M'Kinley was born ; it was there that he passed his boyhood, his early manhood, and his maturity.—‘Argonaut.’