THE WOOLLEN DUTIES OF AMERICA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9021, 6 April 1888, Page 6

THE WOOLLEN DUTIES OF AMERICA.

Oub New Zealand protectionists must be praying that their fellow-workers in the States may be successful in maintaining the duties on wool, and thu3 preventing New Zealand growers from finding a profitable market in America. The New York Herald, in a leading article, ha 3 the following on the woollen duties :—" But this is not all The great American wool-grower is not only a common swindler in his attitude towards the mass of his countrymen, the poor, and people of small and limited means. He is a fraud in his relations to the workmen who gain their precarious living in the woollen factories. There is more labour in the manufacture of the rich man's goods than in the coarser and cheaper good 3 worn by the mass of the people. Ths hypocritical pretence of the wool and other protectionists is that they desire by high, duties to protect the American working-man employed in manufacturing. If they were sincere in this they would lay the heaviest duties on the highest class goods, because the making of these involves the use of the most labour, and in these goods labour bears the greatest proportion to cost of material. But, as has been shown by the examples above, throughout this schedule adopted by the republicans they have carefully put the highest duties on the coarser goods, in which the least labour is used. That is to say, they have skilfully and heavily discriminated against the workingmen employed in the American woollen factories. This republican revision of the wool and woollen tariff, made by protectionists, and adopted by the protectionists of the Ways and Means, deliberately strikes at eeveral now prosperous American industries by depriving them of their free raw material—free under the existing tariff; thun just as deliberately robs the masses of the people, while it shields the wealthy classes, and finally diecriminates heavily against the labour employed in American wool factories. And this is called ' protection to American industry.' It ie in fact a prodigious Bcheme of robber/ under the colour of taxation, without the least excuse, because the chief requirement now is to decrease the taxes and thus get rid of the surplus."