THE AMERICAN TARIFF QUESTION.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1180, 12 October 1894, Page 8

THE AMERICAN TARIFF QUESTION.

The New York correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald , writing under date August 18th, says that even tariff reformers will probably discover that the Tariff Bill, as amended by the Senate, which had just then passed the House, was at least a little better than the McKinley Bill. Two articles of prime necessity, wool and lumber, have been put on the free list, and if experience should show, as it almost certainly will, that neither the farmers nor the lumbermen are seriously injured by foreign competition, it will be easy to take a new and longer step in advance towards industrial freedom. It is especially fortunate that these articles should have been chosen to serve as object lessons of a more liberal economic policy. Many Republicans, as well as nearly all manufacturers of woollens, regardless of politics, have long been secretly in favour of free wool. Under no possible circumstances can this country produce the coarser wools which are needed for making carpets, nor is the home supply of the finer wools ever likely to be enough to meet the needs of the market. Within a radius of 10 miles from Independence Hall, in Philadelphia, more carpet is woven than in all Great Britain, and with the stimulus of free raw material the industry will surely take on yet more colossal proportions. No doubt, too, many foreign houses will followthe example of the English firm of Crossley and Sons, which has just bought out the million-dollar plant of a Philadelphia firm in order to be able to utilise in this country new» patterns and processes before they are pirated by American makers. To stimulate the cutting down of American forests by a duty on foreign lumber has also long been recognised by all intelligent people as an act of criminal folly. In Canada the population is so scanty that the forests renew themselves as fast as they can be thinned out, but on this side of the line the rivers each year rise higher and fall lower, simply because tli6 disappearance of the forests has destroyed the reservoir provided by nature in the roots of the trees for the conservation of the rain supply. Many of the choicest Canadian timber tracts, too, are owned, either directly or indirectly, by American capitalists, and a great part of the profits of the business on both sides of the border will go into American pockets. Indeed, the longer and more closely a cool-headed man looks at what has been done, the firmer will grow his conviction that since the country is evidently not yet prepared for more than an experimental dose of Freetrade, a test case such as is now afforded is exactly what is really to the best interest of sound economic doctrines.