Commentary on tarriff's and their affect on Ball & Hemingray

COMMENT

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By Wilber E. Sutton

OURSELVES FIRST. —

THE difference between good times and bad times in the United States, so far as his­tory indicates, is the difference be­tween an adequate protective tariff for the products of our farms and our factories and an inadequate tariff.

College professors, international­ists and theorists generally may speculate and ponder and glow with beneficent smiles upon the beauties of the brotherhood of man as exemplified by free trade, but the hard part remains that so far as the United States is concerned we must protect our own people against the cheap labor and the cheaply made products of other lands or we are putting ourselves on the level of those countries that our own inter­nationalists laud, but would not live in.

It is a fine sentiment, of course, to remove all trade barriers so that the lowly black of the Congo district who is willing to work for nothing a day, or a cent a day, or what have you, may send his rice to the Ameri­can breakfast table in competition with the rice that is produced in Arkansas or Louisiana, but what profits it you, if you are in any kind of business or profession, to benefit the lowly African if you are, thereby, to impoverish the rice farmers of the United States?

Let us get down to Muncie. Labor in the glass fatories [sic] factories of Belgium can be had for about half the price, for all purposes, that the Ball Brothers Company and the Hemingray Company pay here. Now break down the tariff barriers and doubtless Muncie housewives could buy their fruit jars a few cents cheaper on the dozen in the canning season than they pay for them now, and maybe Belgian-made glass insulators which also are made by the Hemingray Company, could be had by the telephone and telegraph companies more cheaply than Phil McAbee and Paul Zimmerman, and those folks out at the Hemingray office could sell them for, but if you shut down the Ball and Hemingray factories, and then, carrying out the same free trade or low tariff idea to other manufactured products where origin is Muncie, what is anybody in busi­ness or in any profession, or any­ body working for a living here, going to do to live?

Probably this kind of talk ought to be shoved over into the regular editorial columns, but I wished to make the local application, newspapers are filled with the pro­paganda of the so-called coalition of alleged Republican from the western states, and Democrats in the Senate. The coalitionists are not Republi­cans and never have been. They are trying to fool the farmer by making him believe that when the farmer can buy a spool of yarn a few cents cheaper through low tariff on yarn, even though the farmer never uses yarn, the farmer is benefitted although the actual truth is that the farmer is destroying the market for his own wool by standing for such a policy.