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On April 24 Benton McMillin [Tenn.], of the majority of the committee, replied to Judge Kelley. He said in conclusion:

I have no apprehension as to who will be victor in the battle about to be waged between legitimate taxation and that oppressive taxation which is invoked to aid trusts and make pooling profitable. The people have waited long and patiently. But at last they are aroused. Their voice comes thundering through these halls demanding reduction of taxes. "Justice has had to travel with a leaden heel, but is ready to strike with an iron hand." The procession for the relief of the tax-payer is moving. There are but two places about this processionone after it, the other under it. Seek to-day, sirs, whether you prefer to follow and aid it, or go down under it and be crushed by it. [Prolonged applause.]

Julius C. Burrows [Mich.], of the minority of the committee, then spoke. Addressing his remarks to the President's message, he said:

That the plan of the President and his party, if carried into execution, as proposed in this bill, would prove disastrous to American industries and American labor cannot be questioned. It is impossible to secure the necessary reduction of revenue by the abolition or lowering of duties without exposing our domestic industries to the most ruinous foreign competition. But the President seeks to allay public apprehension in this regard by declaring that in the execution of this plan care will be taken not to cripple or destroy our manufactures or work "loss of employment to the workingman or the lessening of his wages." As if his plan could be carried out without working such a result!

On April 25 William D. Bynum [Ind.], of the majority of the committee, spoke exhaustively, answering, one by one, the objections to the bill. In conclusion he said:

Mr. Chairman, the last and certainly the weakest argument that has been urged against the passage of the bill under discussion and in favor of higher duties upon imports is that we should increase duties so as to prohibit importations and thereby raise the price of all products, in order that we may not, in case of a sudden attack or invasion, be dependent upon

other countries for supplies. To declare that it is necessary for us to compel one class of citizens to pay tribute to another, in order that we may constantly be prepared for a sudden invasion upon every side, is to declare that the great lights. which have illumined the world and inspired the hopes of mankind for two thousand years may go out in a twinkling. As for myself, I indulge in no such fears. Rather than dwell in the ages of the past, clad in armor, with spear in hand, I prefer to live in the present, and in the glorious anticipation of a higher and grander future, when all nations shall be banded together in one solemn compact to peaceably arbitrate all differences. [Great applause.]

On April 30 Isidor Rayner [Md.] spoke, ending with an appeal to his fellow Democrats to unite in support of the bill as presented by the committee.

I am for revenue reform because I am a Democrat; not of that sort of democracy that gathers its inspiration from the blast furnaces of Pennsylvania or the woolen mills of New England, but a democracy that can point to Mount Vernon's shades and Monticello's heights and say that from the day of its birth it has been the mortal enemy of monopoly; and when it strikes it down, as strike it down it will, upon its ruins it will live. Its manhood asserted, its promises fulfilled, and its honor vindicated, it will receive under the leadership of him who leads it now, and who, in my opinion, is as fearless a foe as corruption ever encountered, the renewed fealty of the people; but if it yields to the tempter's touch, if it breaks its ranks and locks hands with the monopolists who have been gathering their iniquitous toll for a quarter of a century at the ports of entry of this Republic, and who are here now infesting the avenues of legislation, then in my opinion its handwriting is on the wall and its destiny is closed, for treachery can never triumph and a lie can never live. [Great applause.]

William L. Wilson [W. Va.], of the majority of the committee, spoke on May 3.

That which confronts us to-day is a condition of prolonged, excessive taxation, of a surplus flowing into the treasury which can be gotten out again only by using it to buy the bonds of the Government at the market premium; of a surplus that by the end of the present fiscal year, without such purchase, will drain

away from the channels of trade and commerce one-tenth part of all the money usually in circulation among the people.

That, sir, is the condition, and, as in the past, so now there is no statesmanship on the other side of this House that can meet it. Acknowledging an allegiance higher than that which they owe the people in framing a tariff system, they stand helpless before the great task of tariff reduction. Even in their

debates here they are "many men of many minds."

We have had twenty-five years of protection in this country and the fruits of it. Proposing to be a policy for the making and maintenance of wages, it tells us nothing of the growing antagonism between labor and capital that has marked the recent history of our country; of the unsatisfactory relations between employer and employed; of the long industrial depressions; of the twenty and odd thousand strikes, and the twenty and odd hundred lockouts in our industrial establishments during the past six years alone, with the resulting loss of $60,000,000 in wages to labor; of the building up of great wealth by favoritism, which tries to hold on to its privileges by corrupting the ballot box and intimidating voters; of the centralization of manufactures into a few great corporations, and the recent combination of these into trusts. Of all these, Mr. Chairman, we hear nothing in our discussions.

It urges the restoration of our merchant marine, which it has helped to sweep from the seas, by subsidies, that word of evil omen in a republic, contact with which has never failed to bring shame upon Congress and a stain upon our national honor.

Such, Mr. Chairman, are some of the fruits of twenty-five years of protection; such are some of the ideas with which it is educating our people; such is the career of profligate expenditure along which it is urging us in order to escape any reduction of taxes which may work a lessening of its bounties.

Here the speaker denounced the protective system as the builder of trusts. He said in conclusion:

All we can hope for the future greatness of this country. hangs upon the present issue; and in the sentiment and somewhat in the words of Mr. Speaker, whoever may falter and whoever may fail, the people of the country mean that its glorious destinies shall be preserved; that they shall be transmitted unimpaired to posterity; that the country shall not belong to monopolists on the one hand or to communists on the other, but shall be, as it was designed to be, a government of the people,

by the people, and for the people. [Great applause, and cries of "Vote! Vote!"]

Nelson Dingley [Me.] opposed the bill. He addressed his remarks principally to Mr. Mills' speech.

Where are the facts to support the ingenious theory of the gentleman from Texas that the American laborer receives less pay than the foreign laborer in proportion to the amount of work he accomplishes? How does he arrive at this conclusion? Why, the simple fact that so many hundreds of thousands of foreigners come to our shores to improve their condition, and that none go to Europe from this country for this purpose, is a complete demonstration that they secure better wages for the same amount of work.

Driven to the wall, the last refuge of the free-trader is in the assumption that our protective policy has nothing to do with maintaining our higher wages, but that these wages are the result solely of our cheap land and our abundant natural

resources.

"Demand and supply make wages," says the gentleman from Texas. True. But the protective policy comes in to encourage and establish new industries and new opportunities for labor, and thus increases the demand and necessarily tends to raise the rate of wages, not simply in manufacturing industries, but also in every other employment within the reach of the demand for labor which they create.

The gentleman from Texas devoted much time to an attempt to show that manufacturers, and not their employees, reap the whole benefit of protective duties.

The simple answer to this allegation is that the active competition going on in all kinds of business in this country prevents manufacturers from reaping larger rewards for their investments than is obtained in other kinds of business. Statisties of dividends, furnished by Mr. Edward Atkinson, an authority which the gentleman from Texas accepts as reliable, show that the average annual profits of the manufacturing establishments of New England in the last fifteen years were only 6 per cent.

Indeed, Mr. Atkinson states that the proportion of product received by capital has been steadily declining, and that received by labor steadily increasing.

Now, the gentleman from Tennessee [Mr. McMillin] congratulated the country that "we have reached a point for the

consideration of a bill looking to the reduction of the taxes on the necessaries of life." Surely there is not much reason for congratulation on this score in view of a bill which proposes to impose a "tax" of 65 per cent. on rice and 68 per cent. on sugar-two articles which by common consent are as necessary as flour in every poor man's family, and articles, too, produced to so small an extent in this country that the duty is nearly all added to the price. [Applause.]

But let us look further into this bill. It proposes to make wool, lime, manufactured lumber, wood and chemical pulp, and farm products cheaper by allowing them to be imported free of duty from other countries where the labor required to produce these materials is cheaper than here.

Mr. Chairman, what I desire to ask the distinguished chairman of the Ways and Means Committee is, if it is a good thing to avail ourselves of the manufactured lumber, the wood pulp, the lime, the wool, and the farm products supplied by the cheaper labor of other countries, and give up producing these articles here, or else bring our labor down to the foreign standard, why then is it not a good, aye, a better, thing to also allow all the more advanced manufactures which can be made abroad more cheaply by labor paid less wages than here to come in free of duty? [Applause.]

The chief reason given by the gentleman from Texas for placing on the free list these so-called "raw materials" was to thereby cheapen our manufactured products, so as to be able to better compete with European manufacturing nations in foreign markets.

The gentleman from Indiana [Mr. Bynum] seemed to think that if we only had free wool our woolen mills would at once be able to find valuable foreign markets for their goods.

Now, if with the raw material of cotton cheaper than our British competitors we have been able to export only a few goods, in which there is but a fraction of labor, how does the gentleman suppose we should be able to compete in foreign markets with woolen goods in which the labor is a much larger element?

No, Mr. Chairman, free wool would not add to our foreign markets for woolen goods so long as our labor costs so much more than does the labor of our foreign competitors. That is the sole reason why we cannot compete in foreign markets with manufactured articles into which much labor enters, except in cases of specialties which circumstances have made peculiar to this country.

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