July 21, 1888 Vol. IV, No. 3Whole No. 81

THE STANDARD FOR THE CAMPAIGN.

Subscriptions to THE STANDARD from now to the close of the campaign will be received at the following rates:

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“The Standard” is sent this week to a number of persons whose friends have paid to have the paper forwarded to them for four weeks in the hope that they may be induced to read it, examine the principles it advocates and become regular subscribers. Those who receive the paper without having ordered it will understand that it has been sent in this manner and will be sent for four successive weeks without charge to them.

Terms of subscription will be found on the fourth page.

CONTENTS.

The Accession of Judge Reid. Prison Labor. Guaranteed Not to Strike. The Golden Calf. Our Mercantile Marine. Political Patronage in New York. Pen, Paste and Scissors. What Will Come of the Phonograph. The Single Tax. The Alabama Labor Party and the Tariff Fight. For Ohio Men. Sentiment of the Northwest. New Ideas, Methods and Inventions. The Gill Conspiracy Case. Good God, Good Devil. Some Figures from the Census. Campaign “Standard” Fund. Society Notes. Men and Things. Some Facts About Shoes. Telling Figures. The Taxation Problem in East St. Louis. Straws Which Show the Wind. The Free Wool Vote. Current Thought. The Beating of the Drums. Hamatreya (poem). The Story of My Exile.

Single tax men will read with delight the interview we reprint from the Nashville Democrat, in which Judge Frank T. Reid, the leading republican of Tennessee, publicly announces his determination to support Cleveland and Thurman in this election, and gives his reasons for it.

Judge Reid is a man of clean character, of high standing in his profession, and of great popularity, especially, the local papers say, among the ex-confederate soldiers; and he is, moreover, a powerful speaker. He is the only man in the state whom the democrats of Tennessee have had any reason to fear since their coming into power after the war. Four years ago, when he was the republican nominee for governor against Bate, he ran far ahead of his ticket, both national and state, and, to use the words of the Memphis Appeal, “came nearer than a Georgetown grazier to breaking our bank,” falling short of election by only some three thousand votes—a marvelous result in Tennessee. That such a man, who, four years ago, was an out and out protectionist, should now declare for Cleveland, because Cleveland represents the attack on protection, is a notable and significant event. But still more notable and significant is the position he takes and the reasons he assigns. He has not ceased to be a high protectionist to become a low protectionist, or to become that illogical nondescript, the advocate of a tariff for revenue only. In ceasing to be a protectionist, he has become a free trader in the full and true sense of the term. He wants not merely to abolish protective duties, but to abolish revenue duties as well. And not merely to make trade free, but to make free all those processes of production of which trade is only a part. Judge Reid, in short, declares for Cleveland and Thurman because, as he announces, he has become a single tax man; because he has come to see the economic beauty and far reaching benefits of abolishing all the taxes that bear on labor, lessen wealth and promote monopoly, and in their stead relying for public revenues upon a tax levied on land values irrespective of improvements—a tax that would not only impose no burden on labor, no restriction upon production, but would directly break up that greatest of all monopolies, the monopoly of natural opportunities, and throw open to labor the natural factor of wealth and the never failing source of remunerative employment. Judge Reid does not imagine that Mr. Cleveland represents this principle, still less that the democratic party as at present constituted represents it, but he does see, as every clear sighted man must see, that they are moving in this direction—that they are taking the first steps in the march that can only end in the single tax; that although they may not realize it, they are in this stage of the movement doing as effective (nay, even more effective) work for us as we could do ourselves. And so, leaving his old party affiliations, he comes out boldly and unreservedly for Cleveland and Thurman, throwing his whole weight and influence upon the free trade side of the practical issue.

The coming out of Judge Reid for the democratic national ticket has produced a great political sensation in Tennessee. The

p. 1, col. 2 comments of the democratic press are interesting. The Nashville Democrat welcomes him with much rejoicing, declaring that—

The defection of a man of Judge Reid’s character and ability, a man who polled the largest vote any candidate of his party ever received for governor in this state, and who made for it the ablest canvass ever made for his party in Tennessee, against a trained, skillful, able and eloquent disputant, is no small matter.

It editorially emphasizes his objection to protection, but prudently adds:

In regard to Judge Reid’s single tax idea, that is to say, the Henry George theory of taxation, it is unnecessary for the Democrat to say that it does not agree with him. Nor does it believe that the government ever will abandon the policy of collecting its taxes to a large extent by a tariff on foreign importations. Judge Reid does not, of course, consider Mr. Cleveland or the democratic party in sympathy with his single tax idea or in favor of a sweeping and complete abolition of all tariff duties. But he hopes that when the pretensious^sic of protection have been exposed that the people will be ready to give a more impartial hearing to his theory. Undoubtedly, this much is true; but this impartial hearing will, we doubt not, result in a firm refusal to make such radical and, as we believe, unsound changes in our system of taxation. This time will never come^sic when we shall have no tariff; but it will come when it will be levied for revenue and not for private subsidy.

The Nashville American, also democratic, is not so well pleased. It likes his determination to support Cleveland, but not his doing so as a single tax man. “The act,’ it says^sic,”is better than the reason.” And thus it goes on to clear the democracy of any imputation of being favorable to Judge Reid’s views:

The Courier-Journal in flaming lines says: “Judge Reid has become a convert to democratic principles.” We deny this. He has become a convert to the Henry George idea of putting all taxes on land; collecting nothing on imported goods, nor on bonds or money, nor on personal property of any kind, but putting the entire taxes for the federal, state, county and city on the lands, and Judge Reid does Cleveland the great wrong of saying that he supports him because his doctrine will lead to the Henry George land system—removing all taxes from everything but land.

No such calamity could befall Mr. Cleveland or the country as to have the masses believe what Judge Reid says he believes—that his election will lead to a single tax—the the land tax idea^sic of Henry George.

And we emphatically deny that this is democratic doctrine.

There is nothing communistic about Mr. Cleveland; he has not even taken the first step—he is [illegible] free trader.

The leading democratic paper of the state, the Memphis Appeal, is not troubled by the fears of the American, and is not disposed to accentuate differences of such little practical moment in the present as that between tariff reduction and the single tax. It declares in its biggest head lines that—

THE BRAINIEST REPUBLICAN OF THE STATE JOINS THE VICTORS.

THE CANDIDATE FOR GOVERNOR AGAINST BATE BECOMES ONE OF US.

In a double leaded editorial it declares that Judge Reid’s coming to the support of Cleveland is significant of a great democratic success in November. Alluding to the manner in which he came near carrying the state in 1884, when “every prominent democrat recognized the danger of his nomination,” and he justified their fears by increasing the republican vote from 98,108 to 125,279, it goes on:

Mr. Reid is a strong man, and on the stump has few equals. He is a man of more than ordinary abilities, and in espousing the cause of Cleveland and Thurman upon the democratic platform, will no doubt make himself felt in the canvass. The state democratic committee should see to it that Mr. Reid has an opportunity of speaking to the public as often as he may find it convenient, especially in the cities and larger towns, where there are great numbers of workingmen who will gladly listen to an exposition of the tariff by a man who has made it a study and has been convinced that protection is a wrong that he cannot support.

On the following day the Appeal recurs to the matter, insisting that the democratic state committee should get Judge Reid on the democratic stump:

His voice will be more effective for democracy this year than it was for republicanism in 1884. He will explain protection as he once believed in it and can tell by what processes he reasoned himself out of so gross and offensive a political heresy and into the light of free trade. He can explain what a boon lies in the sections of the Mills bill for the labor of the land, and can make plain the dreadful effects of protection to degrade labor, to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, to build up classes and repeat upon this continent the extremes of caste, as they are to be found in the palaces and the slums of London, Vienna, Berlin, Paris and St. Petersburg. Mr. Reid has never spoken as freely and proudly on any subject as he can on the differences between the democratic and republican platforms, and we trust he may seek and find as many opportunities of doing so as the claims of his profession will permit, and by helping to spread his cherished doctrines help in perpetuating the ascendancy of the democratic party in Tennessee “by a large majority.”

The Appeal is right about it. No man can explain the “dreadful effects of protection to degrade labor” like the man who realizes the connection between what is called “protection” and other more important monopolies; and no man can so rouse the masses to the importance of the question of direction in volved^sic in this contest

as the man who can explain the real causes of the monstrous extremes of condition that are to be found in the “palaces and the slums of London, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg”—and in American cities as well. But from a practical democratic standpoint Judge Reid’s power will be wasted if he is left to stump Tennessee. All he can do there will be to increase the democratic majority. Where he can be of the greatest use is where he can increase the electoral vote—in doubtful states like New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Indiana and Michigan.

Whether he will be invited there remains to be seen. The truth is that there is a very influential section of the democracy which, like the Nashville American, regard us as most embarrassing allies. They are well enough pleased to have our votes, but they would like us to keep quiet as to our reasons for our votes. They are afraid of our avowal of free trade and our advocacy of the single tax, partly from fear of their effect before election, but still more from fear of their effect after election.

This, however, is a matter of small moment to us. Judge Reid represents many thousands of single tax men, who have heretofore voted the republican ticket, but who propose this year to support Mr. Cleveland, and to support him openly, whether the undemocratic element in the democratic party like it or not. We do not seek in any way to misrepresent the position of Mr. Cleveland or the democratic leaders, or to picture them as a whit better or more logical than they are. But we know the inevitable tendency of the discussion they have begun. We see it already in every democratic speech and in every democratic paper. While protesting that they are not free traders, the speakers and writers who are supporting Mr. Cleveland are following his example in demonstrating the humbuggery of protectionist theories and the sheer robbery of protectionist practice, and are accustoming the people to arguments which really tell against the taxation of anything produced by human labor. We know that when they try to stop they will not be able to stop. We know that protectionism is too stron[g?]—too well intrenched, in this country to surrender easily, and that by the time the masses are ready for the abolition of the tariff, or even for a purely revenue tariff, they will be ready for the single tax—convinced of its justice and efficacy by the very same arguments that must be used to convince them of the justice and expediency of breaking down the tariff wall.

But the comments of the Nashville Democrat and the Memphis Appeal more truly represent the attitude of the larger and more democratic part of the democracy. No body of men engaged in an exciting contest are likely to reject the aid of any one who wants to go further in the direction in which they are going, and whose opposition to what they are fighting only differs from theirs in being deeper and stronger. These papers recognize the strength that such a man as Judge Reid brings them, and hail him as “one of us,” either with some reservation as to the future, as in the case of the Democrat, or without it, as in the case of the Appeal—because in the present at least they feel that he is indeed “one of us.” And as the natural and inevitable course of all such movements as that to which the democratic party is now committed is to become more radical, and that with a rapidity proportional to the heat of the contest, the effect of such a man as Judge Reid working with the democrats will be to make him more and more truly “one of us,” by bringing democratic sentiment nearer and nearer to his position. And what is true in the case of such a prominent and influential man as Judge Reid is true in different degrees of all the thousands of single tax men who will this year support the democratic national ticket with all their energy. Some will have more influence than others; but all will have some influence in indoctrinating the masses of the party with which they are working. Such indoctrination consists merely in pushing democratic thought forward in the way in which it is already tending. Our doctrines are not only germaine^sic to what are the essential doctrines of democracy, but are simply those doctrines carried to their logical conclusion. We are the real democrats. And what is going on now is the receiving by the democratic party of democratic principle. This process is being hastened by the withdrawal of protectionists from the democratic party which is now largely taking place.

Judge Reid’s declaration of why he intends to support the democratic national ticket will make a most effective campaign document, and we shall reprint it as a

p. 1, col. 4 tract in the Land and labor library, to enable our friends, and democratic committees if they choose, to use it in this way. But it will most gladden single tax men as an evidence of the progress our ideas are making. In his action we have a public evidence of what we privately know to be true—that there are already many men prominent in public life who are thoroughly imbued with our doctrines, though they have as yet made no open sign. Every man who does so, as Judge Reid has done, makes it easier for others to do so. By and by will arrive a time when they will come with a rush.

How encouraged the single tax men of Tennessee are by the declaration of Judge Reid may be seen from the following letter:

MEMPHIS, Tenn., July 14.—Judge Reid is a young man, about forty years of age, who went into the confederate army as a mere youth of sixteen and fought gallantly until the end of the war. After that he went to some eastern college, Yale I have been told, and completed his education by a prolonged stay in Europe. He is a thorough, ready and fearless orator, whose speeches persuade and convince. Before running for governor in 1884 he had never been a candidate of any party, his election as judge of the circuit court in Davidson county having been the outcome of an independent movement. Judge Reid was induced to stand for the office by the practically unanimous request of the Nashville bar.

In accepting the nomination for governor Judge Reid stated that by family and education he was an “old line whig,” and that the republican party came nearer to his idea than the democratic. He made so earnest and brilliant a campaign that he increased the vote of the republican party from 98,108 in 1882 to 125,279, and reduced Bate’s plurality from 27,469 in 1882 to 6,925 in 1884, and I was told by the editor of one of the leading democratic papers in this city that had the campaign lasted thirty days longer, that slender majority would have entirely disappeared and the republicans would have carried the state.

Judge Reid is a strong man, who does his own thinking, and can be depended upon to give a very clear and cogent reason for the faith that is in him. The importance of his accession to the ranks of the single tax men can hardly be overestimated. On the day the Appeal published its article, one of our men was taking his lunch in the Tennessee club, composed of the older and more conservative of our business and professional men, and heard a very animated discussion upon the subject. The fact that Judge Reid had been led to tariff reform through the single tax seemed to puzzle them most, and they were arguing the question when our man came up. He promptly joined in the discussion, and when the party broke up six of them had promised to read “Progress and Poverty” and give our views a fair hearing.

The Tariff reform club has invited Judge Reid to address the people of Memphis under its auspices on the subject of national revenue and how it should be raised. If, he consents^sic to do so, this community will hear economic doctrines discussed in a way that they have never dreamed of. H. GRATTAN BROWN,

Secretary Tariff Reform Club.

The prohibitionists, though engaged in a vigorous propaganda of their own—the Voice, through the liberal contributions to its recruiting funds, having run up to a circulation of some 150,000, are not ignoring the tariff question, and their papers and speakers seem to be incidentally doing a good deal in the line of Governor St. John’s recent speech, to break down the protectionist superstition. This is of course not pleasing to protectionists, and the Tribune strives to persuade them to desist by telling them that—

Republican victory this year would put an end to democratic hopes of carrying the country on the tariff issue. It would intrust to friends of protection the work of adjusting the tariff to the needs of the country. It would settle for a generation at least the policy of the government in that respect, and thus leave voters and parties free to act with regard to other questions. If civil service reform or temperance reform is to have any chance whatever, for years to come, it can only be through the defeat of the democratic party and the settlement of the tariff question. General Fisk and Mr. Curtis are in duty bound to tell their supporters this truth.

General Fisk and Mr. Curtis may be in duty bound to tell their supporters the truth, but the truth is the very reverse of what the Tribune asserts. The defeat of Cleveland this year could no more put an end to the tariff agitation than the defeat of Fremont put an end to the anti-slavery agitation. The tariff question never has been and never can be settled by protectionists. If they had it all their own way, their work would not be to “adjust the tariff to the needs of the country,” but to adjust it to the demands of a mob of greedy and conflicting special interests. Even if there were anything like a consistent theory of what protection is required by the needs of the country, no tariff ever could be made, as no tariff ever has been made, that would even remotely conform to it, or that would satisfy protectionists themselves. There is only one way to settle the tariff question, and that is by abolishing the tariff, and doing away with the idea that one set of people are to be “encouraged” by prostituting the powers of taxation for the purpose of permitting them to rob the rest of the people. It was only our civil war and the diversion of public attention by the questions growing out of it, and the passions that it enkindled, that gave this system of licensed

p. 1, col. 5 robbery such a long respite as it has had. Now that the movement against it has begun, it must go on, no matter who is elected. The only thing that could check it, even temporarily, would be something, such as another war, that would for the time end the hope of all reform.

The instinct which is turning prohibitionists away from protectionism is a true one. Whether the methods the prohibitionists propose are right or wrong, they really aim at a great reform, and reform in one direction does not check reform in others, but hastens it. The discussion of the tariff question, the breaking down of the protective superstition, must stimulate thought on all public questions, and, as the breaking up of the ground for one crop renders it more fit for another, clear the way for intelligent consideration of all needed reforms.

The prison labor problem brings up in another way the same fundamental question which lies at the bottom of the tariff controversy. Through the failure to make the necessary appropriation for continuing work a great part of the convicts in the New York state prisons are already locked up in idleness, and unless some legislative action is taken there will be in a few weeks no work for any of them. The legislature has been called together by Governor Hill, but the same difficulty which prevented the making of appropriations at the regular session confronts it—the idea that the employment of convicts in remunerative work lessens the amount of work that free laborers can get. This is the same idea which gives its popular strength to protection. At the bottom both of the restrictions on the importation of foreign products and of the opposition to prison labor lies the notion that work is a fixed quantity—that the doing of productive work by one people or by one individual prevents the doing of it by another people or another individual; that instead of being a means to an end—the production of wealth—work is in itself a precious thing that we ought to save for ourselves, by preventing other people from doing it. The demand that convicts shall be supported at public expense without doing anything to support themselves, or that they shall be put to unremunerative labor, seems irrational enough, but the ideas from which it springs have been industriously fomented by one part of the press and negatively indorsed by the other. It is but one of the paradoxes that spring from our denial to labor of access to the natural opportunities of labor. The monopolization of land that we encourage produces an artificial scarcity of the element on which and from which labor can alone be exerted, that shows itself in an artificial scarcity of employment—in a seeming superabundance of labor. The legislature may patch as it will at the prison problem. It is but one of the many pressing and threatening social questions that can only be settled by going to the root of all labor questions, and opening to labor the natural opportunities for employment.

The master mechanic of a well known railroad forwards the following circular:

Legal Counsel, S. D. Sewards, 280 Broadway.

LABOR.

F. D. PRESCO & CO.,

Office 131 Mulberry street, New York city.

Skilled and unskilled laborers furnished for Contractors.

Special guarantee against strikes and labor disturbances.

First-class references given on application.

NEW YORK, June 18, 1888.

Dear Sir: We beg to inform you that we are prepared to furnish to contractors, builders, railroad, mining and other companies, first-class laborers (either skilled or unskilled, as may be required), in any number wanted at short notice.

By special arrangement which we make with the men furnished by us, we are enabled to guarantee our customers against any detention by strikes or other labor disturbance.

We have had long and varied experience in the handling of foreign labor in this country, and can assure our customers good, efficient and industrious men, as we take particular care in selecting them.

To any one desiring references as to our responsibility or experience in any particular branch, we will, upon application, refer to those who have employed our services in similar work.

If you should require anything in our line we solicit the favor of a call from you, and believe we can fill your requirements satisfactorily. Yours respectfully,

F. D. PRESCO & CO.,

131 Mulberry street, New York.

With the circular comes this letter:

DEAR SIR: Inclosed find a circular letter received by me some two weeks ago. It explains itself.

How long is it going to take to convince all workingmen that protection does not protect the laborer, but that when it protects anybody it merely protects the employer and the monopolist? It does seem as though every man could see such a plain truth as this. I was raised a protectionist, but got my eyes open a few years ago, as soon as I began to investigate. Please do not mention my name in connection with this letter or the inclosed circular.

What pretense, indeed, can there be that the American laborer can be protected by excluding the products of foreign labor, when the foreign laborers themselves can enter and be hired in detachments by the

p. 1, col. 6 very men who are most clamorous for “protection to American industry under guarantee that they will not strike?” And of what use is the law prohibiting the importation of contract labor? These people are coming and they will come. We cannot prevent them unless we are prepared to go to the lengths of Chinese exclusiveness and prohibit intercourse with the rest of the world—and that is virtually impossible. There is no remedy to be found in restriction. The only remedy is to be found in freedom. Abolish the taxes which now bear on production, and take by a tax on land values the “unearned increment” for public uses, and the inducement to forestalling and monopolizing land would be gone. There would be room for all and employment for all, and the more that came the greater would be the production of wealth and the larger the earnings of labor.

In the house two significant things have occurred this week—the decisive refusal to concur in the senate scheme to subsidize lines of American steamers and the retention of the free wool clause in the Mills bill by a vote of 120 to 102—every republican present and three democrats, Foran and Wilkins of Ohio and Sowden of Pennsylvania voting with the majority. This is decisive of the final action of the house. The free wool clause embodies the most important provision of the Mills bill, and if it contained nothing else, this would be sufficient to make the issue between the principle of protection and the principle of free trade^sic,

HENRY GEORGE.

OUR MERCANTILE MARINE.

Two Local Single Tax Papers.

The Harlem single tax club, whose headquarters are at 247 West 125th street, this city, have started a paper called the Harlem Tax Reform Advocate, of which three numbers have already appeared. It is a very readable, good sized, four-page paper, issued weekly at a subscription price of fifty cents a year. The editors, W. J. Gorsuch and Charles H. Mitchell, will try to make the articles especially interesting to the residents of Harlem.

A paper of the same size, of similar appearance, bearing the same name, and using much of the same matter, is published by the Single tax club of Brooklyn, which meets every Wednesday at 44 Court street, room 62, and of which John Hickling, 41 Sidney place, is president. This paper contains special local news. The yearly subscription is fifty cents.

Straightforward Talk to California Workingmen.

San Francisco Examiner.

> Suppose, in the first place, that you are employed in an unprotected industry, as nineteen white workmen out of every twenty in San Francisco are. Suppose you are a carpenter, or a blacksmith, or a gripman, or a clerk, or a lawyer, or a compositor, or a mason, or a school teacher, or a porter, or a stevedore, or a sailmaker—suppose you are employed in the gas works, or the shipyards, or the flour mills—suppose you work on the seawall, or the streets. What does the tariff do for you? > > There is no duty on the men who follow such occupations, and the work itself cannot be imported. It must be done on the spot. Nobody can send to England for a pauper shave or a cheap labor house. The only competition to which you are subject is that of laborers in your line of work, and the tariff does not try to protect you against that. Mr. Estee, just before going to Chicago to help “protect American labor,” joined the horticulturists in preparations to import hands from Japan. Mr. Stanford prides himself upon the fact that he pays Chinamen in the Mission woolen mills more than they could get in China.

The Day of the Shrewd Yankee Trader Is Past—Thanks to “Protection.”

Bradstreet’s.

> The total foreign trade of South America is estimated at $700,000,000. Notwithstanding its proximity to the United States, hardly one-fifth of the total trade is done with this country. This inequality becomes remarkable when the showings made by other countries are considered. Of the total trade of the Argentine Republic France takes [23?] per cent, Great Britian^sic 22, Belgium 14, Germany 9, and the United States 6 per cent. With other countries the comparison is still less favorable. Every important article of South American export is needed and used in the United States, and probably the same may be said of our products in South America. The comparisons regarding the carrying trade are still less favorable. Of over 1,000 steamers arriving at the ports of Uruguay in 188[3?] only one carried the American flag. The comparison with regard to sailing vessels is but little better. Almost the entire trade of the United States with Uruguay in 1885, amounting to $6,415,698, went in foreign bottoms. The competition is great between the various European nations for the trade of South American countries.

THE GOLDEN CALF.

Straight-Out Talk to Tariff Reformers.

Chicago Herald (Independent).

There are thousands of men in the northwest who have heretofore voted the republican ticket who know that the attitude of their party on the tax and tariff question is immoral vicious and destructive. They know it because they are men of intelligence and of patriotism. They know it because they remember the time when their party was pledged to no such monstrous doctrines. They know it because self interest has taught them that taxation cannot in the nature of things bring prosperity, and because, having eyes to see, they witness on all sides evidence that the commercial rings owe their existence to the great tariff combine, the father of all trusts, and that the rapacity of the protected classes threatens the very stability of free government.

In every northwestern state there must be 25,000 intelligent and patriotic republicans who privately repudiate the wicked doctrines which, by a singular fate, have been fastened upon their party. What are they going to do about it? Is the republican party as at present organized going their way? Do the Blaines, the Elkinses, the Phelpses, the Claytons, the Thurstons and the Depews represent them? Is the railroad attorney, the Union Pacific lobbyist, and the manipulator of eastern combines to speak hereafter for the republican party—for that party whose boast was its patriotism, its devotion to liberty and equality, and its adherence to the fundamental truths of a free government?

These are questions which independent republicans of the northwest must answer this year. It will not do for them to say that the republican party, which favors taxed clothing and free whisky, which stands for subsidies and trusts and reviles economy and honesty, and which spits upon its Curtises while it elevates its Elkinses, is the same as that which once trod the paths of glory and of righteousness. It is not the same. The name only remains. It has been succeeded by an organization which is led by malignants and by adventurers, by plunderers and by speculators, by an aristocracy of ill gotten wealth striving by fair means or foul to retain its riches and still further oppress the people.

Here in the west this contest is to be one of classes—a hateful and an unnatural thing in a democracy, but one which the masses have not invited. This class conflict has been forced upon the west by the transportation rings, the iron rings, the glass rings, the coal rings, the wool rings, the salt rings, the lumber rings and the thousand other combines and trusts which, but for the protective tariff, could have no existence in this country. Self-preservation demands prompt and united action by the people of the west. They must renounce the party which has sought to enslave them. To reach the destiny which is theirs by divine right; to preserve the legacies bequeathed to them by the fathers, and to remove the menace which now confronts that system of government which is the hope of a tyrant and monopoly cursed earth, they must sink party to-day as the men of 1860 sank party.

Democracy was dear to the free soilers in New York. Democracy was dear to the Douglas men of the north. But above democracy was country. Republicanism may be dear to the men of the northwest to-day; they may cherish its memories; they may glory in its triumphs. But above them all is country. This is the nation’s hope to-day as it ever has been when the clouds lowered darkest. To these men the Herald addresses itself—to the honest toilers of Illinois, of Iowa, of Minnesota, of Wisconsin, of Michigan and of Indiana, the men who need clothing, who need homes, who need tools and machinery, all taxed in the interest of monopoly—the most patient people that the world has ever seen—a people whose patriotic endurance has astonished principalities and powers—when it asks: Is the republican party of Elkins and Blaine, of free whisky and taxed blankets, of castle-in-Scotland Carnegie and corn-for-fuel western farmer—is that party now going your way?

Making Women Beautiful.

New York World.

There is a woman in New York who has a growing clientele of patients coming to her to be treated for ugliness. They may be in perfect health physically, but not quite at peace in their minds because of defects which render them unpleasing in the eyes of their fellow mortals, and she ministers to this mind diseased, by curing, as far as is possible, the complaint of plainness. Women go to her to be made thinner or stouter, to have their color heightened or reduced, to be treated for ugly complexions, red eyes, thin hair, round shoulders and all the physical faults which make the difference between beauty and the lack of it. To women who are too stout she recommends a bath of salt water in the morning, two or three handfuls of rock salt being put in the bath over night and allowed to dissolve. They must be rubbed down with a heavy Turkish towel after this salt bath, and are to sleep on hard beds, while the only internal treatment she prescribes is congress water and a grain or two of roasted coffee to be chewed half an hour before meals, which will greatly lessen the appetite for food. She suggests a diet of cresses, lettuce and spinach, with deserts of Iceland moss lilies^sic.

Thin women she feeds on carrots and parsnips and doses them with a few drops of acid phosphate before meals to give them an appetite for the muffins, brown bread, oatmeal and fruit that are to form the greater part of their diet. But what she principally relies upon to add flesh to thin girls is a pint of sweet milk to be drunk every night just before getting into bed. She orders off the corsets of round-shouldered girls and puts them into braces instead, with daily exercises on a pulling machine to help on the good work, while awkward and heavy girls are given a bar over which they are to jump many times every day. When a woman has become too florid, she is fed on sassafras tea and given hot baths, and the pale woman has her baths cold and a bottle of claret each day. This ’beauty doctor,” as she is called, has effected some wonderful cures of plainness, and in several cases has taken entire charge of a woman for six months with the result that at the end of that time her friends scarcely knew her, so greatly had her appearance changed. There is talk of an infirmary or private hospital being established near New York, of which the beauty doctor is to have charge, and where women will go, as they do now to the rest cures, to undergo thorough treatment for ugliness. This female beauty cultivator is very stern and dictatorial, and will immediately give up a case if her directions are not followed to the letter. She has great hopes of her hospital, where her patients will be directly under her eye and she can see that her ideas are carried out. She holds that there is no excuse for thorough ugliness, and that it can be to a great extent made a matter of will with a woman whether she will be pretty and pleasing or not.

p. 2, col. 3

POLITICAL PATRONAGE IN NEW YORK.

The Real Issue, Mr. Horr.

Detroit Evening News.

Here is a fine specimen of campaign logic from our own Horr of Saginaw, delivered at a republican ratification meeting in New York:

“The campaign is only four days old, and yet we have the issues plainly defined. It is this: Shall the republican club of this country or the Cobden club of England govern this country? As for me I am satisfied with the clubs of my own native land. The cheering on the other side is for Cleveland. You don’t hear any cheers in England for Harrison, do you?”

If this sort of thing “goes” with the average American native, it should not be difficult for the campaign committees to prepare plenty of literature for the public. If the issue can be stated as Horr states it, it can also be stated this way: Shall the democratic clubs of this country or the Primrose tory clubs of England govern this country? Or, Shall we follow the American policy of universal liberty or the Bismarckian policy of industrial repression? If Mr. Horr had been prominent enough before the war to have delivered speeches he could have made a fine argument for negro slavery in the same way, thus: “Shall we stick [to our?] own American institutions or shall we bow to the dictation of the English Exeter hall fanatics who ask us to abolish slavery? Shall we follow unbroken American traditions, or shall we follow the example of the British, who abol-

p. 2, col. 4 ished slavery in their colonies years ago? As for me, I am satisfied with the institutions of my own land. The cheering on the other side is for William Lloyd Garrison, for Sumner, for Fremont and the abolitionists, and not for Preston Brooks, for Yancey, for Breckenridge^sic and the slave holders.” Indeed, arguments of this sort, modeled upon Mr. Horr’s school of logic, were made for slavery, and were sufficient to hold many in the ranks of the slavery party.

But the issue is not what Mr. Horr states it to be. It is rather this: Shall the American people, who alone have the right to govern this country govern it for the common welfare, or for the benefit of one favored class who grow rich from the spoils of taxation? This is the issue, Mr. Horr, or at least one of the issues, and you cannot befuddle your own brain and your fellow citizens sufficiently to escape from it.

Harrison on Lunacy.

Indianapolis Sentinel.

It was Ben Harrison who declared, only a few years ago, in a public speech at Martinsville, that the greenbackers ought to be sent to a lunatic asylum.

There are a good many old greenbackers in Indiana. They have been quietly biding their time. They have lived to see the principles which they espoused—and which Ben Harrison pronounced idiotic—solemnly affirmed by the supreme court of the United States. The idea for which they contended has triumphed, and the power of congress to emit legal tender notes, at its discretion, in war or in peace, to any amount which it may deem expedient, has been established beyond question.

But these sturdy friends of the people’s dollar still have an account to settle with Benjamin Harrison. They will settle it at the polls next November. The men whom he characterized as “lunatics” ten years ago will see to it that the fifteen electoral votes, which were pledged by Harrison’s friends at Chicago to the republican ticket, are delivered to Cleveland and Thurman. The old greenbackers have good memories, if Ben Harrison does consider them “lunatics.”

PEN. PASTE AND SCISSORS^sic.

The London and Northwestern railway has decided, “in deference to the prejudices of its American customers,” to institute the system of checking baggage.

The project to connect the Caspian with the Black sea by a pipe line seems about to be realized. The Caspian and Black sea naphtha conduit company has been formed with a capital of about $7,000,000, its property and plant to pass to the crown after the lapse of sixty years. The capacity of the proposed line is to be such as to admit the passage daily of 1,200,000 gallons of naphtha.

The stupendous plan for supplying the city of Liverpool with water involves the removal of a whole Welsh village, including woods, cottages, churches, etc., this immense space to be devoted to a reservoir four and one-half miles long by half a mile to a mile broad, and eighty feet deep. There are to be three lines of pipe, each sixty-eight miles long, with filtering beds and secondary reservoirs, and the cost of the aqueduct alone is estimated at $15,000,000.

A mechanical scarecrow has been invented. This new invention represents a man of “sportsmanlike” appearance, standing with gun in hand ready to fire at the first intruder. The arm holding the gun is made to move by clockwork, which is inclosed in a strong iron box at its feet, and at a proper elevation it fires a shot louder than an ordinary gun. After the report the arm lowers. The mechanism can be regulated at the owner’s pleasure by a regulator like a clock, and only requires to be wound up once a day.

The proposed substitution of india rubber for metal in the manufacture of horseshoes, says the Mechanical News, is based upon various supposed advantages, one of these being that the former enables a horse to go [easily?] over all kinds of roads and rough or slippery ground without slipping. The contrivance brought forward for this purpose is such as to obviate in one instance the necessity of using an iron shoe. It can be moved momentarily when the horse is not traveling, and can also be used when the horse is shod with an iron shoe.

Besides the regular restaurant charges, the Coney island waiters have an elaborate system of extortion. Besides the right check for the cashier, they make out a duplicate check for the customer. The items are swelled over the card rates, and the addition adds ten or fifteen per cent more to the total check. On an order for a four dollar dinner a smart waiter expects to pick up seventy-five cents besides his fee. Waiters who make a man go through long arithmetical processes if he doesn’t want to be swindled are as big a nuisance as the mosquitoes.

Two clans or families in the prefecture of Yung How, in Hunan, China, recently fought for the possession of a certain hill, and twenty-seven were killed. The government thought such a proceeding irregular, and sentenced the leader of the victorious party and fourteen of his followers, with the one of the defeated who fired the first shot, to decapitation. Several members of the two clans, who took no active part in the row but encouraged it, were sentenced to receive 100 blows each, and the elders of both families were sentenced to eighty blows each, on general principles, for not having prevented the fight.

It is not a little significant that at the time a leading electrical engineer has been presenting forcibly the merits of an electric underground road for New York, a similar project should be brought forward and advocated in Chicago. The fact is, both cities greatly need underground roads, but will not adopt them without electricity as a means for supplying not only light, but power, thus avoiding all the evils and annoyances of the London road. In the case of Chicago, it is proposed to go down to bed rock—as low as 100 to 150 feet deep—and from a central point drive radiating tunnels.—[Electrical World.

According to a recent report the eyes of American range cattle growers are being turned toward South America as the future cattle growing country of the world. A Washington dispatch to the St. Louis Globe-Democrat notes the efforts making by a cattle grower representing a syndicate of western cattle growers to obtain a large grant of land in the valley of the Amazon river in Brazil, to be devoted to cattle raising. The representative of the syndicate is reported to be of the opinion that the days of cattle raising on ranges in the United States are numbered, and that South America offers the most advantageous conditions for the industry.

The Engineering and Mining Journal is authority for the statement that the “record” in rapid machine work has again been lowered. Heretofore the Baldwin locomotive works of Philadelphia have held the first place with the record of an engine built in twenty-four hours, but the Pennsylvania railroad company has now taken the palm by constructing a full-sized (110,000 pounds) anthracite-burning locomotive at the Altoona shops in sixteen hours and fifty-five minutes. The work was commenced on the morning of the 18th of June, and in five minutes less than seventeen hours the engine was turned out ready for use. It is to run on the New York division of the Pennsylvania railroad.

The Buffalo Courier tells a remarkable story of a remarkable man. He was well dressed, large, self possessed—evidently a man of the world. He strolled into a commission house at the Elk street market, where stood a bushel basket full of eggs. The stranger looked at them a while, and then deliberately stepped into the basket. The crash that followed brought out the proprietor. “See here! what in the name of the seven devils are you doing?” “Oh, I only wanted to see how it would seem to stand on this basket of eggs,” said the man, calmly. “You’ll settle for this before you leave here,” was the reply of the irate merchant. “I haven’t any objection,” he said, producing a well filled wallet, and paying in full for the damage. Then he strolled out as calmly as he had strolled in.

p. 2, col. 5

WHAT WILL COME OF THE PHONOGRAPH?

London Spectator.

When a child of seven can recognize distinctly in the phonograph the voice of a friend which he has not heard since he was five, we may feel pretty sure that that marvelous instrument has at last triumphantly solved the problem to which Mr. Edison set himself. We are told that two distinct voices, as well as a great number of musical airs, have passed over the Atlantic and become audible again here after being silent for ten days, to the ears for which they were destined when they were committed to the phonograph in the United States. What are we to expect from this wonderful invention? Mainly, we fear, an immense storing up of sounds that it might be better not to store up, an immense accumulation of those winged words whose wings are best employed in carrying off into nothingness what deserves only temporary life. Men are becoming so vastly ingenious in finding the means of magnifying and embalming every little ripple of human energy that we tremble for the consequences. The earth will soon be made a museum of odds and ends of form and speech; and unless man suddenly takes a great spring into a moral greatness worthy of all this careful storing, we may have future generations drowned beneath the accumulated scraps of ancestral voices and expressions.

Only consider that this wonderful discovery will very likely furnish a future Madame Tussaud with the means of reproducing minutely a parliamentary or municipal debate, by depositing within the figure of every wax representative a phonogram of some speech which its original had made, and winding these off in turn in the order in which the actual speakers had addressed the assembly. It is quite conceivable that in the year 2000 there may be the means not only of hearing figures like Lord Salisbury or Mr. Gladstone pour forth in the actual tones of those orators speeches which were actually made by them in our own day, not only of hearing Lord Tennyson recite “Maud” in the twentieth or thirtieth century with that rich and peculiar burr with which he pours it forth to his intimates, but of revivifying every little notoriety of our day, from Dr. Parker to Dr. Tanner—bottling up their voices for the ears of our posterity, as well as making their forms visible to future generations, till “earth is sick and heaven is weary,” as Wordsworth has it, of the hollow words which phonographs utter for the purpose of recalling a past that is not worth recalling.

It will be something, no doubt, that the colonies should be able to hear within a few weeks the very voice of the statesman or the sovereign whose words have turned the balance as it was inclining to either war or peace; that Germans in Philadelphia should be able to hang on the accents of Prince Bismarck’s declaration to the reichstag on a critical conjuncture; or that the Australasians should hear with their own ears what Mr. Gladstone says on the federation of the empire, or what M. Goblet says on the intentions of the French with regard to New Caledenia^sic or the New Hebrides. It will be a singular satisfaction to many an exile in India to take with him a number of assurances of regard from the voice he loves best, and listen to the reiteration of these assurances thousands of miles away, in days, perhaps, when they have long ceased to represent existing realities; and to the blind it may prove a constant delight to correspond with friends by an interchange of actual speech, when the speech has been bottled up in phonographs instead of committed to letters which the blind must trust other friends to read aloud to them. The number of small and great gratifications which the phonograph, like the photograph, will afford to those who hunger and thirst for living signs of those from whom land and seas separate them, is likely to be quite limitless.

But, nevertheless, we cannot help fearing that all these rapidly multiplying agencies by which we are enabled to perpetuate the most trivial expressions—whether visual or audible—threaten to overwhelm coming generations with the superabundant vestiges and records of the past. Shall we not come to regard it as a singular virtue when men obliterate voluntarily traces of themselves which, instead of being useful to posterity, would only serve the purpose of the dust in which useful things are so often smothered? Are we not discovering a great deal too many means of defeating the benefits conferred by oblivion? Are we not likely to rescue from forgetfulness what it should be the first duty of human beings who do not wish to miss their way in the steadily accumulating piles of human rubbish, to forget? We cannot help being appalled at the shrinkage of character which seems to go on simultaneously with the growth of these manifold devices for erecting massive monuments to character. Are not men daily becoming less and less massive—less and less impressive in proportion to the machinery for taking impressions of them, and recording delicately all the outcome of their much fretted and subdivided and attenuated lives? We are often tempted to wish that human nature should be allowed time to overtake the scientific paraphernalia in which it is almost suffocated, before any more discoveries are made by which the pettiness of our lives may gain in artificial importance, the distractions of our posterity may be multipled^sic and the complexity of their inherited memories increased.

As it is, we fear that the phonograph may add to the great picture galleries of our great houses, voice galleries almost more impressive, from the vivacity with which grandparents and great-grandparents may be made to address the descendants who never knew them, and that too, in all sorts of contending strains. Imagine a man in the next century whose great-grandfather was a Gladstonian, whose grandfather was entrusted with a command in the war with Ireland to which home rule had led, and whose father had sided with the Irish in resisting the oppressions of the restored government—and imagine these ancestors addressing their descendants in all the different accents of political passion to which their different situations in life had given rise, while their portraits look severely down upon him, enforcing by their expression the earnestness of their political view—would not such a man carry into life a consciousness even more hesitating and divided than even that which gives birth to our nineteenth century vacillations? Or imagine a man in the same century whose great grandmother was a vehement partisan of women’s suffrage, whose grandmother was a lady doctor who held that the nerves of the women of the day had been ruined by educational over pressure, and whose mother, after carrying a law for embodying Amazon regiments and womanning a few ironclads, had emigrated to escape the consequences of the French conquest of our southern counties—and imagine him listening to the most characteristic utterances of each of these ancestresses as they frowned upon him from the living canvas on his walls—would not he too carry into life a very strange complexity of vivid associations such as might easily embarrass him with the singular conflict of their pathetic eloquence?

We have a very strong belief that the scientific ingenuities of our day, acting under the imperious guidance of sensibilities which are as narrow as they are tender, will contrive to fill the world we leave behind us much too full of us for the free growth of our posterity; and that a time will come when it will be necessary to preach a sort of iconoclasm toward the pieties of ancestry in order to clear the way for anything like independent growth. One of the most effective of Arabian fairy tales describes how the prince who is to break the spell of the wicked magician’s enchantment has to pass along a way where voices in the greatest confusion address him from every side, in every accent of scorn, or ridicule, or indignation, all appearing to come from the mere stocks and stones beside his path. Was this an unconscious anticipation of the phonograph? We much doubt whether Edison’s wonderful and admirable discovery,

p. 2, col. 6 and the extensions that must follow, will not tend to bewilder the world in which our children’s children live, at least as much as the outcries of the bewitched valley of rocks bewildered the hero of that eastern tale.

Did She Call on Tolstoi in this Costume?

New York World.

Mrs. Van Rensselaer Cruger, whose brilliant letters from Russia in one of the daily papers last winter attracted so much attention, has brought home with her from the land of the czar a new fashion which is destined to have many imitators. She appeared at a garden party lately in a black lace costume of which the silk bodice was cut low and without sleeves, the white skin being allowed to show through the laces. On her head was a wide black lace hat, and she carried a lace parasol, but to all this summer bravery she had added a long white boa of Thibetan lamb’s fur round about her throat. The effect was very unique, but rather charming on the whole, and before the summer is done it may be prophesied that a great many women will be imitating her. Mrs. Kruger^sic had great social success in Russia, was received at a private audience by the czar and czarina, attended the court balls and saw the brilliant society of St. Petersburg at its best. She was extremely popular and admired, being a woman of great esprit and having half a dozen foreign languages at easy command. She picked up sufficient Russian during her stay to greatly impress her American friends on her return. Among the pleasantest experiences of her stay was a visit to Tolstoi, who, like the rest of his countrymen, succumbed to her American charm and talked to her at length of his peculiar convictions and his great books. Mrs. Cruger is tall, slender and graceful, with bright brown hair, very far seeing and intellectual eyes and a face of great delicacy and strength.

Our Tariff Laws.

J. D. Miller in Puck.

Have you ever read our tariff laws? If not, and you want the imagination of Sir Walter Scott, the ingenuity of Rider Haggard, and the humor of Mark Twain brought together in one volume, read the little book containing the list of duties upon imports. You must know, beforehand, that this work is the result of the superhuman wisdom of successive legislatures, and is the only thing which has prevented the shutting up of American mills, the closing of American mines; and that without it the American workingman would have to leave shop and factory, and, lying down on the greensward, kick his heels in the daisies for all eternity. If you doubt this, read the Tribune.

Under schedule A, comprising chemicals, we find that the native bee is protected from the competition of the foreign pauper bee by a duty of twenty per centum, ad valorem, on beeswax. It is to this wise provision that the round, sleek body and long, firm sting of the native bee is due. Under free trade the American bee would soon sink to the degraded condition of the European bee. Mr. Blaine, who has been abroad, will be able to tell you much more about this that I can^sic. But let the free trader beware, for the native bee will resist to the bitter end of his sting any interference with that system which has secured him such blessed conditions.

One knows not on what principle some of these tariff laws were constructed. Wood bears a heavy duty, but burn it into charcoal and it comes free. Earth may be sent in at a penalty of one dollar and fifty cents per ton; but let it not be ocher or ochery earths, for then it must bear a duty of one-half of one cent per pound; pour oil on it and grind it fine, and the duty is increased to one cent per pound. Whalebone comes in free, but stick it into a corset and it bears a duty. Fresh fish may be sent in free, and ice may be sent in free, but be careful not to put your fish on ice, for both are then subject to duty as preserved fish. It is gratifying to learn that the protected American workingman can get his “blood, dried,” from abroad, free of duty; but “blood, wet,” about which we are not definitely informed, is, we suppose, a wholly different matter.

If any one has a bell which he wishes to bring into the United States, he can get it in only by breaking it, since “broken bell metal” pays no duty. If a man has a few pet birds, he can get them in free only by killing and stuffing them. Coal stoves of American vessels^sic are free, but they musn’t^sic be unloaded—so perhaps they are not free.

The importation of life saving apparatus is to be encouraged when undertaken by “societies incorporated or established for the saving of human life.” Life saving efforts on the part of the individual are therefore to be discountenanced. Sea weed, moss and vegetables used for bedding are free, but let not the thoughtless wrap these in tick, for they are then subject to duty as mattresses.

The fact is, we are not half protected. There is one provision, which, if availed of, would render ineffectual our whole protective system. If a cargo sinks, and is recovered after remaining under water two years, all the merchandise the vessel contains can enter our ports free of duty and compete with native merchandise. Is there not greater danger that the Cobden club will at no distant day adopt this last desperate device of ruining our native industries?

The law provides that “canes and sticks for walking be charged a duty of thirty-five per centum, ad valorem; if unfinished, twenty per centum, ad valorem.”

You may be glad to know that your little daughter plays with a thirty-five per cent, ad valorem, English doll; that billiard balls roll into our native wharf at a tax of fifty per cent; that if your foreign opponent beats you at chess, you have your revenge in a fifty per cent, ad valorem, duty on chess men. Fire crackers go off at one hundred per cent tax, and gloves go on at about half the expense. Foreign grease spots come high, but not too high for protection; the duty on grease being only ten per cent, ad valorem. Many will be sorry to learn that we discourage the peculiarly American industry of draw-poker by a duty of one hundred per cent on playing cards.

And yet the hope of the free trader must mount when he reflects that “Balm of Gilead” and “Manna” (whether from heaven or not is not stated) are free, and that several chemicals with long names, which, for the protection of the American jaw, ought to be entirely prohibited, are admitted free of tax: Myrobalan, Cajeput. Inglandium Origanum^sic, Alizarine, and several other language corrupting foreign products.

A necessary provision, though not strictly protective of American industry, is that which places on the free list “wearing apparel in actual use.” This wise precaution enables the foreigner to enter our ports and walk to the nearest hotel with his nakedness entirely covered.

Cost of a Forty-eight Cent Book, if Imported.

New York Herald.

“Sells’s Dictionary of the World’s Press” for 1887 was very kindly sent us by the publishers from London. Its published price is two shillings, or very nearly fifty cents in United States money. It is cheap at the price. But just see what the book has cost us under the high tariff system so dear to the republican heart. In the first place we paid a duty of $1.50, or three times the published price of the book. In the second place we paid $1.50 for brokerage fees—an item which really seems exorbitant. In the third place we paid other fees on it amounting to seventy-one cents, though its weight is under five pounds—making a total of $3.71 for the importation into this country of a fifty cent book presented to us by the publishers. Here is the bill of costs. Look at it and wonder:

PITT & SCOTT’S FOREIGN EXPRESS.

New York, July 7, 1888.

New York Herald:

Statement of charges on one package from London (Reference number 1,915):

Received payment, July 11, 1888.

PITT & SCOTT, per [K.?] D.

IT FINDS A NOTABLE ADVOCATE IN TENNESSEE.

JUDGE FRANK T. REID, THE REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE FOR GOVERNOR IN 1884, DECLARES FOR CLEVELAND.

BECAUSE FREER TRADE WILL LEAD TO FREE TRADE AND THAT TO THE SINGLE TAX.

A Strong Argument Against All Taxes Save a Tax on Land Values.

Nashville Democrat, July 11.

Learning that Judge Frank T. Reid, for many years a stanch republican in this state, and in 1884 the candidate of that party for governor against Hon. William B. Bate, had expressed his intention of voting for Cleveland and Thurman at the ensuing presidential election, a Democrat reporter called upon him at his office in the Baxter court yesterday, and asked him for an expression of his views.

In reply to the question, Is it true that you intend to support Mr. Cleveland in the pending presidential campaign? the judge answered in the affirmative.

Will you take the stump to explain your determination to renounce your allegiance to the republican party? inquired the scribe.

Whether I shall take the stump during this canvass will depend upon circumstances, replied Judge Reid. But if I do it will not be to renounce what you are pleased to term my allegiance to the republican party. I still believe in the creed of that party, with the single exception that I no longer believe in the doctrine of a protective tariff. And as that is the distinctive if not the sole issue in the present canvass, I think it my duty to vote against the party that maintains it, although on every other question I am in agreement with that party.

I am not a partisan, and have never been one. By partisan I mean one who supports his party at all times and on every issue, whether he thinks his party right or wrong. I have always done, and shall continue to do, my own thinking on all subjects, and shall try to prove true to the truth as God gives me to see it. I owe allegiance to no organization, except to such as represent ideas which I believe are sound and right. The appearance within the recent past of the many gigantic “trusts” in this country, or combinations of capital to control production, to monopolize many of even the necessaries of life; the large number and formidable character of the labor strikes during the same period of time; and the great interest shown in contemporary literature on politico-social and economic questions, have caused me to study the question of the tariff as I never did before. And the result is that I am convinced that a “protective” tariff inures only to the benefit of a comparatively few manufacturers, enables them to reap immense fortunes by the tribute it permits them to exact of consumers, and which they more and more use to corrupt legislatures and the people at the ballot box; and that it does not operate to secure to the laboring men of this country higher wages than are paid elsewhere.

The amount of the manufacturer’s net profits has nothing whatever to do with the rate of wages he pays his laborers. It ought, in conscience and right; but it does not. The rate of wages is determined by the demand for labor. If the laboring men of this country are paid better wages than their brothers in England are, which I doubt, one explanation of it is due not 1o^sic the fact of a protective tariff, but rather to the fact that—

No pent up Utica contracts our powers; But the whole boundless continent is ours.

If there were the same density of population on our soil as in England, our workingmen would have no occasion to felicitate themselves on getting better wages than are paid in England. And if to insure our laboring classes higher wages it is necessary to protect them against cheap foreign goods, does it not equally follow that they should be protected against the importation of cheap foreign labor? But without assigning other reasons, I will say that I think our protective tariff makes possible the gigantic combinations of capital known as “trusts,” and that these and similar monopolies threaten the masses with industrial slavery, and foreshadow the overthrow of free institutions.

In a general way, what is the theory of taxation which you now entertain?

I believe in a single tax levied on land values, irrespective of improvements. The products of labor, unless it is unavoidable, ought not to be taxed; which is but another way of saying that labor ought to be as little burdened as possible. Men should rather be encouraged to obey God’s command, and by their labor on the raw materials provided by Him for that purpose, make this earth fruit- ful and beautiful.

Don’t tax a man for building a house. It is to the interest of the human family that the building of houses should be encouraged. The more houses the cheaper is the rent and the better the accommodation. Don’t tax one who proposes to grow fruit and bring it to those in cities to eat. Don’t tax a man for building an organ. We want music on the earth. Don’t tax him for raising fine stock, or for anything that he creates by the sweat of his brow and brain.

But here is a species of property that, in justice, ought to bear all the burden, namely, land values—values created not by the man who now enjoys their benefit, nor by any one from whom he holds title, but created by the general public, whose agent and representative the government is. Here, for instance, we will say is a vacant lot in the city of Nashville. We will say that it has been vacant since the creation of the earth. In other words, nothing that those who hold the legal title to it have done has made it worth its present value. Let us suppose it will sell on the market for $500 a foot. Who created this value? Why, the 75,000 or 80,000 people who, in progress of time, have come here and built a city around it. Or a man holds a thousand acres of land near the city, which can be sold for $500 an acre, without reference to anything he, or those for from whom he holds^sic, has done to add to its value. We will say it is still the same wilderness it was when our fathers came here and broke the cane. Of course, nothing that he or they have done has created this value, but it is due solely to its contiguity to this market.

You can see that the adoption of this system in the levying and collection of taxes, while it would not add to, but would rather lighten, the burden now borne by those land owners who have built on or otherwise improved their land, would force the owners of vacant land to either build or cultivate or else part with it to those who would. It would destroy that worst and most dangerous species of gambling—speculation in real estate. If a man withholds a piece of land from the uses and purposes for which the Creator created it; if he says this land shall be with-

p. 3, col. 2 drawn from the general stock, shall be as if it was never created, shall not contribute its proportional share toward the support of the human family; very well and good, let him do so, but let him pay an equivalent for the wrong and injury he thereby does.

I think God created this planet and stored it with seemingly inexhaustible riches as a store house of raw materials for his children here to work up into forms of usefulness and beauty; and I think that labor ought to be permitted the freest opportunity possible to get at that raw material.

Speculation in land ought to be prohibited. It prevents poor people from having homes near their work. No greater blessing could descend upon the race than to rescue our women and children from the life they are living in the alleys and slums of our cities and towns, and to put it in their power, or the power of their bread winners, to have homes, to have land, and trees, and green grass, and pure air, and singing birds, a garden, fowls, etc., etc., around them. In a little while we would have a different race of men and women. Henry George never said a truer word than when he said, “The Huns and vandals that threaten our present civilization are now being born and bred in the slums of our great cities.”

Monopolization of land ought to be prohibited. It creates landlordism, the deadliest enemy to the well being of the people. The same causes will produce the same effects, and it is only a question of time when the same pitiable condition of things will prevail here as exists in Ireland, unless meanwhile something is done to prevent it.

Tax land values, and you thereby effectually prohibit speculation in land. You prohibit the monopolization of land. You put the burden of supporting government on a species of property created by the public. You encourage labor by taking the burden off its shoulders. You lighten the burden of those land owners who have built on their land, and have improved and cultivated it. You put the burden on vacant, unused land, whose owners keep it out of the general use, and refuse to permit it to answer the purpose of its Creator, that is, to contribute to the support of the human family.

A prominent physician of this city a few days ago informed me that the late Dempsey Weaver, a few years before his death, advocated the removal of all taxes from personal property and their imposition on land, assigning, among other reasons, the ascertained impossibility of collecting taxes from personal property with anything like justice and equality. The dishonest man succeeds easily in hiding from the eyes of the assessor that species of property, and so transfers his load to the shoulders of those unwilling to perjure themselves by a false return. That tax is a premium for perjury.

My recollection also is that this system of taxation—a single tax on land—was many years ago advocated by Mr. Enoch Ensley in a series of letters addressed to David A. Wells, in which he advanced the argument that land owners could well afford to assume the whole burden of taxation for the reason that the removal of that burden entirely from every species of personal property will invite and cause capital to come here and become invested in all manner of enterprises.

I think if the devil had had the devising of a system of taxation whereby the masses—the real laboring men—could be cheated and swindled of all their earnings, he would have invented the present system—that is, the protective tariff system—whereby monopolists are protected in fleecing the masses; and he would have approved the system of taxing a man, as under our state laws, for “the privilege” of obeying the divine command, and by his labor creating forms of beauty and usefulness.

Do you consider Mr. Cleveland a free trader?

No. But of course a revenue tariff is one step in the direction of free trade. If free trade is ever reached it will force the government to adopt direct taxation (the only honest taxation), and that, of course, will force on public attention the question of what property ought to be made to bear that burden. And when that comes about I don’t think it will be long before it will be generally recognized that the single tax on land values, irrespective of improvements, will be the source from which government revenue should be obtained.

More Encouraging News From Tennessee.

MEMPHIS, Tenn., July 13.—Believers in the single tax doctrine have good reason to rejoice at the sure and gradual progress the great cause is making in the southern states. Being a resident of a southern state, I am supposed to know something of the events and happenings that are now transpiring. The cause was somewhat on the wane some time ago. The disbanding of the land and labor club was one of the evidences that such was the case; but recently the single tax doctrine has taken a fresh start forward. A wonderful impetus has been infused into it and its kindred doctrine, tariff reform. Converts are gained so quietly that hardly any one realizes the large acquisition our cause has made. When the single tax doctrine is brought up in conversation it is really surprising to see the number who openly advocate its adoption.

The cause is not only making progress among the wage earning classes, but it is also gaining converts among professional men, among lawyers principally. The most notable example of this kind is Hon. Frank T. Reid of Nashville, Tenn, who is recognized as one of the foremost lawyers of the state, and who is one of the strongest and ablest republicans. He has come out for Cleveland and the Mills bill, and at the same time declares in plain terms for the single tax.

Our tariff reform club is pushing ahead vigorously. It has been very successful. Meetings are held every week. Clear and convincing speeches are made at each meeting. The audiences mostly consist of the wage earning class. Our workingmen are thoroughly waking up to the importance of tariff reform and the single tax doctrine. Their leaders participate in our meetings, and make short and earnest talks in favor of tariff reform.

Taken altogether, the grand cause is progressing most favorably in this section of the country.

I think your position in supporting Mr. Cleveland is the best move that can be made under the circumstances. If Mr. Cleveland is elected, our cause takes one long step forward, for it will be a victory for tariff reform; while, on the other hand, if Mr. Harrison is elected and protection indorsed, it will do us harm, for the protection monster will fasten its fangs around us firmer than ever. This being the case, it would be very near treachery if those who believe in tariff reform would now, when it is in the greatest need, desert it.

L. L. LENTE, 438 Union street.

Particularly Interesting During the Campaign.

Cedar County, Neb., Nonpareil.

We read some two hundred papers every week. The most of them we can “go through” in less than five minutes, but when we strike Henry George’s paper, THE STANDARD, we have a two hours’ job on hand, for we read it from the first word on the first page to the last word on the eighth page. It is a grand paper, and every sentence has a meaning. It should be read by every voter in the Union.

p. 3, col. 3

It Will Support Cleveland—A Letter From the Chairman of the Executive Committee.

MOBILE, Ala., July 11.—The executive committee of the labor party of Alabama has issued a second address. In all local elections we aim to put in office men who, without regard to party lines, will best represent the interests of all classes, and who favor the reforms we advocate. At the national election we advise the support of the democratic candidate, for reasons given in our address. The passage reads:

In the coming national election, everything else being equal, the best interest of all will be served by our supporting that party which has already pledged itself to a reduction of the tariff, which reduction and final abolition will be a return to the principles of pure democracy as expounded by Jefferson, and one step toward that freedom of trade and labor which would exist naturally if not hampered by governmental interference.

To my mind there are, among others, two very weighty reasons why the republican party will make the strongest kind of efforts to succeed this time. First, the managers of the party want the offices, with all that that implies: a lively sense of favors to come; old scores of four years’ standing to be settled; wounded pride to be atoned for; vindication for past acts and justification for the continuance of a policy that was settled when the war closed. Second, the republican managers know that the tariff retorm to which President Cleveland, Mr. Mills and others have committed and pledged the democratic party will, if inaugurated, result in such benefits to the country at large as would not only give the democratic party a new lease of life, but would be the virtual breaking down of the republican party. That party often promised a reduction of the tariff, but failed to make it, so now they would not only be charged with the sin of omission, but the greater one of opposing another party that would do right.

But the republicans tell only a part of the truth. The good which may flow from the reduction and final removal of the tariff will serve to whet the appetites of the people for yet other reforms. It is impossible for this tariff discussion to go on, without leading us nearer to the single tax reform.

Here in Mobile, where the interest I have taken in political purification has resulted in the loss to me of my business, the single tax idea is growing fast. Yet a little while and misunderstanding and misrepresentation will give way to the justice of our doctrines.

Where two political parties stand so evenly balanced it is the part of a third party to throw its weight with that party disposed to go its (the third party’s) way.

EDWARD QUINCY NORTON, Chairman executive committee labor party of Alabama.

A Correspondent Suggests a Way for Single Tax Men to Bring the Doctrine Before the Assembly Taxation Committee.

LIMA, Ohio, July 9.—C. S. Walker, in a letter in THE STANDARD of June 30 drew attention to the fact that “the committee appointed at the last session of the general assembly to revise the tax laws is to begin operations on July 31,” and suggested that some concerted action of single tax men be taken in order to impress the committee with single tax views.

I suggest that a good way to take concerted action would be for all the single tax men in every locality in Ohio to unite in a letter to Mr. Walker, authorizing him as their representative to appoint a committee to prepare a statement of our views and present the same to the legislative committee on the revision of the tax laws. This would be an inexpensive way of taking concerted action; and if every single tax man in the state would do this it would furnish an exact statement of the numerical strength of the single tax idea in Ohio, for it would include not only those who will vote for the Cincinnati nominees, but also those who will vote for Mr. Cleveland and those who will vote for Harrison and Morton. If Mr. Walker ap- proves of this, I will get what signatures I can here.

JAS. WHITE, 720 North Main street.

Terms of Land Tenure at Various Times and Places.

LYNN, Mass.—Looking to-day into Knight’s Mechanical Dictionary, I was greatly interested at what I found under the heading “Plow.” It is one of the charms of Knight that he indulges often in notes of all sorts concerning matters not strictly within the range of the subject, but which are extremely interesting. Under the heading ’Plow,” he says some things about land tenure and use, of which I copy the following:

Strabo says that in India the rent was one-fourth the produce. Evidence before committees of the English house of commons in 1814 and 1821 showed that the English rent was about the same.

The hectemorioi, poor Greeks who cultivated the fields of the rich, only received one-sixth of the produce before the time of Solon.

The politor, or renter of land under the Roman system, received from one-fifth to one-ninth of the produce, the landlord bearing all expenses, the tenant finding the labor.

All on the farm, stock, tools, and seed, belonged to the landlord; the tenant was a workman. The modern system, where the landlord finds tools and fixtures, the tenant everything else, was not generally practiced in early Roman times, although the coloni, described by Columella, held under a tenure nearer the modern; but the amount of the landlord’s share, being from four-fifths to eight-ninths of the product, shows that the relation of the tenants was a base and slavish one. In most cases the slavery was destitute of even a flimsy pretext, and the peasantry were serfs on the land. . . .

In Lombardy the landlord pays taxes and makes repairs; the tenant provides cattle, implements, seeds and labor, and gives half the produce to the landlord.

In the Neapolitan territory the landlord has two-thirds the produce. In Ohio and the neighboring states the landlord receives one-third. In Japan he receives one-sixth.

The grain or produce rent, in contradistinction to the cash rent, is the more common mode of tenure throughout the continent of Europe. In England it is on a cash basis. That country is rapidly drifting into the hands of a few proprietors.

Thanks to the much maligned French revolution, the land of France is held in small freeholdings. The Hebrew land polity is the best yet.

THEODORE P. PERKINS.

The Democrats Must Become Aggressive.

EAST ORANGE, N. J., July 10.—If the presidential election was to come off very soon I would have no doubt of the result. Cleveland would be elected. But election day is some time off, and there is considerable danger in the result, because of the apologetic position of many of the democrats. There are a large number of undecided men that go with the current, men who do little thinking for themselves, and whose prejudices are easily aroused. Many young men belong to this class. With them protectionism and Americanism are synonymous terms; they look upon

p. 3, col. 4 protection as a purely American institution. They know nothing of free trade, excepting from hearing it denounced as “British.” Democrats must get at these young men. They must become aggressive. The “American system” must be shown to be a Chinese system.

E. C. ALPHONSE.

Who Gets the Benefit of the Boom?

HUTCHINSON, Kan., July 11.—When this county was first settled, about seventeen years ago, poor men came here from the east and homesteaded 160 acres each. Some bought railroad lands for one or two dollars per acre. This city was laid out on a section of railroad land. The adjoining lands were very soon taken up by comparatively poor men, most of whom built cheap houses on their quarter sections.

These families continued to live on the land. Few of them made many improvements. Sometimes they nearly starved and would have starved had not their friends in the east assisted them, but they “proved up,” as it is called, and got their titles from Uncle Sam.

After a while the city began to grow and the original site was too small. Then the speculator put in his appearance. He bought an adjoining quarter section; paid the old homesteader $10,000 for it; laid it out in lots and sold the lots for $30,000. This was a lesson to the rest of the old homesteaders.

They continued to live in their old shanties and raise a little corn, etc., but they were poor. The land agents began to try to boom the town by advertising it, but the homesteader seldom helped to do this. The land agents raised money for bonuses to get industries to come here. but^sic the old homesteader was too poor to give anything. Laboring men, mechanics even, gave of their hard earnings to boom the town ,but^sic the old homesteader gave nothing.

At last the great boom came. Men went wild. Speculators bought out the old homesteaders for from $24,000 to $48,000 for their quarter sections. Thousands of acres were laid out in lots on all sides of the town. One site is now large enough to hold the population of Chicago.

Who got the benefit of the boom? Certainly not the laboring men, but the old homesteader. What did he do to create the boom? Generally nothing. Who pays him $48,000 for what only cost him $200? Laboring men, and they pay two or three times as much to the land speculator for buying the lot and having it surveyed. Is it any wonder the laboring man is poor? Verily it is not. Forty-eight thousand dollars is a pretty large sum of money. A man working at $400 a year and his expenses all paid would require to work 120 years to be able to save up that sum. A man working at $200 a year and all expenses paid would require to work 240 years to earn it. Or, 100 men working at wages that would enable each one to save $48 a year—and that is more than they can now do on the average—would require to work ten years to pay the sum which one old homesteader is allowed to get for sitting a few years on a quarter section and holding the government patent for it.

And yet on the Fourth of July the laboring man went out to hear the Declaration of Independence read. “All men are created equal.” What a farce is this!

J. G. MALCOLM.

Wages and Cigarette Making.

DURHAM, N. C., July 13.—I have noted your interview with our congressman, John Nichols, and he states that the tariff has not affected the working people’s mind in his section. I believe him to be a sincere man, and no doubt exists of his re-election. If the working people elsewhere would but turn their eyes this way they would see the fallacy of “protection.” Think of able bodied men being paid at the rate of $3 to $5 per week. Protection may protect the manufacturer, but it certainly does not help the workman. The cigarette making trade is an important industry in this town. About four years ago there were employed in the cigarette factories here about five hundred hands. To-day there are not over forty, all told, in this business. You will probably say that demand for cigarettes has fallen off. But that is not so. There are five times as many cigarettes made to-day as were made four years ago. An ingenious youth in Vir- ginia invented a machine capable of doing the work of fifty hands. Of course large numbers of hands had to go, and to-day every hand maker would be discharged if it were not for the fear of popular indignation; but they are being slowly weeded out. The manufacturer seeks his labor at as low a price as it can possibly be got for. He cares not who is thrown out of work.

We need no protection—it is a freer use of the natural opportunities that is wanted. I hope when Hon. John Nichols will speak on this subject in the next campaign he will throw light on it.

ONE WHO VOTED FOR NICHOLS.

Everybody in his County at School Again.

PARKERSBURG, W. Va., July 13.—We are busy doing missionary work. Such an interest in politics as now prevails in our town and county I never expected to see. Everybody is at school again and anxious to read about the tariff. Our county democratic paper printed two of Henry George’s articles on the subject.

Please send me by mail two dollars’ worth of tract No. 72 by Shearman; two dollars’ worth of tract No. 77 by George; one dollar’s worth of tract No. 76 by Shearman.

W. I. BOREMAN.

Among the Texas Farmers.

WICHITA FALLS, Tex., July 8.—The cause is progressing favorably here near the frontier. I have every confidence that the time is not far distant when the laboring class, including the farmer, will all unite in favor of direct taxation. A little over one year ago I was the only single tax man I knew of in this county. Now there are over one hundred of us. I have talked and distributed such reading matter as I could get, notwithstanding poor health and ejection from a home where I lived for seven years with my large family. I am greatly encouraged when I see how anxious the farmers are to indorse the single tax petition. I am secretary of the farmers’ alliance here.

They are beginning to wake up to the study of political economy, but they need encouragement. I have induced the president of our county alliance to take up the subject. I furnished him with “Protection or Free Trade?” and “Progress and Poverty.” Please send me some of Thomas G. Shearman’s free trade tracts. Every tract and copy of THE STANDARD you have sent me in the last year has made its power felt.

E. J. PEREGO, Secretary Wichita Alliance.

And There Are Lots More Such Free Trade Democrats.

Hillsdale, Mich., Democrat.

The Democrat believes in free trade. It wishes there were not a custom house in America. The democratic party, as a party of the present, takes the sensible ground that in revising the tariff laws of the country for the purpose of reducing taxation, each step shall be in the direction of freeing trade of its burdens.

p. 3, col. 5

Unmistakably Free Trade—Even Republican Papers Forced to Conform to the Popular Demand.

The free trade sentiment has become epidemic in the northwest, and when it once gets fairly started it is no respecter of party lines either.

The St. Paul Pioneer-Press, the republican organ of Minnesota, after floundering about for some days in a semi-dazed condition, returns to its former self and says:

It will be a disappointment to eastern protectionists of the prohibitory tariff school to learn that the northwest has not changed its position on the tariff issue. The Pioneer-Press will be found in the future, as in the past, in the front rank of those who demand an earnest and honest effort to reform the tariff. Upon that question it stands upon the historic ground of the republican party. And a reform of the tariff by a congress elected on the Chicago platform is even more to be expected than was the refusal of a democratic congress to advocate or even propose a change after it had been chosen on a platform of tariff for revenue only. The Pioneer-Press, therefore, reiterates to-day every word that it has said in the past in favor of tariff reform. It reiterates its adhesion to the protective principle, moderately interpreted, and its opinion that the surplus should be disposed of neither by extravagant appropriations nor by the repeal of internal revenue duties, but by the cutting down of those custom duties which are now far higher than any just scheme of protection can require, and by placing on the free list those commodities of general use with reference to which a protective duty has no longer any usefulness.

If the attitude of so strictly partisan a paper as the Pioneer-Press were not conclusive evidence that the republican sentiment of Minnesota is well nigh unanimous for the abolition of the surplus by means of tariff reduction, the declarations of the three men who are seeking the nomination for governor at the hands of the republican party ought to satisfy the most case hardened Pennsylvania protection partisan on that point. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch says:

The three leading candidates for the republican nomination for governor of Minnesota are Governor McGill, W. E. Merriam and Albert Scheffer, all of whom openly repudiate the tariff plank of the Chicago platform. Governor McGill denounces what he calls “the monopolistic idea of tariff for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many.” Merriam takes his stand firmly on the democratic idea of a tariff sufficient to protect American labor by covering the difference in wages between this and foreign countries, and he believes with the democrats in reducing the surplus by reducing the unnecessary taxes on articles of necessity rather than by removing taxes from whisky and tobacco. Albert Scheffer is the candidate of the farmers’ alliance for the republican nomination and stands where that alliance placed him, on an aggressive platform favoring a radical reduction of tariff taxes. In the parlance of the organs the republican party of Minnesota is “a British free trade party.”

The Todd County Argus, another republican paper of Minnesota, obviously represents the predicament of a large class of more timid republican papers and voters who are biting their lips to keep from expressing the discomfiture they are experiencing from constantly treading on their own toes, when it says:

We believe that the protection doctrine as set forth in the republican platform is deeply rooted in the people, and will win. But the day is near at hand when the people will learn that protection favors the few at the expense of the many.

But this is not all. The republicans of the Third Minnesota congressional district recently held their convention and unanimously adopted the following resolution:

Resolved. That^sic, while supporting the doctrine of protection to American industries, American labor, American homes, American fisheries and American honor, we demand a reduction of taxation to the requirements of the government, and a reduction and revision of the tariff by such reduction or repeal of duties as will relieve from unnecessary burdens the necessaries of life and those articles, other than luxuries, which do not enter into competition with the products of American labor.

The Third district is represented by a tariff reform democrat.

The Fifth district is represented by that “free trade” republican, Knute Nelson, by grace of a majority of 42,698. The Third and Fifth districts represent more than half of the republican vote of Minnesota. The Chicago Herald has remarked that as the republicans of Minnesota are not protectionists, neither are the republicans of Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan and Illinois protectionists. The San Francisco Examiner, commenting on the situation in Minnesota, says that “the same drift is manifest throughout the northwest.” It then remarks:

If the republican sentiment in Minnesota is so solidly for tariff reform, what must the democratic and independent sentiment be?

The democrats of Minnesota have spoken. Their state platform of May 7, 1888, says among many other things to the same purpose:

Finally, that all taxation shall be equal and impartial. That our people shall have free access to the markets of the world to buy as well as to sell to the best advantage and upon equal terms with the people of other lands; that our power to produce and ability to purchase shall no longer be confined to a monopolized home market, influenced by combinations and at the mercy of pools and trusts.

In conformity with these principles we specify as among the articles which should be placed upon the free list, salt, coal, wood, lumber, sugar, iron, steel, glass, binding twine materials, drugs and medicines, all wearing apparel, carpets, and household goods, tools, implements and machinery used in agricultural and mechanical employments and all raw materials consumed by our manfactories^sic.

This is what we mean by revenue reform.

Will Governor Brown Please Explain?

ST. LOUIS, July 14.—Hon. Joseph E. Brown of Georgia says that the south ought to adopt the protective policy which has enriched the north. As the protective tariff now in force prohibits the landing of foreign goods in southern ports as much as in the northern ones, the south already has the benefit of the tariff as much as she can have it unless the laws are changed. The northern blockading squadrons prevented the importation of foreign goods into southern ports from 1861 to 1865, and the south was thoroughly protected, but no one has ever dreamed that Gov. Brown approved of that.

But who is it that has been enriched in the north, that Gov. Brown refers to? Is it the great mass of the people or the few?

We had a protective tariff in 1860 and previously to that time, but Gov. Brown saw clearly then that the “working classes” had not been benefited by it. In his message to the legislature of the state of Georgia, dated Nov. 7, 1860, on the state of the country and the causes of the quarrel then existing, he compared the wages and lot of the northern workman with the material condition of the slaves of the south and found the latter to be better off. He said:

Many of the northern masters, or employers if they prefer the term, are now in possession of large fortunes, which they have accumulated by the use of the strong arms of white laborers among them, who have labored and toiled and dropped the briny sweat for weeks and months and years in their service,

p. 3, col. 6 > and have received from them in return a meager compensation which, in health, has barely enabled them to support themselves in a simple style, denying to their families most of the comforts of life; and, in sickness, has often left them in destitution and actual want of the necessaries of life. While those who receive the benefits of the labor of others are living in stately mansions amid ease and luxury, and faring sumptuously every day, many of the laborers whose toil brought these comforts, must spend their days in unpleasant dwellings, doomed to perpetual obscurity, and denied, even in sickness, the comforts of life produced by their own hard labor.

Every word of this is true, and the condition of the working classes in the north is worse to-day than it was then. If protection has “enriched the north,” what part of the north has it enriched? The working classes! Will Gov. Brown please answer.

M. A. THOMAS.

The Pittsburg Single Tax Club.

PITTSBURG, Pa., July 12^sic—Having much time to spare I could distribute a good many Shearman free trade tracts if you have any left.

There is no organization here now. The members of the club broke away to take sides on the all important question of the tariff. Of our membership of forty-two at least thirty will “ride in the democratic wagon,” although you could not have found one free trader when the club was organized.

MARK F. ROBERTS, 2411 Harcums alley.

A Young Man with a Future.

Friends of Mr. John P. Cranford of Brooklyn will doubtless be glad to hear of the brilliant achievement of his second son, Ralph M. Cranford, a young man just past his majority, who has taken first prize in the competition of designs for a new city hall building for the metropolis. The young man had had next to no experience before this. He had entered an architect’s office only two or three months before, and prior to that he had done no architectural work of any kind.

1. HIGHLY PROTECTED INDUSTRIES.

2. UNPROTECTED, OR SLIGHTLY PROTECTED.

The highly protected men who saw the highly protected lumber with highly protected sawing machinery, it will be seen, get $215 a year for so doing. The statistics for this sawed lumber industry are interesting in other respects. Thus, the total amount paid in wages was $31,845,000; the cost of material was $146.155,000^sic; together these two items make $178,000,000. The total product was $233,268,000. Substracting^sic cost of wages and material from the value of product we find that $55,268,000 went to the employers and mill owner, or $24,000,000 more than the amount paid in wages.

We give these figures for what they are worth, without putting much faith in census figures, or arguments founded upon them, though the protectionists see fit to do so—whenever the figures suit them. But that the average rate of wages is lower in the protected than in the unprotected industries, is undeniable. This is due mainly to the character of those industries, and to the fact that employers in them are the largest importers and users of “foreign pauper labor;” but it nevertheless disposes of the argument that protection raises wages.

The Pittsburg Chronicle-Telegraph urges some electrician to invent a sewing machine motor. Ye gods of protection, what wickedness has broken out in Pittsburg! A sewing machine would make cheaper shirts, and cheaper shirts would make cheaper sewing women! Is not this the creed of the protectionist? Where is Kelley? Where is Randall? Where is Jarrett? The Chronicle-Telegraph must be disciplined, or its readers will begin to think!

A fatal admission is made by the Reading, Pa., Herald in noting Chicago’s advantage over the east in the manufacture of iron. The reason, it says, is hard to find; “but reason or no reason, it seems destined to gobble up the markets of the west and to be a successful and formidable rival to the old and well established manufacturing centers of the east.” And yet Chicago has no natural gas, as Pittsburg has; her wages are higher than wages in Pittsburg, and there is no protective tariff to keep her products out of competition with the products of Pittsburg’s pauper

p. 4, col. 4

labor. There is a screw loose somewhere. Perhaps it is what is by courtesy known as the “protection philosophy.”

The Detroit Evening News wants to learn whether the democratic congressmen who have done their level best to diminish the effectiveness of the Mills bill are “to be sent back to continue in congress their resistance to the principles of the message and to the oft repeated promises of their party?” We hope not.

One Henry H. Houston of Philadelphia, a director of the Pennsylvania railroad company, has made a profitable study of the land question. He secured a belt of farming land from a quarter of a mile to a mile in width and extending from Bryn Mawr through Chestnut hill to the New York division of the Pennsylvania road. A railroad to be operated by the Pennsylvania is now to be run through this strip. Of course the railroad will immensely increase the desirableness of Mr. Houston’s tract of land, and it is expected, according to the Philadelphia Times, that what he “bought for from $150 to $500 per acre will bring away up in the thousands.”

As an indication of the advance of opinion toward accepting the single tax, an incident which occured^sic during Graham McAdam’s address at the the Reform club^sic last week is worthy of note. The Reform club has consisted for the most part of the conservative type of tariff reducers; but, though it is scarcely six months old, the single tax leaven has worked so well that Mr. McAdam was most vigorously applauded when he said that a protective tax on wood and iron benefited, not the laborer, but the owners of the mines and forests. And Mr. Wilbur referred so frequently and in such a way to wood, iron, coal, etc., as “God-given materials” as to create a strong impression that he had already asked himself to whom God gave these materials and discovered the true answer.

The attempt of gold basis republicans to divert votes from the democratic ticket because Thurman opposed the credit strengthening act, is like a two edged sword, and republicans may find it to be a dangerous plaything.

The Press, if may we use the expression^sic, goes the whole hog. Some folks like spare ribs, while others prefer ham; some have a weakness for jowl (with turnip greens), some are fond of sausages, some take to pickled pigs’ feet, and some again are content with bacon. But the Press, in a truly catholic spirit, devours the whole animal, and finds bristles and chitlings as succulent and digestible as head cheese and crackling. When it says a thing is good it isn’t afraid to say it’s all good—every part of it, and all the way through.

That duty on wool, for example. Most protectionist papers tell about the immense benefits that the duty on wool confers on the men who have wool to sell—and discreetly stop there. But the Press isn’t that kind of a paper. To its mind the duty on wool is a boon not only to the wool seller, but to the wool buyer as well. Like the quality of mercy, it blesseth him that gives and him that takes. It’s a good thing all round. Thus, after telling us that the increase in the weight of fleeces from two to five pounds “is almost wholly traceable to the duty on wool,” the Press goes on:

And the benefit did not cease here. Under this system a woolen industry has been developed in this country in a brief period which in annual output almost rivals the woolen and worsted industry of England. From a dependence on Great Britain for woolen goods we have developed our own manufactures, until to-day our blankets, our flannels, our worsteds, our woolens and our dress goods compare favorably in quality and price with those made in Yorkshire. The prices of these goocs (and the Press has the samples and the price for a series of years) have steadily declined and the consumer has been greatly benefited.

Down goes the pig, trotters, tusks and all. Gobble—gobble—gulp—the Press has swallowed him. And if the exigencies of the protection cause demanded it, the Press would doubtless swear that the surest way to make a one cent journal successful is to double the cost of the paper used in printing it.

A Correspondent Suggests a Single Tax Bandana.

NEW YORK.—I think single tax men should have a distinguishing color in this presidential fight—something similar to the Thurman bandana, under which they can march and cheer and fight, and be recognized. I suggest that its color be blue (indicating that that^sic we are true to our convictions). It might contain as many white stars as there are states. In the center might be a shield bearing the portrait of Jefferson (or any other of our great readers^sic), and surmounted by the motto, “Fidelity to Principle,” the whole surrounded by thirteen stars, symbolizing the thirteen original states.

This is going to be a red hot campaign, and I want single tax men to be recognized. We are in this race until the finish, and I want our “git thar” stroke to count and our colors to be seen flying at the bow. Besides, there may be some little profit in the scheme; that will aid our educational campaign fund to spread the light.

MORGAN E. STEVENSON.

Commercial Property on Long Island.

In the South Side Observer of Rockville Center, Long island, is an item stating that the board of town auditors met at Freeport a few days ago and granted licenses to thirty citizens to plant oysters on fifty-nine acres of oyster beds, which were divided in lots of one, two and three acres each. The rent paid was $5 per acre. A large part of the revenues of the towns on the shores of Long island are derived from this renting of oyster beds.

p. 5, col. 3

New York, Where High Wages are Paid, Competes with Massachusetts Where Low Wages are Paid.

NEW YORK, July 14.—I am continually told by protectionists that a country, state or locality paying high wages cannot profitably send goods into another country, state or locality paying low wages. If they would stop counting wages by the day or week and ascertain the cost of raw materials, and compare quality and quantity of goods produced, they would be able to speak more correctly.

Massachusetts is the banner state for shoe manufacturing. There wages are less per pair and expenses are less per pair than in this city, and yet in several factories here shoes are made for Massachusetts. In the shop where I work shoes for six Massachusetts cities are made. These cities are our best customers. I have often been told by protectionists that there is something about this they do not understand.

We have a factory here which works exclusively for the city trade. We have others which make the same line of goods for the whole country. But in the slack seasons, which come twice a year, the “city” factory closes for eight or ten weeks, while the others close for only two or three.

The Press, in an editorial some time ago, made this recommendation, that ladies should not wear imported goods—“patriotism before fashion.” The Press seems not to know that ladies’ fine shoes, which are largely made here, are made from imported goats’ skins, under many names; that gentlemen’s fine shoes are made of imported leather; nor that in this branch of labor are employed many Blaine republicans who would lose their present employment if this recommendation should be carried out. I have seen this question from many points, and have concluded that the sooner trade is allowed to govern itself by its own laws the better it will be for all. I think this agitation is just what is needed. It will show men the tariff robber and ultimately the ground rent robber.

GEORGE SEWARD, 203 West Thirty-fourth street.

A “Protected” Iron Molder Has a Few Words to Say.

ERIE, Pa^sic., July 14.—I am an iron molder by trade and have lately came^sic on from Brooklyn, where I had been employed for about six months. Of course the usual strike took place against a ten per cent reduction in wages, and I had to take the road. Wherever I stopped I could hear people discussing the tariff question. I have talked with some very intelligent people who are really afraid of free trade, but I found that there was little difficulty in making them see the folly of our indirect system of taxation. I invariably wound up with a single tax argument. From what I have seen I am satisfied that this campaign is ours.

I worked here in the city of Erie about seven years ago. We then had a prosperous union, and molders’ wages averaged $3 a day. The men for the most part were sensible and intelligent. To-day the union is demoralized, wages are $2 a day, and the men are degraded. When I went into some of the shops and spoke to some of these men they did not even raise their heads to look me in the face. Fear has ground out what little principle they had in them, and they hate to see a stranger come into the shop. I might cite you many such incidents to back up my assertions. There are molders in this and other cities who work by the piece.

They work from one end of the week to the other without knowing what they will get in payment. When pay night comes they have to take whatever is given them. If they open their mouths they make themselves liable to discharge. Union men are disliked. Such are the fruits of “protection” to American labor.

I have laid down the course which I intend to follow during this campaign. I shall attend all the republican meetings to hear the protectionist speakers, and, if I can obtain the privilege, to ask questions. All single tax men should avail themselves of these opportunities and do likewise. It might be the means of sending away several in the audience with our principles ringing in their ears.

Send me some tracts.

JAMES A. MILLER.

They Can’t Check Discussion.

INDIANAPOLIS, Ind., July 14.—The democratic party had what was termed a little local demonstration to-night, but it proved to be a monster in every way, both in point of numbers and enthusiasm. The speakers tried to hedge on the tariff question by denying that the democratic party is the free trade party, and by endeavoring to convince the audience that the party only favors a small reduction of the customs duties sufficient to reduce the surplus in the treasury, but when it came to the question of protection they were compelled to talk free trade doctrines, and by denouncing so-called protection they had to brand it as a delusion and a snare which does not protect in the least.

The most significant thing I learned was the fact that a very large percentage of the workingmen are familiar with the single tax doctrine, and I look upon it as a coming issue. Brother Krause and I did a little missionary work after the meeting by entering into a discussion with quite a number of men on the tariff question. By gradually bringing forward the underlying principle of taxation we soon had them interested, and we explained what really makes high wages. To our surprise all agreed with us, and several said they had been studying the land question.

But before this a well dressed and apparently well-to-do gentleman, who had been talking protection with all his might, and had got repulsed upon several propositions, finally said that the working men of the country were bent on tearing down and destroying the present system, and wanted to create a revolution. To this I replied, “Yes sir, we intend to do away with the system that makes millionaires of the few, paupers of the many; we intend to uproot the whole vicious system that advances and perpetuates privileged institutions and builds up privileged classes, and inaugurate a system of equity and justice in its place.” The crowd cheered me, and my opponent could not stand it and left.

L. P. CUSTER.

The Protective Principle Weakening in the Coal Fields.

FREELAND, Pa.. July 10.—Up in these highly protected hills the free traders are becoming very active. A number of articles attacking the protective tariff have appeared in the Hazleton Plain Speaker, the most influential paper in the middle coal fields. As yet no protectionist has had the temerity to dispute any of the correspondent’s statements. Everything looks very encouraging. I believe that with proper effort Pennsylvania can be placed on the list of doubtful states, if not brought into the democratic column. The most prominent aspirants in this Fourth legislative district for the nomination for congress of both parties are single tax men. Yours, in the cause,

W. B. ESTELL.

p. 5, col. 4

A Short Speech by Graham McAdam Bristling with Information.

Graham McAdam talked to the Reform club Friday night, July 13, about “How to talk to other persons about the tariff.” When he concluded United States District Attorney Mack D. Wilbur of Kings county made a remarkable speech which excited great enthusiasm. Mr. McAdam in his address said:

As the result of many talks with skilled artisans I have found that there is a method of placing this question of the tariff before the minds of workingmen which does not allow evasion. The first thing which interests workingmen is the statement by protectionists that the present tariff is necessary to enable competition with foreign laborers and manufacturers, and it is unjustly assumed that unless there is such a tariff the American workingman will be placed on the same plane as the English laborer, or, at worst, with the East Indian or Chinaman. The first step, therefore, is to rid your hearer’s mind of the question of wages. What are the elements of competition? The first should be materials. These may be divided into metals, fibers and wood. The first of these may be separated again into iron, lead, nickel and tin; the second into wool, cotton and flax; the third requires no explanation, for our supply exceeds all present demands. Another of the elements of competition is power, which is derived from coal, water and wind; a third is capital, and the fourth wages, which consists of food, clothing and shelter. No man ever received more than these for wages. These things tabulated upon a blackboard furnish the best exemplification to your audience. It gives them a picture which they rarely fail to remember. Now comes the question as to what the tariff does to enable us to compete. It sticks duty at once upon all of these materials. They are taxed about like this: Iron from 40 to 50 per cent, lead from 50 to 60, nickel about 45, and tin free. Here’s your chance. I illustrate why tin is free. Because we haven’t got it anywhere as yet. But there has been some little talk about it being found in North Carolina and Maine; and depend upon it that as soon as it is brought to sunlight fellows will go to Washington and get it taxed. That is what a tariff is for. It is to enable John Smith to make more money out of his particular little interest.

Now come down to wood. The duty on that is from 10 to 30 per cent; coal 24 to 43 per cent, water they can’t tax and wind they have got to let go free. Here we are then at the fourth of the elements of competition. The tariff increases the cost of food, clothing, and shelter. The tariff is alleged to encourage home industries. What do we wish to encourage? Not wood, or coal, or iron, for the men who are benefited there are not the laborers, but the owners of forests and mines. Wool! What American workingman is benefited by the tax on wool? And so on with the list. Take a diagram setting forth this little problem, such as I have tried to give you, and place it before the workingmen, and they will appreciate and understand it. New York laboring men are now in a different position than they were four years ago. Since then a man whom I respect—but with whom I cannot agree—has come before them and converted them from being sentimental protectionists to free traders. I refer to Henry George. (Applause.) You can’t stampede an audience of workingmen as you once could with the cry of “free trade.” They have acquired knowledge and enjoy the possession.

What is called cheap labor is not the thing to be feared. In France, a protection country, they argue differently than we do. Their wages are lower than in England, but the French workingman declares this is due to the fact that their work is not so good as that of the Englishman.

Here are some figures giving the comparative amount of wages received in finishing raw materials:

While one operative in Germany is working up 100 pounds of raw material, others in England and this country are working up 243 and 363, respectively. These figures are based upon an actual canvass of the facts. Again, take the figures in the last census concerning the production of silk in this country. It is given as $34,410,463. The tariff profit is fifty per cent. Therefore, we pay a tribute of $11,000,000 to increase American workingmen’s wages. But the same census shows us that only $9,000,000 is paid in wages, allowing $2,000,000 additional to go into the indigent manufacturers’ pockets. (Applause.)

To Make the Single Tax a Reality.

CLEVELAND, O., July 10.—The following extract from an article by Rev. Sydney Smith, in the Edinburgh Review (1826) will serve to show single tax men what they will have to do to make the single tax a reality. Rev. Smith says:

“That man is not the discoverer of any art who first says the thing; but he who says it so long, and so loud, and so clearly, that he compels mankind to hear him—the man who is so deeply impressed with the importance of the discovery that he will take no denial, but, at the risk of fortune, and fame, pushes through all opposition, and is determined that what he thinks he has discovered shall not perish for want of a fair trial. Other persons had noticed the effect of coal gas in producing light; but Winsor worried the town with bad English for three winters before he could attract attention to his views. Many persons broke stone before Macadam, but Macadam felt the discovery more strongly, stated it more clearly, persevered in it with greater tenacity, wielded his hammer, in short, with greater force than other men, and finally succeeded in bringing his plan into general use.”

Is not this true of every step of progress the world has ever made? In a just cause, brains, diligence and perseverance everywhere lead to success. Let us therefore take courage from the experience of the past, and not consider our cause lost, but continue to push it with ever increasing vigor.

H. SHERMER.

Poverty and Land Values in Chicago.

CHICAGO, Ill., July 10—According^sic to the best information to be had on the subject, there are now about 35,000 idle men in Chicago unable to get employment at any wages. They comprise all grades of wage workers, from the best class of mechanics to the day laborer, and the most expert accountant to the errand boy.

A recent number of the Real Estate and Building Journal gives a statement of real estate yearly sales, running from thirty-eight million in 1871 to ninety-five million in 1887 and an estimate of a hundred million for 1888. The present value of business property is given at $5,000 down to $100 per front foot. Residential property is ranging from $750 down to $125 per front foot. But presumably these lots are for people who don’t work, for immediately following is, “Workingmen, corners, $50; workingmen, inside, $35.”

As an example of the advancing tendency of values, a lot 100 feet by 90 is cited. It was sold in 1864 for $34,000, in 1875 for $140, p. 5, col. 5 000, in 1882 for $400,000, and in 1887 for $600,000, “showing an increase in a little over twenty years of from $350 a foot to $5,000 a foot.”

The value of “acre” property adjoining the city is given at from $700 to $3,000 per acre.

In the face of these facts, the papers and people are wondering why such numbers of men are unemployed. Charitable individuals and institutions are at their wits’ end to know how to cope with the widespread distress, never once seeing that the high price of land, whien^sic is paraded as evidence of prosperity, is a concomitant of all this idleness and poverty. Thousands of city lots and suburban acres lie unused while over 3,000 men^sic, able and willing to work, are compelled to stand idle.

WILLIAM SPALDING.

How a Great and Rich City Could be Made Out of a Bankrupt Town.

St. Louis Republican.

MASCOUTAH, Ill., June 20.—Our sister city of East St. Louis is in a peck of trouble. At a time when public sentiment seems to be fairly represented by her city government, the penalty of former municipal extravagance and mismanagement must be paid by the present generation of taxpayers. The law wills it, the courts have decreed it, and the debt must be paid even though all property and goods within the corporate limits “be confiscate to Venice” in order to satisfy the judgments of the city’s creditors.

In the halcyon days when the city was in the hands of political nondescripts, debts were contracted and bonds were issued to the tune of $1,000,000. And now, by legal decree, taxes must be levied to pay them. But how can the industries of East St. Louis survive under so heavy a burden? How can it be hoped that a single new industry will be established there if threatened at the outset with prohibitive taxation? Capital is not only free to stay away if the prospect is uninviting, but is free to move away if burdened there more than elsewhere with repressive taxation, thereby reducing to an utter impossibility the already gloomy prospect of freeing the city from the principal and ever growing interest of its municipal debt.

While the ablest financiers of the city are pondering the problem, and committees are devising ways and means out of the trouble, they are confronted at the outset by a constitutional difficulty which presents an obstacle almost insurmountable. The constitution of Illinois provides that all property and values in the state shall be assessed and shall pay state taxes in equal ratio. This provision applies to county and municipal taxation as well, although corporations and individuals throughout the state evade the law every year by secreting, or only partially listing their personal property to the assessor, yet they cannot successfully evade the law when capital seeks fixed investment. And, therefore, every fixed investment, every manufacturing and productive enterprise in the city and state contributes its proportionate share to the public revenues. The tax on enterprise, though hitherto not onerous enough to be prohibitive, is, nevertheless, sufficiently heavy to dampen the ardor of those who would engage in manufacturing or in productive enterprises of any kind, from the building of factories down to stock raising. Though the framers of the constitution probably did not contemplate such results, yet the steadily growing state taxes are just as steadily operating to discourage thrift and enterprise throughout the state. But now, when it shall be necessary (for the court decrees it) for a municipal government, under this constitutional provision, to quadruple and quintuple the taxes on all enterprises within its municipal confines, from rolling mills down to provision stores, then will the industrial outlook for such a city be gloomy indeed.

If, on the contrary, instead of placing further burdens on industry and productive enterprise, the existing load of state, county and municipal taxes could be lightened, or indeed abolished, then would enterprise meet with so much greater recompense in East St. Louis than elsewhere that capital would flow to that fortunate railroad center, and the hum of industry and the songs of happy artisans be heard in a few short months where now the lonely gardener hoes the succulent cabbage in the truck patches of the American bottom. Were the constitution of Illinois so modified as to permit county, township and municipal governments to exempt from taxation all personal property and fixed improvements within their confines, then the problem of East St. Louis would be solved. So soon as that city adopted the method of raising its revenues by taxing land values alone, and exempting from taxation every product of industry and every form of enterprise, there would at once set in a flow of capital and of labor to East St. Louis which would produce so great an increment in land values that this increment, taken by the city in taxation, would suffice not only to pay its debt, principal and interest, but also to provide an ever increasing fund for street paving, schoolhouses, sewerage, water works, electric lights and every convenience for a flourishing city which makes it desirable for residence and for business. Such an increment in land values can occur only in the same measure that people can be induced to move to East St. Louis. The greatest inducement to the establishment of business enterprises is to exempt them from taxation. Where manufactures prosper population grows. Where population grows land values increase. This increment in value being created by the people and unearned by any individual should belong to the people and not to individuals; and only those could grumble (and they must be few) who, having bought vacant lands, expected to realize for their personal profit that increment in value, which, being produced by the whole people naturally belongs to the whole people, and not to any individual.

Allow me to add, in conclusion, that my solution of this vexatious problem is not only practicable, but will inevitably be adopted ere long. The recommendation of Mayor Hewitt that personal property shall be exempt from municipal taxation in New York city, and the deficit in the revenues thereby created be made good by appropriating the increment in land values consequent thereon, is but a straw showing the rising current of public opinion; and not the least improbable action of the next legislature of Illinois is the submission to a popular vote of a constitutional amendment framed on the line I have suggested.

ILLINOISAN.

Greeley on Over Production.

In the year 1850 Horace Greeley addressed the New York typographical society at a celebration of Franklin’s birthday, in which he said:

I trust no one here gives heed to the mumbling of self-styled political economists about over production and the kindred phrases with which counsel is darkened. Over production—of what? Where? Can there be over production of food when so many, even in our midst, are suffering the pangs of famine? Over production of clothing and fabrics, while our streets swarm with men, women and children who are not half clad, and who shiver through the night beneath the clothing they have worn by day? Over production of dwellings, when not half the families of our city have adequate and comfortable habitations, not to speak of that large class whose lodgings are utterly incompatible with decency and morality? No, friends! there is no over production save of articles pernicious and poisonous, like alcoholic liquors, lewd books, implements of gaming, etc. Of whatever conduces to human sustenance, comfort or true education, there is not and never has been too much produced, although, owing to imperfect and vicious arrangements for distribution, there may often be a glut in the warehouses of trade, while thousands greatly need and would gladly purchase if they could. What the world eminently requires is some wise adjustment, some remodeling of the social machinery, diminishing its fraction^sic, whereby every person willing to work shall assuredly have work to do, and the just reward of that work in the articles most essential to his sustenance and comfort.

p. 5, col. 6

Must Look to Some Other Cause Than the Tariff to Account for the Differences in Wages.

San Francisco Examiner.

Our high tax contemporaries have much to say about the difference between wages in California and in Europe, but they never mention the difference between wages in California and in the eastern states. If the tariff is all that keeps wages from falling to the European level, why do they not fall now to the eastern level? There is no tariff in the way.

A maid of all work in San Francisco gets $25 a month; the same girl in New York would get $12; yet the same tariff is in force in both places. A carpenter in San Francisco gets $4 a day; in New York the same man would get $2.50; yet the same war taxes are in force there as here. It is evident that the high wages prevalent here depend on something else than the tariff, and it follows that a change in the tariff would not necessarily affect them.

Caught in a Net.

It is a peculiarity of fish that when, in their progress along a coast, or up or down a river, they meet a net stretched at right angles to their course, they invariably turn toward deeper water, follow the obstructing net until they reach the end of it, and then resume their course up or down the stream, not turning the corner sharply, but making a considerable sweep. This little peculiarity has got the race of fish into heaps of trouble. Cunning men, reckoning with certainty that what fish did yesterday they will do to-day and to-morrow and the day after, and so on to the end of time, plant a long line of net across a river’s course from the bank well out toward the deep. The fish, true to his instincts, follows the net outward to its very end, turns the corner gracefully, and essays to go on his way rejoicing. But alas! before he has gone twenty feet, another barrier of net opposes him; not running straight across his path, but diagonally. Again he hunts deep water, follows this line of net to its end, and proceeds as before, only to find another net in his way, which guides him into a great bag of net reaching from the top to the bottom of the river, and so arranged that unless the fish, in swimming round its sides, turns a very sharp angle at the gate, he never can get out. The whole of this cunning reticulatory arrangement is called a pound, and it catches every fish that comes along, from a shark to a moss bunker. The stupid things haven’t got sense enough to turn round and go out the way they came in. They persist in thinking that if they follow the nets toward deep water they must come to the end of them at last. And the result is that a boat load of fishermen come along in the morning, lift the net bag and carry the fish away to market.

It is doubtful if there be any man living fool enough to let his physical body be caught in a fish pound: but there are plenty of men with habits of thought sufficiently fish-like to let their intellects be led astray by a logical net arrangement not unlike that we have been describing. These are the men who insist on solving the social problem along a certain line and in a certain direction. Don’t turn back, they tell us. Don’t try to go out the same way you came in. ’Push for the deep water; the line of nets must come to an end sooner or later. Alas! it does come to an end; but its end is in the net bag of paradox, out of which no man can ever come who is not able and willing to turn a sharp mental corner. Such a fish-minded man is Mr. H. H. Champion, who tells us what he thinks about “The New Labor Party” in the Nineteenth Century for July.

Mr. Champion is not one of those who are blind to the problem of the day—who would like us to solve the net question by playing that there is no net. He sees the net plainly enough—every mesh and knot of it—and he sees that it stretches right across the path of progress. He is perfectly satisfied, too, that nothing is to be hoped for from the remedies ordinarily proposed. Legislatures may take testimony about tenement houses and sweaters, and pass laws against them, but all to no purpose. Charity can no more stem the tide of misery than Mrs. Partington could sweep back the Atlantic with her broom. Here is the opening of Mr. Champion’s article:

The social condition of the people is attracting an amount of attention in this country which would seem incredible to a man who left England seven or eight years ago and had been ever since out of reach of English newspapers. Upward of one hundred members of the house of commons have just committed themselves to the assertion that parliament pays far too little attention to social questions. Two hereditary legislators have succeeded, through the medium of select committees of the house of lords, in bringing prominently before the public the gravest problems connected with labor. Lord Aberdeen’s committee, if it has no other result, shows that it is no longer a mark of dangerous eccentricity to believe that the offer of the work house is not a wholly satisfactory method of dealing with the unemployed; while the evidence being given before Lord Dunraven’s committee establishes the fact that to thousands the progress of the Victorian era has only brought freedom to exist on “starvation wages.” Signs are not wanting that the poor themselves are discontented with their conditions. On the other hand the willingness of the comfortable classes to examine any kind of remedy, and to accept any solution of the difficulty that promises to do more good than harm, can never have been more marked.

And yet it is probable that little if any change will be effected. Those who are old enough to remember the period of “Alton Locke” and “The Song of the Shirt” will admit that there were great men—before Lord Dunraven and Mr. Arnold White—who thrilled England on the subject of “sweating,” and yet failed to touch its causes. Thomas Carlyle being dead yet speaks to warn anyone sanguine enough to think that mere words can replace the bastille of the workhouse by the organization of labor, or call forth captains of industry from the chaos of competitive commerce. A modern instance may better prove the wisdom of expecting little from sensational revelations and parliamentary inquiries. Five years ago a royal commission on the housing of the working classes obtained evidence that appalled those who had never heard of earlier inquiries into the matter, and had never seen with their own eyes the home life of the poor. The net result of all that discussion was an act of parliament, which is already an admitted failure. Its most stringent clause against insanitary dwellings has never been put in force. Things remain as they were, and the whole question is, to all appearance, shelved for years.

There is no reason to anticipate any greater results from the present examination into the miseries of the poor. Consequently it is time that those (and I believe they are many) to whom these subjects are not merely exciting novelties to talk about, but matters of real and deep importance, should determine on a practical policy which offers a reasonable method of improving the material condition of the workers, and, if persisted in, of securing that diffusion of prosperity and contentment without which the triumphs of civilization are but Dead sea apples. . . .

I have no wish to belittle the great efforts made by charitable and philanthropic persons to sweep back the rising tide of misery. They themselves admit that it is gaining upon them. And this is natural, for their efforts are condemned to impotence by the fact that they are directed, not at the causes, but at p. 6, col. 2 the effects, of poverty^sic. We get no further by helping poor men while the causes that make and keep men poor are still at work. Philanthropists build model dwellings, and by only taking four or five per cent on their capital, provide comparatively cheap house room. But they know, and all the world knows, that by so doing they only enable the worker who pays the smaller rent to underbid his less fortunate fellow in the competition for employment. A few workingmen co-operators share amongst themselves the profits of the shopkeeper and drive him into the labor market, thus handicapping themselves more favorably for a contest in which there are so many competitors. Diminish surplus labor by emigration, and you are but fitting a waste pipe to a tank which is being filled by a supply pipe of enormous and ever increasing diameter. Point out that the workman with eight children or an unquenchable thirst for beer is heavily weighted, and no one can contradict you. But make all men teetotalers, restrict all parents to four children, and you only start all your competitors level in a race for which the subscription is lifelong labor, the prize for the lucky few inadequate comfort, and tue lot of the many^sic bare subsistence wages for never ending toil, with starvation always in the foreground. Again, though the best educated man has the best chance now, make education general, and free competition lands you in a state where the many must still be miserable, and can thank you for minds that resent injustice being developed in bodies that suffer privation. This, or something very like it, is felt by everyone whose reason is not paralyzed by an overwhelming impulse to devote all his energies to the immediate relief of suffering humanity.

. . . . . . .

The times are ripe and a field is open for the action of a party which places the rights of labor before everything else, and while it aims ultimately to secure to the worker the full fruits of his toil, pursues the immediate amelioration of the conditions of his life by a practical policy based on sound economics, and requiring for its speedy triumph only the action of legitimate forces ready to hand. The first condition of its success is fulfilled by the general admission that there is urgent need for improvement in the lot of the working class. The sympathy is at present mostly confined to the extreme form of privation, but it is already being followed by a conviction that the sensational horrors are merely outward symptoms of a deeply rooted disease. For all who examine the matter closely find that “the sweating system” is but the last expression of that competition which drives all who live by labor, and that “the unemployed” are but the worst sufferers from the uncertainty of employment, which acts on the labor of every grade with results differing only in degree.

Brave words, aren’t they? One would swear that this fish, at all events, would never be caught in that paradox bag at the end of the line of nets. Well, one would be mistaken, that’s all. For Mr. Champion goes on in this style:

What is now required is to lay the finger on the actual cause why wages are low, hours of work long, and employment scarce; to distinguish the factors in the industrial situation in Great Britain to-day that give a man without special skill, when seeking employment, no choice but to accept a standard of living worse than that of most chattel slaves, in return for a day of labor twice as long as that of the average slave. The answer may be given in one word—competition. Tue possessors of wealth^sic are enabled, by the competition of the workers, to procure the means of life at the least possible cost; the workers, having no means of living save by the barter of their labor, are compelled, in the competition for permission to live at all, to underbid one another until the wage is the least that will support life, and the day’s work the longest the human frame will endure. Nay, these limits are often passed, and the life is not sustained, and the human frame breaks down. These are the simple facts of the case, and so long as this competition is allowed to go on the present conditions will remain.

And, by way of a remedy, Mr. Champion would have his labor party bend all its efforts to the enactment of an eight hour law! The fish is fairly in the bag, and the argument, from this point on, is but a mere swimming round and round.

Certainly it would be a good thing if men worked only eight hours a day—better still if they worked only six, or four hours. Only how are you going to manage to limit the hours? Let that be the work of the new labor party, says Mr. Champion. But it would be a good thing, of precisely the same kind, to have the poor better housed; and laws have been enacted providing that they should be better housed; and Mr. Champion himself is witness that they’re not a bit better housed in consequence. So the fish swims round and round in the bag, and never takes the trouble to reflect that the way in must also be the way out.

Why should competition be the terrible thing Mr. Champion paints it? If every producer is a seller, isn’t he also a buyer? Ah, but, Mr. Champion tells us, “the workers, having no means of living save by the barter of their labor, are compelled, in the competition for permission to live at all, to underbid one another until the wage is the least that will support life and the day’s work the longest the human frame will endure.” Aha! Rem acu tetegisti^sic, Mr. Champion—your needle’s point has touched the sore. Let the workers claim the right to live, if they please, otherwise than by the barter of their labor. Let them claim their share of God’s provision for mankind. Give them the right of access to the natural opportunities out of which alone their labor can create wealth. And don’t waste your time in getting laws passed that no man shall work more than eight hours a day, or receive less than $5,000 a year for his labor, or live in any other than a three-story brown stone front house on a fashionable corner. For you may fill the statute books of England and America with such laws as those; and every one of them will be as idle as an act of congress against dyspepsia or cold feet. What labor wants is not kind treatment and philanthropic legislation, but freedom to exert itself. Pull the nets up, Mr. Champion, and let the fish swim where they will.

The Condition of Continental Europe.

Mr. Stead, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, has been making a leisurely tour of Europe, halting at the various capitals, investigating the methods of administration of the different governments, and carefully weighing the chances of peace or war. To which side he finds the balance ultimately incline, Mr. Stead has not yet informed us. But meantime he presents a series of pen pictures of actualities p. 6, col. 3 and possibilities which are both instructive and interesting. Here is his description of the “armed peace,” which at present pervades Europe—every nation standing ready, with sword and shield in hand, studying how best it can ward off the blow whose descent it foresees, and deliver the stroke it has fully determined to deal:

Peace implies rest, and in Europe there is no rest. Peace supposes security and confidence, but in Europe everywhere is insecurity and suspicion. Peace supposes order, but in Europe there is not order, but international anarchy. The continent is an armed camp. The nations labor, as the Jews rebuilt Jerusalem, with a sword in one hand and their industrial tools in the other. Restless, suspicious armies are encamped side by side where formerly nations lived and labored. Every year some one or other of these armies invents some more deadly weapon than its rival, some more terrific explosive, some more expeditious mode of slaughter. No sooner does this happen than all the others hasten to adopt it, piling on with desperate energy the panoply of armor beneath which humanity is crushed. Amid the ceaseless ebb and flow of human affairs, one phenomenon never varies. The sum total expended on making ready for slaughter constantly increases. Every year more and more is drained from the soil in order to feed the magazines. Every year the barrack gains on the cottage, and preparation for war becomes the absorbing preoccupation of a great proportion of the flower of our youth.

From every able bodied man this armed peace exacts three, four or five years of life when it is at its richest and brightest. When the youth steps into manhood and begins to dream of love and labor and of the sweet joys of home and family, there swoops down upon him the kidnapper of Mars and carries him off to the barracks and the camp. This vast organization for murder is the upas tree of civilization, and all the continent is sickening under its fatal shade. The first cost is the cost in actual cash paid down, the second in life wasted at its prime, the third in the condition of unrest which saps the sense of security necessary for the prosecution of business. Business is difficult when peace is not worth three months’ purchase. Every year commerce becomes more and more international. Every year, therefore, any disturbance of peace becomes more dangerous to the trader. Even the shadow of war now produces far more serious dislocation of industry than in old times was caused by the actual progress of a campaign. For in old times every parish was a little world in itself, a microcosm capable of independent existence, and able to carry on its own business and grow its own crop if all the rest of the world was in measureless confusion. To-day all this has changed. A network of rail arteries and telegraph nerves now knits all Europe into one organism. Workmen may be thrown out of employment in Madrid because of a failure in Moscow. A swindle on the bourse in Vienna may take the bread from the mouths of a hundred families in Paris. This extreme development of the nervous system of the continent has gone on side by side with the steady development of militarism, which, when it becomes active, either excites business to feverish and frenzied activity, or reduces it to a condition of paralysis. It is difficult to maneuver an army without doing damage amid the rough and rustic hamlets of the peasantry, but in Europe we have at the same time multiplied the number of our armies and substituted for the cottagers’ huts edifices as fragile and as costly as the porcelain palaces of the Chinese emperors.

. . . . . . .

The whole continent seems to be under some horrible enchantment. The armed peace sits like a vampire at the bedside of the people, draining their life-blood while they sleep. Hence, say some, war is certain. The nations cannot stand the strain much longer. Sooner or later, and sooner rather than later, they will rush to war rather than wait to be slowly suffocated by the sheer weight of their armor.

A delightful picture of smiling peace, truly! One might well be tempted to long for the outbreak of war; for a short, sharp, decisive campaign; a lightning stroke of battle that should clear the air and render it possible for men to breathe freely once again. But Mr. Stead’s forecast of the war that is to come is that it will be no brief struggle, but a deadly wrestle of the nations, such as the world has never yet witnessed.

As the armed peace is a nightmare fouler than the world has yet suffered, so the next war is an appalling catastrophe from which imagination shrinks aghast. For there is nothing in modern history that it will resemble. Hitherto, down even to the last wars, when empires have gone to battle it has been a war of soldiers. The next war will be a war of peoples. In the Russo-Turkish war it was an army framed on the old system which was repulsed at Plevna, and ultimately swept in triumph to Constantinople. In the Franco-German war the French army was largely professional, and it was because the standing army of professional soldiers went down like ninepins before the irresistible rush of an armed nation that all military systems have been revolutionized. Now every nation has armed all its able bodied adults. In former days the mustering of a half million of soldiers was regarded as a mighty feat. To day Prince Bismarck^sic adds to the ranks of the army of the fatherland, with one stroke of his pen [7?]00,000 fathers of families, and not a single voice is raised even in passing protest. Germany in the center of Europe fronts east and west with an available host of three million trained soldiers. France will have between two and three millions ready to hand. Russia before long will be able to put five millions into line. Austria and Italy we need not count. The blast of the trumpets that proclaims the beginning of war will summon the manhood of Europe to the work of slaughter.

Not only will the number of the combatants be far beyond those which were raised even in the days of the First Napoleon—the grand army with which he crossed the frontier on his march to Moscow only consisted of the same number of men that has been added this year to the German army—but the spirit in which it will be fought out will differ for the worse. Prince Bismarck has frankly told us what kind of war it will be. We shall fight, he said, if we do fight, until we are bled as white as veal. It will be a duel to the death—a war in which the avowed object of the combatants is the utter destruction of their adversary. “Saigner a blanc^sic,” to drain the very life blood of your enemy until you leave his carcass as white as that of the calf from which the butcher seeks to drain every ruddy drop of gore—that is the declared ideal of the foremost nations of the continent in the year of grace 1888. The imagination refuses to picture what it means. All our recent wars were short. The longest was that of the Crimea, which was little more than the siege and the defense of a single fortress by professional soldiers. The Franco-Italian war was almost an affair of weeks. The Danish war was over almost before it began. The Austro-Prussian-Italian war lasted just six weeks. The Franco-German p. 6, col. 4 war was over in six months. The conquest of Turkey was completed in about the same time. But the next war will not be over in six weeks or in six months. To bleed each other white, when both combatants are pretty well matched, and when there are millions of men in reserve, is an affair of years. But when all business is suspended, and the reapers have been summoned from the farms to the battle fields, it will be impossible to carry on war on this scale for years without utter collapse and ghastly famine. Hence the embattled millions will fight with the grim and desperate energy of men who know that, like Judas, what they do they must do quickly. They will strike terror. All the tourney rules of civilized war will be in danger of going by the board. It will be a contest of titans waged with the ruthlessness of fiends. The next war will be in danger of degenerating into a nineteenth century version of the horrors of the thirty years’ war, on a scale far more gigantic, and therefore characterized by crimes far more colossal.

The drafting of men into camps and the paralysis of production are not the worst features of that condition of dreadful uncertainty that the governments of Europe have created and call it peace. What can be more demoralizing to a people than the deliberate corruption of its press by such methods as are described below? What could more thoroughly brutalize a government than to learn experimentally the possibility of winning success by such hideous corruption:

The reptile fund—so called because of Prince Bismarck’s own phrase—consists of the confiscated fortune of the king of Hanover, together with an unknown grant from the war indemnity. Speaking of the attacks made upon the government by the press, the chancellor exclaimed on a memorable occasion that as his administration was so exposed to malignant misrepresentations at the hands of its adversaries, he did not think it tolerable that he should be left unarmed against so powerful and so unscrupulous a foe. “I must have means,” he said, “with which to hunt those reptiles to their holes and destroy them there.” Hence the so called reptile fund, which is simply a indefinite amount of secret service money at the disposal of Prince Bismarck for controlling the press. With its aid he is said to have organized a news service for the benefit of the German government, the like of which exists nowhere out of the pages of the French novels which describe the spy system of Fouche. At its head stands Herr Holstein, the ame damnee of Prince Bismarck, who has at his command a disciplined host of confidential reporters, who enable him to follow unseen the movements of all his adversaries. The great chancellor never neglects any foe, no matter how insignificant. The famous third section of the Russian police was mere child’s play compared with the ubiquitous engine of observation which the chancellor has established for the collection of information. “Power,” said Lord Beaconsfield, “belongs to the best informed;” and there is no newspaper editor in Europe who organizes so sympathetically the collection and tabulation of information as the German chancellor.

What kind of information? All kinds of information, but chiefly that which concerns the doings and sayings, the movements and the writings, of those whom it may be necessary for him to crush. At the chancellery of the secret intelligence bureau at Berlin, under Herr Holstein, are kept the dossiers of every man or woman whom from time to time it thinks necessary to Prince Bismarck to watch with a view to ulterior developments. The minuteness of the information thus stored up for future use is very extraordinary, and suggests many uncomfortable reflections. A friend of mine resident in Germany once had an opportunity of seeing a copy of his own dossier. Therein he found set down all particulars of himself and his family and his relations. A list was given of all the people whom he was in the habit of receiving, and a detailed report as to all the correspondents to whom he was in the habit of writing. To this man, it was written, he sends letters every week, to the other every day, to a third he writes sometimes twice a week, and then ceases to write for a week or a month. The skeletons that we all try to keep concealed in the shadiest recesses of our secret chambers are thus kept as ready for mobilization as a Prussian army corps. “Krieg, mobil,” telegraphed Von Moltke along the wires from Ems in 1870, and instantly all the parts of the huge military machine fitted themselves together and descended upon France. So in case it is necessary to crush or to embarrass any opponent at home or abroad, Herr Holstein has but to press a button and the private records of that opponent’s life are ready to hand, to be served up with such sauce piquante as may suit the public taste in any of the journals by which the inoculation of the public mind is arranged for in the interest of the administration.

But the possession of an indefinite amount of secret service money for purposes of corruption, and the accumulation from all the unseen channels of a ubiquitous secret police of a vast reservoir of information for use if required, are by no means the only instruments by which Prince Bismarck keeps his press in good order. “How is it done?” exclaimed a witty victim of the chancellor’s surveillance. “It is very simple. Some fine day all the editors of Berlin are summoned to the office of the oracle. They are told that the government is in possession of such and such an important piece of information which is communicated to them, not for publication, but in confidence, in order that when the opportune moment arrives they may be well informed. A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse, and before very long one or other of the editors discovers in some mysterious way that the time has arrived when the cat must be let out of the bag. He lets it out accordingly, and all his brethren follow suit, and the news, true or false, is launched in due form.” “But what,” I asked, “if an editor refuses to take the hint and obstinately abstains from circulating the official communique^sic?” “Then,” was the reply, “it does not go well with that exceptional newspaper. Misfortunes always attend the journal which is foolhardy enough to ignore a hint from above.” “What kind of misfortunes?” “Oh, all kinds of misfortune. Dormant lawsuits mysteriously reappear; official advertisements are withdrawn; privileges of sale or of display, which depend upon the good will of the administration, are suspended. But perhaps the most efficient allies of the chancellor and his myrmidons are the vendors of quack medicines for the cure of unmentionable diseases.” “How, in the name of wonder, can that be?” “It is very simple. In the fatherland the government charges itself with watchful solicitude for the morals of its subjects. But as even Homer sometimes nods, so the most vigilant administrations sometimes fails^sic to discover that the columns of German newspapers are defiled by the insertion of advertisements of immoral pills or by the address of unclean doctors. When, however, any newspaper continuously opposes itself to the will of the authorities, the custodian of public morals puts on his spectacles, and woe betide the unfortunate journal if in the obscurest corner of his badly printed page there should be discovered lurking an allusion p. 6, col. 5 to the objectionable pill or the disreputable physician. The administration is down upon him at once, and punishment is heaped on punishment until the editor consents to dance to the piping of power. Then the custodian of public morals once more slnmbers^sic and sleeps, and the quack advertises his pills in peace.”

Add to this that press prosecution for press offenses are as plentiful^sic as blackberries, that editors are sent to jail as felons for what would be regarded in England as perfectly justifiable criticism upon the chancellor, that half the cities in Germany are under a state of siege, and you can form some idea of the facilities which Prince Bismarck possesses for manipulating the journals of the fatherland.

The most marvelous example of the results which can be attained under the German system of press nobbling at home and of journalistic idiocy abroad was the European scare produced by the alleged concentration of Russian troops on the German frontier. As a matter ot fact^sic, there was no such concentration. The Russian government had moved 4,000 troops from Moscow to Warsaw. That was the solitary and slender substratum of fact, which was of course perfectly well known to the German war office. But it so happened that at that time Prince Bismarck, for reasons best known to himself, was anxious to secure, with the moral sanction of Europe and the unanimous vote of the reichstag, the addition of 700,000 men to the German army and also to compel Austria to add several millions to her military expenditure. As Europe was in a condition of profound peace the operation did not seem easy. To genius, however, all things are possible, especially to genius that has no scruples and that has a reptile press. So it came to pass one fine day, nearly a month after the 4,000 troops had been moved up, that one of the reptiles in some obscure corner of Germany discovered that the Russians were pouring troops westward toward the German frontier. Instantly all the other reptiles discovered this menacing announcement, and reprinted it for the edification of the German public. The English correspondents of course telegraphed it to London. The news goes the round of the continent, growing of course as it goes. To the excited imagination of nervous Europe the Russian frontier seems bursting with armed men, all day long the phlegmatic German seems to hear the rumble of batteries thundering up from the unknown depths of Muscovy to concentrate on the frontier of Posen or the boundaries of Galicia. When the sun rose in the east its rays were obscured by the lances of Cossack hordes swarming to the plunder of the fatherland. Every day brings news of fresh concentration, of the departure or arrival of new reinforcements for the frontier. Innocent bystanders imagine that all this thunder is real. Those behind the scenes know that it is produced by artifice, and is sheer illusion. But it is wonderfully realistic. Everything seems so natural, and of course so true. If it were not true, would a paternal government, with all the facts at its finger ends, allow such alarming statements to harrow up the soul of every Teuton? So every one said, and even the Russians, who knew that the only movement that had taken place was the dispatch of 4,000 men from Moscow to Warsaw—4,000 out of [8?]50,000—were not a little puzzled to understand what it could mean. The bourses of Europe were disturbed. The rouble, which has been steadily going downward until it is now worth about exactly one-half of its nominal value, took a further plunge toward zero. Russian securities declined. Business transactions all over Europe were checked, from dread of approaching war. Still was kept up the rolling of the German tomtoms and a thousand sheets echoed the reverberations of the heavy tread of marching millions of menacing Muscovites.

At last the psychological moment had fully come. As in the opera the advent of the hero is heralded by long flourishes of premonitory music in which all the skill of the orchestra is employed in leading up to his entrance, so when the public mind was strained to the utmost verge and all the continent rang with the clangor of steel and the thud of the Cossack troops, Prince Bismarck appeared in the tribune and demanded the grant necessary to add 700,000 fathers of families to the effective strength of the German army. It was perhaps the most tremendous blood tax ever imposed in a single speech. But so marvelously had the mise en scene^sic been managed, so dexterously had the great reptilian orchestra played upon the nerves of the nations, that it seemed the most natural thing in the world. All the actions of the German parliament^sic unanimously and enthusiastically acceded to his demand, and the press of Europe declared that the last inroad of militarism upon industrialism was forced upon the German government by imperious necessity.

And then when the money had been voted and the men added to the standards, the deception, having served its turn, was unceremoniously discarded without even dropping the curtain to conceal the scene shifters from the dupes of the great illusion.

Mr. Stead is probably not entirely free from a bias in favor of sensationalism. It can do no harm to take what he says with a very considerable grain of salt. But after making all allowances for exaggeration, there remains a picture of European society sufficiently terrifying.

A Wandering Shepard.

The new proprietor of the Mail and Express is making rapid strides in journalism. Beginning with the selection and transcribing of scriptural texts, he has improved his style by the composition of circulars to his employes demanding information as to their ages, conditions of life, personal habits, etc. And having thus acquired what Thackeray (how he would have loved the Shepard) called “the trick of the pen,” he has made a bold jump for fame, and appointed himself the traveling European correspondent of the Mail and Express, writing his letters, like many another correspondent, right here in New York. His first epistle, descriptive of things in Romania—just be particular about leaving out that u, if you please, Mr. Printer, for Colonel Shepard says so—has already appeared in his paper, and others will doubtless follow in due season.

The colonel writes under the nom de plume of Clio, which plunges us at once into a sea of doubt. For Clio was the illegitimate daughter of Jupiter and Mnemosyne, and is also the name of a pteropodous mollusk without any shell—a sort of ready opened Little Neck clam. Now the wildest stretch of imagination couldn’t convert the colonel into anybody’s daughter. On the other hand—a clam without any shell?—we give it up. Perhaps he’s a little of both, or may be somebody picked the name out for him. Anyway, that’s his name.

The colonel’s letter begins with a bit of history. In 1856, he tells us, the Turkish provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia were consolidated into the principality of Romania p. 6, col. 6 and General Couza was appointed the first prince.

He proved to be a benefactor of the country, for he gave the peasants two-thirds of the land of the country, requiring them to pay the old aristocracy for it by a series of taxes imposed upon the peasants and extending over a period of fifteen years.

Just how the country was benefited by the peasants being compelled “to pay the old aristocracy for it,” we are left to imagine, for the colonel doesn’t tell us. Also we are left in doubt as to what became of Mr. Couza. Clio doesn’t say anything more about him, but goes on at once to narrate that “in 1866 Charles of the Hohenzollern Simiringen^sic (it’s Sigmaringen in our encyclopedia, but no matter) mediatized family was placed upon the princely throne by the European powers.” To this ruler the colonel pays the following glowing tribute:

He proved so efficient and energetic and popular that the principality resolved itself into a monarchy in the year 1881, and by the common consent of the powers the prince became King Charles I of Romania, and has since continued to rule with vigor and applause, with the love of his people and the confidence of his neighbors.

A prince who rules with vigor and applause, to say nothing of the rest of it, is indeed worthy to be praised by a special correspondent, whether muse or mollusk.

Then follows a description of the country and an account of the capital, whose name we are told is Bucuresti, which somehow reminds one of Dr. Helmbold. It also suggests that the king of Romania doesn’t know the name of his own capital, since in the autograph letter which he got some other fellow to write for him to Colonel Shepard, and which was duly published in the Mail and Express, he wrote it Bucarest.

The legislative body next demands attention, and is served up by Clio after this breathless fashion:

It is still thought sufficient to provide them a hall which will not comfortably seat more than one-half of their number (after the manner of the British Houses of Lords and Commons), and a crowded and corn-hurting condition of things is the result, with a pushing for seats and a perching of some members upon the friendly knees of their fellows, and the dodging around some of the many pillars of the building when one of them desires to address the President, and the furious ringing of his bell almost constantly during the session calling for order, and the sobering shouts of several secretaries going on while members simultaneously demand hearing from different parts of the house, and lather themselves in their frantic and heated efforts to be heard, and only sure of that when drawing laughter by a joke, or hisses by attacking somebody or something.

The custom of lathering themselves in order to attract the president’s attention is certainly a curious one. But it is far from being the only extraordinary thing to be seen in Bucuresti. There is a church there that no traveler ought to miss.

In the same inclosure with the palace of the legislature are the old church and much finer palace of Prince-Archbishop Calentic^sic Miclescu, the Greek metropolitan, the stumpy colonnade of the church being terribly and hideously frescoed with souls burning in purgatory, as if in warning to all who join such a church that they may know what to expect hereafter, and had better keep out of it entirely.

Frescoed with burning souls! Great Scott! Where are the missionaries? No wonder the colonel puts a text in his paper every day, after visiting a church like that!

Then we get this somewhat incomprehensible extract from a railway guide:

The Oriental express train from London, Paris, Munich, Vienna and Buda-Pesth, passes through here to Smaarada, on the Danube, about forty-four miles south of Bucuresti, where it terminates, and the rest of the journey is made by a ferry boat across the river to Rutschuk in Bulgaria, thence along a rough railroad through the beautiful country of the Balkan mountains to Varna, on the Black sea, and thence by steamship, ninety miles, to Constantinople.

“Passes through here”—“the rest of the journey”—“Varna on the Black sea.” Give it up. But never mind. Clio is just coming to the king, and no wonder she—or he—confound it, what is the proper pronoun?—is a little excited.

Through the good offices of the Hon. Fulton Paul of New York, our recent able republican representative at Bucuresti (replaced by a democrat who needed to be reformed by an office), we had the honor of an audience with the king.

There’s some mystery about this. Was the colonel introduced by the reformed democrat, replacing the Hon. Fulton Paul? Or did the Hon. Fulton leave word with the king to look out for the colonel? It’s like the fifteen puzzle. But it is fairly matched by this tremendous sentence which immediately follows it:

Sir William White, the British Ambassador, has also been very attentive to Americans, and has studied the political situation in the East so long and so thoroughly here, that upon the failure of Sir Edward Thornton to cope successfully with the astute diplomats of the powers at the Sublime Porte, he was transferred from this to the still more important post at Constantinople, where he still cultivates Americans, and does everything in his power to extend the praise of British free trade to the absolute death of every Turkish manufacturing interest, except a little needle embroidery work by the women, in which they spend their lives for less than a subsistence.

If the reader will excuse us, we’d rather not say anything about this little matter. We would like to, but there are too many snags.

So Clio saw the king, who speaks English perfectly, for the following extraordinary reason:

The King has practiced with Dr. Young, a resident American dentist living near the palace, while playing billiards with him, so that speaking English is not as hard with His Majesty as pulling teeth. Dr. Young has become as necessary and useful to him as Dr. Evans, of Paris, another American dentist, did to the Empress Eugenie^sic.

Good Lord!

Like a true American as he is, the colonel struck the king for a trade at once, and succeeded in booking his order for a copy of the United States revised statutes, 1 vol., full Russia, edition 1881. Having transacted this business, the king sent a servant to tell the queen there was an American in the parlor she might like to continued on p. 7 →

[continued on page 7]

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“Discusses some of the questions recently brought to public notice by Henry George and Father McGlynn.” She is opposed to the land theory of the former on the ground that it is not in accord with the Christian religion. . . . She criticises somewhat severely several of the clergy of her own church.”—New York Sun.

THE LAND OF THE NIHILIST RUSSIA.

By W. E. Curtis.

12mo, cloth, $1.

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GERMAN TRACTS.

No. 41. The Syracuse Platform. 2 pages.

No. 42. “First Principles.” Henry George. 4 pages.

No. 43. “Socialism—Its Truth and Its Error.” Henry George. 4 pages.

No. 46. “Taxing Land Values.” Henry George. 8 pages.

No. 47. “It is the Law of Christ.” Rev. S. H. Spencer of Henry, Ill. 4 pages.

No. 48. “The Case Plainly Stated.” H. F. Ring. 8 pages.

No. 50. “Progress and Poverty.” Henry George.

No. 52. “The Case Plainly Stated.” (Swedish.) H. F. Ring. 8 pages.

No. 53. “Sailors’ Snug Harbor.” Wm. T. Croasdale. 12 pages.

SWEDISH.

No. 52. “The Case Plainly Stated.” H. F. Ring. 8 pages.

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Address HENRY GEORGE,

12 Union square, New York city.

EARTH SONG.

Mine and yours; Mine, not yours. Earth endures; Stars abide— Shine down in the old sea; Old are the shores; But where are old men? I who have seen much, Such have I never seen.

The lawyer’s deed Ran sure, In tail, To them, and to their heirs Who shall succeed, Without fail, Forevermore.

Here is the land, Shaggy with wood, With its old valley, Mound, and flood. But the heritors? Fled like the flood’s foam— The lawyer, and the laws, And the kingdom, Clean swept herefrom.

They called me theirs, Who so controlled me; Yet every one Wished to stay, and is gone. How am I theirs, If they cannot hold me. But I hold them?

When I heard the Earth-song, I was no longer brave; My avarice cooled Like lust in the chill of the grave.