August 4, 1888 Vol. IV, No. 5Whole No. 83

THE STANDARD [label obscures: IN THE?] CAMPAIGN.

Subscriptions to THE [label obscures: STANDARD] from now to the close of the campa[label obscures: ign will be r]eceived at the following rates:

Single subscription . . . . 52c Ten or more, each . . . . . 48c One hundred or more, each . . . 44c

“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 man ner and will be sent for four successive weeks without charge to them.

Terms of subscription will be found on the fourth page.

CONTENTS:

A Call for a Conference of Single Tax Supporters of Cleveland. New York Free Trade Club. Judge Reid and Tennessee Democrats. William Lloyd Garrison and Owen G. Lovejoy. Awakening of Jeffersonian Democracy. The Good Work of the Republican Press. A Single Tax Campaign in Dakota. The Press and Mayor Hewitt. John Jarrett versus John Jarrett. Among the Typos. In a Type Foundry. Again, Where Are Those Acres? From Warren Worth Bailey. A Hot Debate. Harrison and the Workingmen. Pen, Paste and Scissors. Working of the Interstate Railway Law. The Protective Idea Destroying American Manhood. “Standard” Campaign Fund. Physiology As Is. Personal. Men and Things. Wire Rods. The Beating of the Drums. Single Tax Petitions. Queries and Answers. A Visit to “La Conciergerie,” State Prison of Paris. Straws Which Show the Wind. Stupidity Incarnate. Current Thought. Thomas Paine on Agrarian Justice.

Advocates of the single tax in New York and vicinity who propose in the coming election to support Cleveland and Thurman are requested to meet in the upper hall of Cooper union, on Monday evening, August 7^sic, at 8 o’clock, for conference as to the best means of doing so.

This call is made at the request of a number of our friends and with the knowledge that it will meet the approval of many others. As to whether single tax men who are determined to support the democratic national ticket should take any concerted action or form any separate organization, and if so what that shall be, are questions that many of us have been thinking about and talking about, and that can best be settled by discussing the matter at an informal conference. As the call is only to those who have made up their minds to support Cleveland and Thurman, the matter for consultation will be only as to how this support can be most effectively rendered, and the end we have in view most effectively promoted.

It is time that we should take counsel together about these things. We have too much interest in Mr. Cleveland’s election to leave undone anything that may enable us to make it more secure and more triumphant. He has taken a great step in our direction and has pulled his party, despite its machines, into a discussion that brings the great labor question into practical politics. He and Thurman—for the significance in the second place on the democratic ticket of a man whom the great railroad monopolists hate, and whose re-election to the senate the Standard oil company prevented, is very great—represents to us all that is good in the democratic party, and all that is hopeful in national politics; while the republican candidates, standing on the most ultra protection platform ever promulgated in the United States, represent for this campaign at least the ignorance, cupidity and prejudices that block our way. The election of Cleveland and Thurman means the revivification of the democratic party with something of democratic principle, the triumph in its ranks of the spirit of Jefferson over the spirit of Tweed; it means the carrying forward of the movement against protection into a fight for free trade; the winning of the first set battle on the road to freedom; the bringing up of other economic questions, and an attack on monopoly all along the line.

New York in this election, as it was in the last, will probably be the pivotal state. And it is in New York that cowardice and treachery are most apparent among Mr. Cleveland’s party supporters and can do the most mischief. It ought to be our part to do all we can for his election independently of them, and, it may be to some extent, in spite of them.

This campaign, moreover, gives the greatest opportunity for the propagation of our principles that we have yet had. We ought to take advantage of it as far as our ability will permit. While democrats are apologizing for attacking protection and declaring that they are not free traders, we who are free traders, and who see in the removal of restrictions and the abolition of all the burdens now imposed on production, the emancipation of labor and the restoration of their birthright to the disinherited, ought to make our voices heard. We can rally the men who are not afraid of freedom,

p. 1, col. 2 and show how many of them there are; we can place upon our own platforms men who are too democratic to find place upon the regular democratic platforms; and we can arouse an enthusiasm and do a work of education that will not only tell in votes for Cleveland and Thurman in this election, but will tell most powerfully in the great educational campaign of which that ending in November is only a beginning.

This will not be a meeting for speaking, but a meeting for consultation, and I would urge all single tax men in sympathy with its purposes to be present.

The New York free trade club begins to show signs of life. A vigorous branch has been started in Harlem, and the general committee has issued a circular in which it announces a reduction in annual dues from $5 to $1, declares its intention of carrying forward the banner of the absolute freedom of trade, and says:

One of the most important matters of detail which we now have to undertake is the formation of congressional district organizations, through which those free traders who are not disposed to enter either of the regular democratic halls, can at the same time labor for the success of the democratic presidential ticket and insure the election of congressmen who stand right on the tariff question.

The ranks of the free trade club ought to be filled up. It can be made the agency of effective work in this campaign. Its office is 39 Nassau street. E. J. Shriver is chairman of the executive committee, and E. P. Doyle secretary.

The Philadelphia Record, though it is doing good work for free trade, is evidently afraid to let its readers know that there is a real free trader in the country. This is the way in which it speaks of Judge Reid:

Two years ago Judge Reid of Tennessee was the republican candidate for governor of that state, on a high tariff platform, and, by his popularity, he received the largest vote ever given to a republican in Tennessee, coming within a few thousand votes of an election. But Judge Reid has become convinced that the tariff should be reformed, and he is now an earnest advocate of the election of President Cleveland.

This is not the truth. Judge Reid has not become convinced that the tariff should be merely reformed. He is not that sort of a man. When he believed in protection he believed in the highest kind of protection. When he ceased to believe in protection he became an absolute free trader. He is to-day an outspoken and earnest advocate of the election of President Cleveland, not because he wants the tariff reformed, but because he wants the tariff and all other taxes on labor and the products of labor, abolished, and all public revenues raised by the taxation of land values—that is to say, by a tax on monopoly. Judge Reid does not suppose that President Cleveland stands for what he wants, or that the democratic party is committed to it. But in what Mr. Clevelanu stands for, and in what the democratic party is committed to, Judge Reid sees a step toward what he wants. The Record would not endanger a single democratic vote by frankly stating this. On the contrary, protectionists are more likely to become out-and-out free traders like Judge Reid than they are to become tariff reducers. A vigorous, fearless free trade campaign in that state would have given Pennsylvania to the democrats this year, whereas the best that can be hoped from the policy that is being pursued is a reduction of the republican majority.

The Memphis Appeal is much more manly. Replying to the Dresden Enterprise, a democratic paper that likes Judge Reid’s coming to the support of Cleveland and Thurman, but does not like his reasons, and thinks it necessary to protest that the democratic party does not sympathize with absolute free traders and single tax men, the Appeal says:

Our esteemed contemporary is wide of the mark in supposing that Judge Reid’s support of the democratic party makes it in the least responsible for what it terms Henry George’s wild theories of land tax. . . . Let Judge Reid hold fast to his single tax idea and Henry George and his followers promulgate it with all the good sense and logic they can command. This is a free country and they have a right to their views and opinions. We care nothing about any man’s religious or philanthropic or economical views. If a man holding peculiar or extreme ideas in these departments of thought is willing to help us in victoriously re-electing Cleveland, we say welcome, thrice welcome. And we say to Judge Reid, you are a thousand times welcome to the democratic ranks, because you are a man of influence, a man of brains, a thinking man and a philanthropic man, who loves his kind and would find the shortest way to accomplish the greatest amount of good for his race. You may agree or disagree with George, Judge Reid, as much as you choose, you are pledged to support the democratic nominees and platform and we welcome you sincerely and heartily.

This is good sense and good politics. We single tax men are supporting Cleveland because he suits us. We are supporting him just as the wiser abolitionists supported Lincoln. We make no false pretenses. We do not assume that Cleveland is one of us, or that the democratic party is committed to our doctrines for

p. 1, col. 3 more than a little way. But that little way is enough for us now—it is a beginning. And though democrats themselves may not see, in the direction in which they have begun to move, anything of greater promise to the masses than a seven per cent reduction of the tariff, they will be unwise to reject the aid of men who do see in it the road to the emancipation of labor and the abolition of poverty.

A clear note comes from a Massachusetts democratic stump. William Lloyd Garrison addressed a large democratic meeting at Hyannis last week in a speech that had all the power of clear conviction and high moral purpose. If there are any milk-and-water tariff reducers among the Hyannis democrats, Mr. Garrison’s declaration of his own position must have given them a cold chill. He said:

I am a thorough believer in absolute free trade. I look forward to the day when custom houses shall be regarded as the emblem of barbarism—an anomaly and an anachronism in a true republic.

And thus he continued:

I am aware that the democratic party makes no claim to being a free trade party. Shall I therefore decline to recognize its step in the direction of progress? On the contrary, I hail it with joy and hope. The question cannot be discussed without opening the eyes and minds of men. The republican party, from its inception till the day when Abraham Lincoln signed his immortal proclamation, steadily protested that it did not mean abolition. The path once entered on leads into liberty, and whether men mean it or not, one step necessitates the next. There are no returning footsteps. Therefore, in departing from the company that at present masquerades under an honored name, I show my fealty to the true republican party of Sumner and Giddings.

Another democrat of the same kind, Owen G. Lovejoy, has made his appearance in the democratic party of Illinois, and has been received with open arms, having been unanimously nominated for congress by the democratic convention of the Seventh district. Mr. Lovejoy, like Mr. Garrison, bears a name once bitterly hated by the “sham democracy.” He is a son of the veteran abolitionist congressman, Owen Lovejoy, and the nephew of Elijah P. Lovejoy, who was murdered at Alton, Ill., before the war by a pro-slavery mob. Like Judge Reid of Tennessee, Mr. Lovejoy four years ago took the stump for Blaine, being then a protectionist. Like Judge Reid he has since, I am informed, become a believer in the single tax. At any rate his speech to the convention shows he has become a free trader. He denounced protection as nothing but robbery under form of law, and quoted as a statement of his position the words of Justice Miller of the supreme court of the United States in the Topeka land case: “No government has the right to put its hand in my pocket, take out my money and give it to some one else.” “The democratic party is not for free trade!” so its “men-afraid-of-their-horses” declare. And we who are for free trade are quite willing to allow this claim. But, all the same, the democrats of the Seventh congressional district of Illinois howled with delight at the free trade sentiments of their free trade nominee for congress. And all over the country the democratic masses will welcome the same doctrine if it is fearlessly presented to them.

The address of Chauncey F. Black, late lieutenant governor of Pennsylania^sic, and president of the democratic society of Penusylvania, which is being sent out with circulars looking to the formation of branches through the state has a most refreshing ring. Mr. Black says:

Mr. Jefferson believed that no man could be a protectionist, for the sake of protection, and be a democrat. President Cleveland agrees with Mr. Jefferson, and I believe I am safe in the statement that every enlightened democrat in the United States agrees with President Cleveland.

And a good many unenlightened ones, too. For no one knows better than Mr. Black that the enlightened democrats, i. e^sic,, democrats who understand and believe in the political philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, have, up to this time, and especially in Pennsylvania, been but a remnant. And what he seems to aim at in the formation of these democratic societies is not so much the securing of adjuncts to the machinery of carrying elections as the establishment of educational societies for the discussion and teaching of Jeffersonian principles. He says:

We are confronted to-day by the tariff question, and President Cleveland, like Mr. Jefferson, recognizing the paramount importance and vital character of the issue as involving nothing less than the power of government to lay the masses under tribute for the support of special interests and favored classes, has summoned the people to vote upon it, naked and alone, and thus to determine once for all whether the producers of this country are to be free or slave. Does any man suppose that if the democracy of the United States had any time since 1880 been organized into Jefferson associations or democratic societies acknowledging the name and authority of Jefferson, there could have been the smallest division of opinion among us on this grave question? It would have been impossible. Errors and misconceptions would have been winnowed away in the keen blast of popular discussion in the voluntary demo-

p. 1, col. 4 > cratic assemblies. False doctrine would have been detected by the infallible touchstone of the Jeffersonian test, and the fallacies of the bourbon protectionist, seeking to enslave labor to build up monopoly, would have been uniformly met by us as they were by our fathers. It would not have required the trumpet of our great leader—the fearless and invincible man of the people—who stands today where Jefferson and Jackson stood, to summon us to this critical contest for American liberty; we would have been there long before he called, and the battle would have been won before it was joined.

What could be more encouraging than such language^sic as this from the president of the association of Pennsylvania democratic clubs. There are too many federalists and whigs in the lead of the democratic party to have the vote of Pennsylvania counted for Cleveland this year, as with a vigorous campaign on Jeffersonian principles might have been done. But the leaven is working.

In the meantime the republicans are doing their share of the good work. The Boston Globe says:

The extreme free traders like Henry George are delighted with the course of the republican press. ’And well they may be. Six months ago all the free traders in this country could hardly be reckoned by hundreds; now it is not too much to say that they are hundreds of thousands. It is doubtful if there is now any assembly of workingmen in which there are not some who openly avow doctrines, not of reasonable reduction of the war tariff, as advocated by President Cleveland, but of genuine free trade.

The republican cry of “free trade!” is responsible for this. But for that insane iteration there would be to-day no reference to free trade anywhere outside the ranks of Henry George’s followers. Now, free trade is really being forced into public discussion by the madness of the republican press. Not in a dozen years of agitation could the handful of free trade theorists have so popularized their theory as the reckless republican managers have popularized it for them in the last six months. For when large bodies of men see free trade discussed and denounced every day in every republican paper as if it were a live question, they are bound to take sides upon it.

There are and have been other influences at work to make free traders of workingmen than the republican press. The Globe does not realize how fast and how far the doctrines advocated by THE STANDARD have been spreading. But the republican press is now doing its share, and this not from blindness, but from the necessity of the situation. When a great question like that of the tariff comes into popular discussion it must be discussed not as a question of percentages, but as a question of principle. This may be seen in the democratic press as in the republican. Despite their protests, what they are really discussing is, Whether we ought to have any protective tariff or not? Let Cleveland be elected and it will not be long ere the question will be, Whether we ought to have any revenue tariff or not?

Something like a local single tax campaign has been going on in Lake county, Dakota. E. H. Evenson, the county superintendent of public schools, is a subscriber to THE STANDARD and a single tax man, and has been doing missionary work through the county by getting subscribers to THE STANDARD, distributing land and labor tracts, etc. This led to a fight against him at the recent school election, that, as the following extract from one of the local papers will show, would have delighted the heart of Vice Chancellor Bird of New Jersey:

The educational institutions of this country are the foundation on which depends the stability of our government, and that a man who, while in the performance of his official duties as the head of those institutions, devotes any portion of his attention, time or thought to the distribution of a class of literature of the seditious, treasonable nature of the Henry George circulars, which Professor Evenson has been handling and believes in, is as unfit to superintend the molding of the minds of our youth as would have been Spies, Fielden or Most.

This was the key note of the opposition to Professor Evenson. He was, however, elected by a considerable majority, and the people of Lake county, Dakota, know considerably more of the single tax than they did before.

The Press has been publishing certain comments as to the management by Mayor Hewitt of his great estate at Ringwood, New Jersey. According to the daily papers Mr. Hewitt has become very indignant at this and has placed the matter in the hands of Assistant District Attorney Fitzgerald, with a view of beginning a suit of criminal libel. He has also given an interview on the subject to the reporters, of which this is the Herald’s version:

I am determined to resent this unjust and malevolent attack upon my character. If this publication be libelous, as I believe it to be, then Mr. Porter, the editor of the Press, must either give his authority for these false and malicious statements or he must go to jail. If he will give me the author, then the latter will have to suffer the consequences. Now this malicious slander must end. When I ran for mayor the same story was printed in the Leader, but Mr. Henry George, the editor, subsequently wrote a personal note of retraction. I could and did overlook the publication then, for it was made in the heat of a political campaign. But I will not overlook this statement, which is not only false, but deliberately malicious, and made at a time when there is no excuse for misrepresentation because of

p. 1, col. 5 > political bias or excitement. I wish to say that I am not to be prevailed upon from prosecuting the author of this malicious attack upon myself.

I object to being thus made Mr. Hewitt’s witness. I was never editor of the Leader, nor did I ever write such a note of retraction. I know nothing about these Ringwood stories further than that I heard them before I was a candidate for mayor, and that when I became a candidate they were brought to me with the offer of proof, if I would use them. I declined to do so. Something of the sort was, however, without my knowledge, afterward published in the Leader. As that paper was supporting my candidacy, I wrote to the editor protesting against such publications on the ground that, whether true or false, the introduction of personal matters was derogatory to the dignity of our campaign, which was one of principle. A like abstinence from personal abuse I also did my best to urge upon our speakers. I have never had any retraction to make concerning Mr. Hewitt, as I have always spoken of him with fairness and courtesy, even though on various public occasions he has seen fit to go out of his way to make misrepresentations and insinuations regarding me.

Whether Mr. Hewitt as owner of the 22,500-acre estate of Ringwood has pressed the absolute rights of ownership of that much of the earth’s surface any further than the laws of New Jersey give him authority; whether he has gobbled up a charity hospital or harried his neighbors to get their land, or done various other things which the Press avers, and which even protectionist opinion would probably condemn, will doubtless be settled in the criminal suit which Mr. Hewitt is to bring against Mr. Porter. But the queer thing is that the Press should charge Mr. Hewitt with setting up a pluck-me store and compelling his employes and tenants to trade there. If this is true, it ought to be so much to the credit of Mr. Hewitt, according to Press philosophy. For if he does this, he is only doing on a small scale what the Press is constantly contending should be done on a large scale. He is protecting the people of Hewitt and Greenwood and the Ringwood tract generally, just as the Press insists the people of all our states and territories must be protected. He is saving them from the machinations of the traders of other villages alien to the Ringwood estate, who want to do them the deadly injury of selling them things cheap. He is preserving for them their own home market!

Whether its charges be true or false, the Press surely forgets itself in these articles. For instance, it says of the village of Hewitt, which by its description is but a sample of many mining villages where the workmen of our most highly and most continuously protected industries dwell:

The air of utter ruin, of absolute sadness that is settled over the village of Hewitt, and the wan faces of the women who inhabit the wretched houses, all tell a tale of a terrible blight. The landscape is superbly beautiful. The village nestles between some mountain tops that save it from the winds, and a purling stream courses through its center. Nature has blessed the spot. But at Hewitt it is as at many another miniature of the ideal land; that which nature most has blessed man has deepest cursed.

Nature blessed, and man cursed! This is queer language from the Press. Surely it is not setting up the freedom of nature as against the restrictions imposed by man? For what in that case would become of the blessed device of making men prosperous by imposing taxes upon them? The Press is daily warning its readers against the ruin that free trade would bring them. Now, what is free trade but natural trade?—the trade that would go on in the absence of restrictions and prohibitions—the track in which man follows an impulse as natural to him as that which takes the purling brook on its easiest way to the sea.

Even worse than this, the Press proceeds as though it discredited General Harrison’s aphorism that a cheap coat means a cheap man inside of it, and had utterly forgotten its own daily contention that the way to secure plenty is to make prices high:

And down to the store the reporter went, and everywhere found confirmation of what had been told him. He ascertained for a fact that the store belonged to Cooper & Hewitt, and that the men were practically obliged to deal there. He also saw everywhere evidences of the servitude to which they were subjected. There they had gathered in waiting for Mr. Hewitt[’s?] [ink blot] paymaster to come along to dole out to them the few cents’ balance which was theirs after their indebtedness to the firm had been deducted. Some of them had not one cent coming, and one healthy, strapping young man came out of the door with a silver quarter dollar in his hand, the only returns which he had after a whole month’s labor. None of them had more than $3 or $4, and the great majority came out just about even.

Mr. Porter is an English tory, maddened into protectionism by the repeal of the British corn laws. Evidently he has

p. 1, col. 6 never been in Pennsylvania, or any other part of this country where the great protected industries flourish, or he would have seen nothing surprising in highly protected American laborers coming out at the end of the month with nothing ahead. His ignorance of this country is also shown by his innocent and not unnatural horror at the sight of a pluck-me store—a common adjunct of protected industries in this favored land. The report goes on:

. . Some of the men bought some underclothes which were in the store—poor, trashy articles that could be purchased any where for twenty-five cents, retail.

“How much do you sell these for?” asked the reporter, pointing to the articles.

“From seventy-five cents to $1.50 apiece,” he replied, “according to the quality and the pattern.”

On those articles alone the firm were reaping in from 300 to 500 per cent profit, and on other goods the prices were proportionately high.

All this indignation is creditable to Mr. Porter’s goodness of heart, but strangely inconsistent with his principles. For what is the object of protection but to oblige people to deal where they don’t want to deal, and to pay prices that they don’t want to pay? And in support of this policy, does not the Press daily tell its readers that high prices make high wages, and that the way for the workingman to improve his condition is to vote big profits into the pockets of the boss? And does it not daily assert that the sure way to make things ultimately cheap is to make prices artificially high?

If the Press were at all consistent it would not bring it as an accusation against Mr. Hewitt that he “protects,” in the way it says it does, the people of his New Jersey estate. It should rather praise him for disinterested benevolence, and tell the free and independent citizens of Ringwood that it is owing to this protection that they get any work at all, and are even a silver quarter ahead at the end of the month. It should contrast their $1.50 per day with the wages of the pauper laborers of Mr. Porter’s native land, who, as all American protectionists know, work for nothing and board themselves, and whose highest object in life is to flood this country with their products, asking nothing in return save the satisfaction of destroying American industries. And it should at the very least, cite the fact that even Cooper & Hewitt retail coal oil at a price lower than it was wholesaled at fifty years ago as a proof of how protection reduces cost—a conclusive proof of the beneficence of that system of taxation which, as it asserts in another column, has increased the weight of the fleece of the protected American sheep from two pounds to five pounds.

But the strangest thing of all is that the Press should admit this to its columns:

At Lakeside the reporter saw a young Englishman, George Baldwin, who had managed to escape from the thralldom of the baron of Ringwood.

“I don’t want to talk about him,” he said, as he continued his work in the garden. “Those weeds are of more account than he is. I’ve been pretty well over the old country, and you may talk as you please about pauper labor and people working for a bare bite, but that country over there (pointing to Ringwood) is worse than the old country ever was. They just work their men so that the loading of the ice costs them nothing at all when the profits that they have from the store are taken into account. It’s a pity for the poor fellow that’s got to work for them—that’s all I’ve got to say. They say you needn’t buy in the store if you don’t want to, but the one who doesn’t, doesn’t stay long. The tenants have no leases. I was ordered on a Sunday morning to leave that day, but I didn’t. I guess they couldn’t get any one to throw me out on that day. I left the next morning, though, and was so glad to get away anywhere from it that I never called for the few cents that are still due me. Mayor Hewitt has it.”

Surely the “foreign pauper labor” editor of the Press must have gone to sleep. Or is a dim idea that the land question has something to do with the wages question beginning to creep into his brain? Here is something which seems to favor the latter supposition:

The birds that fly in the air, the rabbits that romp through the woods and the fish that swim in the streams the people dare not touch. Cooper & Hewitt say they are theirs, and what Cooper & Hewitt say in that village is might, and might is the only law which has currency there.

This is humbug. The flying birds, and romping rabbits, and swimming fish, and the soil, and trees, and grasses, and rocks, and ores, as all things else in or above that cone of matter having 22,500 acres of the earth’s surface known as the Ringwood estate for its base and the earth’s center for its apex, are not Cooper & Hewitt’s simply because they say they are theirs, but because the laws of New Jersey say so, Messrs^sic. Cooper & Hewitt, according to these laws, own all this section of the natural universe by the same kind of title that the land owners of New York city own Manhattan island. It is theirs, to trace this title, because the venerable Peter Cooper, now dead, gave it to them when he died. Where did Peter Cooper get it? He bought it of the heir of some dead man. And so on. The Ringwood title will continued on p. 2 →

[The column ends here mid-sentence at the foot of page 1; no “continued on” line is printed.]

THE MAJORITY FIRM FOR CLEVELAND AND FREE TRADE.

Strength of the Single Tax Principle—All but Eleven Men in the “Herald” Office Converts—Brief Statements by Representative Printers—Strong Opposition to Hill.

Though the columns of the press have for some time been teeming with expressions cf^sicsic opinion of political managers, little has yet been heard from the people who are to do the voting. THE STANDARD here presents the views of a number of the representative men in one of the big trades in this city—the printing trade. The men of that industry contributed very largely to the work done for the united labor party last year and the year before. It is found that a large number of the union members are single tax men and that they will vote for the democratic candidate for president, because they believe he is going their way.

In the Herald office the champions of the single tax principle are John McCutcheon, Robert McKechnie, A. A. Mohr, Frank Fleming and Mr. Tuttle. They are single tax arsenals. They are well supplied with facts and figures showing why Cleveland should be supported this fall. They proudly boast that they have made single tax men of all but eleven of the one hundred and forty-nine men in the Herald composing room. This one hundred and thirty-eight men^sic will support Cleveland, but the indications are that they will vote against Hill if he is renominated, and will use all their efforts to defeat him, because of his veto of the electoral reform bill. Let them speak for themselves:

ROBERT MCKECHNIE, ex-president of the international union; and editor of the Boycotter during the campaign of 1884.—“I was a republican up to 1884, when I voted for Cleveland on account of the Tribune trouble. I have been a George man since 1883. I shall vote the democratic national ticket this year, not because I have any respect for the party, but because it will be the means of helping the single tax men to clear the way. It is a matter of duty with me; the interests and the future of my family are involved in the struggle just now commencing. I agree with Hugh O. Pentecost that I am about to take a ride in a nasty smelling boat; but I have to choose between two refuse carriers, and I have chosen the least objectionable. But I will work with all my might against Hill if he is nominated, on account cf his veto of the electoral reform bill. I vote in New Jersey, or my ballot would count one against him. He won’t get ten votes out of this chapel.”

JOHN MCCUTCHEON, an old and esteemed member of the typographical union, who stood at his polling place and worked for the united labor ticket in 1886 and 1887. Mr. McCutcheon’s pockets are filled with single tax and free trade clippings, and under his case are tracts and STANDARDS with which to make converts.—“I voted the democratic ticket up to 1886. This time I do not vote that ticket as a democrat, but as a George man. I find it easy to convince men of the righteousness of our doctrines, and no man who once becomes inoculated with our ideas ever leaves us. I will vote and work against Hill if he is nominated.”

A. A. MOHR.—“I shall ride in the democratic wagon (as George says) as long as it is going my way. If it turns out of the main road I shall jump out. There is only one thing worth fighting for in politics, and that is to bring about the levying of all taxes on land values. But I realize that the change can only be brought about gradually. This year the democrats are making a great move to that end; therefore I am with them. I can’t see how a reasoning man can do otherwise. I shall vote against Hill for his petty action in vetoing the electoral reform bill. Friends of mine, men who work for a living, writing from Indiana, tell me that Harrison will be defeated in his own state. However, the national democratic ticket will not win if the democrats continue to pursue their present cowardly plan of campaign.”

MR. TUTTLE.—“Because I love my family I am a single tax man; and because I love them I will this year vote for Cleveland. Since I became a single tax convert I have spent all my spare time circulating that kind of literature, and that and quiet talks have had an effect which will be made manifest in my neighborhood. The democrats seem to be afraid to stand upon their own platform; and they deserve to be beaten. If Mr. Cleveland carries this state it will be through our efforts, and not his party’s. I will not vote for Hill if he is renominated. Better the rankest protectionist in the state than such a man as Hill. There are three votes in my family for Cleveland and against Hill; and there are a good many more in the neighborhood in which I live.”

The remarks of the four gentlemen, quoted above, were repeated again and again. Suffice it to say that the Herald composing room will give a nearly unanimous single tax vote for Cleveland, and against Hill.

When the reporter walked into the World composing room he saw Joseph Rymer standing in one of the “alleys” reading Thomas G. Shearman’s tract: “The Common Sense of the Tariff Question” to a circle of listeners. “Dan” Webster, up in the corner, had some type in one hand, which he was distributing, while in front of him was a clipping from a newspaper, which he was reading and discussing with his side partner. Tom Hancock was distributing and listening to what Joe was reading, while a slight smile was spreading over his face. He greeted THE STANDARD reporter pleasantly.

“What’s the matter with Joe?” asked the reporter.

“He’s trying to convert those fellers. Joe’s got it worse than ever this year. He’s here all the afternoon and don’t get in over a handful of type. How does the office stand? Well, this alley of mine is solid. We’re single tax men, and we’re going to vote for Cleveland.”

JOSEPH RYMER.—“We have a large majority of single tax men. All the old hands are that way, but the new men have yet to be converted. They are nearly all from Washington, where they had been in the government office under the republicans. But we will get them later on. They feel a little hot now because they were bounced after the democrats went into power. THE STANDARD and the tracts are doing good work here; and we have a number of friends working among the heathens who have the single tax argument at their tongue-tips, and they are making a good impression. The way to make Cleveland votes in this office is to talk democratic party very little and the single tax a great deal. The office stands just now about two single tax Cleveland men to one republican. We will gain friends all the time; we can’t lose any when once we get them in our grip—they hold themselves there. Hill will be cut badly by our friends.”

“DAN” WEBSTER.—“I’ve been trying for two hours to get in this handful and at the same time argue with this chap beside me. He’s a hard citizen, but I’ll catch him. You see, he had a”snap” for so many years in the gov-

p. 2, col. 3 ernment office that he is “pizen” on the party that bounced him. I’ve got to get my type in for to-night or there’ll be trouble.”

DON L. SWETT.—“If the democrats don’t come out and stand squarely on their own issue I’ll vote against them. Their vacillation will lose them this state. Blaine will be here in a few days, and he will open the campaign for the republicans of the state by giving fair and square protection talk. How will the democrats meet what he says—by saying they are also in favor of protection to a certain extent? Why, the voters will laugh at them. If the democrats will say they are not free traders, but partial protectionists, and the republicans declare for high protection, the conclusion of the unbiased voter will naturally be that it will be best to vote the high protection ticket, for if the democrats are agreed with their opponents that a little protection is a good thing, the voter will argue that a good deal must be a better thing. I won’t vote for Hill.”

SHERMAN CUMMIN.—“I used to vote the democratic ticket, but I won’t do so this time unless the democrats become more outspoken—unless they stop their shuffling. They are not fooling anybody but themselves. The average voter can see through their cowardly game. They only believe in a slight tariff reform, eh? Well, if a little tariff reform is good, why is not a great deal of tariff reform better? Why don’t they come out man fashion and say that lifting tariffs from industry will stimulate industry and raise wages, and that they want to demonstrate that proposition by a slight reduction in the tariff? Why don’t Speaker Carlisle and Congressman Mills and the others come out boldly and pronounce what their ultimate aim is, and ask the people to allow them to try the experiment on wool and lumber and salt? Their constituents have confidence in them, as is shown by the fact that they have sent them again and again to congress. The people of the country would be perfectly willing to give them a chance if they only asked for it. Their experiment would be successful. Lifting all tariffs from production would be the greatest blessing that could come to producers, for it would immediately increase the demand for workers, and would consequently raise wages. The democrats will have to talk honestly to the people or they will lose the fight in November. I will not vote for Hill, and will do what I can to defeat him.”

HENRI ROGOWSKI—“I will support the national democratic ticket. I think the office stands just now about two to one that way; but later it may be better than that. The only subjects discussed here now are the land and tariff questions. The Washington men who have come in are republicans, and are hoping that with republican success they will be able to get back their old”sits” in the government printing office. There will be an increase in Cleveland voters before the election. I don’t know about Hill.”

The World composing room runs over two hundred men. A canvass shows about one hundred and forty votes for the Cleveland ticket.

Estimates from the Journal show seventy in favor of Cleveland to twenty against; the Times, about half and half; the Morning Sun, about seventy in favor to ten against; the Evening Sun, solid for Cleveland; the Press, half and half; the Star nearly solid for Cleveland.

Mr. O’BRIEN, one of the proprietors of the Union Printer, said: “Immediately after the adoption of the platform at St. Louis the chairmen of chapels reported that a large majority of their members had taken fright at the tariff plank; but since then things had changed and now the estimates for the entire book and job trade could be put down at five for the democratic ticket to two for the republican. The democratic percentage could be improved; but so far the only visible work had been done by the republicans. Already the book and job offices had been flooded with republican literature, but nothing of a democratic nature had been seen, the only work so far in their interest being done by the George men, who stand aloof from the democratic party while championing their national ticket. The most notable change is in Beadle & Adams’s. In 1884 the vote was six for Blaine and seventeen for Cleveland; this year it promises to be reversed. The Washingtonians who were thrown out when Benedict took charge of the government office are actively working for the republican ticket in the trade; some of them even threaten to introduce resolutions at the next meeting of the union regarding political action. If they do they will be badly beaten.”

THEODORE WILDMAN, secretary of typographical union No. 6, said that he thought the book and job trade now stood five for Cleveland to two for Harrison. He couldn’t speak authoritatively for the newspaper men, as he rarely saw any of them, except the chairman^sic of the offices. But he was certain that his estimate would hold in the balance of the trade. He did not know how Hill stood with the men; the only talk he had heard around the rooms so far was about the national ticket.

An Infant Industry of Pretty Lusty Growth.

TO TYPE FOUNDERS.

Dear Sirs: The Mills tariff bill has passed the house of representatives. It taxes our raw material as follows:

Lead—1¼ cents per pound, equal to 31¼ per cent ad valorem.

Copper—30 per cent.

Tin—Not mentioned, unless under a general clause on page 9, at 40 per cent ad valorem.

Antimony—Free, but freight expenses and brokerage probably 10 per cent.

New Type Metal—15 per cent.

Brass—Under general clause on page 9, at 35 per cent.

To all these discriminations against the American type founder must be added at least 40 per cent for the excess of wages in America.

To overbalance these crushing disabilities, the Mills bill allows only 15 per cent ad valorem!

Write to your senators at once, and give facts in your letter.

Up and do, cr^sic American type founding will be prostrated.

THOMAS MACKELLAR, Pres’t T. F. A.

“Look at that!” said Stillman Walker, senior member of a large type making and printers’ furnishing house. I had already a copy of the circular in my pocket, and had called on him to ask questions regarding it; but he forestalled me by showing his copy. It was intended ostensibly to be a secret circular from the president of the Type founders’ association of the United States to its members.

“Do you know what that means?” said he. “It means that if the Mills bill passes type founders’s^sic wages will fall to the level of wages paid in Great Britain. That’s what you free traders will bring our American workmen to if you are allowed to go on; and more than that, type will be brought into this country to compete with our American made type, and we will have to close up, and our workmen will be thrown out of employment.”

I read the circular more carefully. I hadn’t heard or read anywhere that the Mills bill had made any radical cuts in anything excepting wool, lumber and salt; but I judged from the importance which Mr. MacKellar had attached to the matter that perhaps the Mills bill had made radical cuts in the metals necessary to the making of type. I asked Mr. Walker if he had a tariff book. He hadn’t. I thought that strange, but didn’t say so. I asked him what the present tariffs on the ores were. He didn’t know, nor did anybody in the office know. It appears there is a firm on Gold street that sells type metal to most of the foundries, all ready to melt and work up. So I couldn’t argue the matter with him at all.

But I had my serious doubts about type founders paying forty per cent more to their type workers than was paid in Great Britain. I had heard that statement before in regard to other industries, which I had found to be untrue; but when I expressed my doubt he looked at me with pitying astonishment.

I couldn’t argue the type matter with him, and I told him so; I had no facts, and I don’t think he had, either; but I gave way to him because I presumed he ought to know more than I did about type manufacturing, because he was in the business and I wasn’t. With a quiet smile of triumph he permitted the matter to drop. But I determined at the first opportunity to post myself on the type business, so that when next we met I could talk the matter over with him understandingly.

After smoking half a bad cigar he had given me, I casually remarked that I would like to take a look at his type foundry.

“You want to make some inquiries?” said he suspiciously.

“Perhaps. Do you object?”

Oh, no,” he answered with the air of a merciful conqueror. Then turning to one of his subordinates, he said:

“Danny, take Mr. McCabe up stairs and introduce him to the foreman and Mr. Milne and ask them to show him around.

I went up and was introduced. I got a lot of ammunition, which I at first intended to save until I fired it at Walker; but on second thought I have concluded that it will do more execution if I fire it at the readers of THE STANDARD; it will hit my friend just as hard as if I had saved it for him.

John Milne is a matrix maker. He is a Scotchman by birth, and has lived in the United States over twenty years, but goes back every year or so on a visit. He is reputed to be an exceptionally good workman, and receives much above the standard wages. His testimony is interesting:

“As to the weekly wages paid, they are, as the circular says, on the average about forty per cent higher here than in Great Britain—in dollars. But you must remember that is the weekly wage. Type founders over there don’t work as many hours as they do in this country. Nine hours a day and four hours on Saturday is the rule, making forty-nine hours. Here we work sixty—a difference of eleven hours. Then the English workman doesn’t do as much work in an hour as is expected in this country, the ratio of work done being, say, eight in Great Britain to twelve here, or one-half more work. You see, the trade organizations there regulate the amount of work that shall be done in a day; but even if they did not, I think the climate would. An Englishman finds soon after coming here that, somehow or other, he can do more work.

“Weekly wages are forty per cent higher here than in England, as a rule, as Mr. MacKellar claims, but they should be more than that, for the cost of living is at least fifty per cent higher. I regard two pounds ($10) in England as better than fifteen dollars here. A man earning ten dollars a week over there would be foolish to come here for eighteen dollars, unless he was assured promotion within a reasonable time.

“As to piece work—there is very little of that class of work done over there—there is nothing like forty per cent difference. For instance, to make this matrix in England [picking up one] I would get one shilling and six pence (37½ cents); here I would get forty-five cents for it—seven and a half cents more than is paid in England. Now, that is not a difference of forty per cent, by a good deal, but a difference of only just twenty per cent.

“The trade here is in a fair condition; much better than for many years Has the tariff had anything to do with it? Certainly not! The tariff can’t regulate wages any more than it can regulate the moon in its course. The supply of labor is what regulates the demand. It would be a positive benefit if the metals necessary for type making came in free of duty. Why, the largest item of expense in making type is labor—not material—and labor comes here free. Here’s the way to figure the thing out. Take, say, one hundred pounds of nonpareil. It costs:

1. That is the figure Mr. Walker places it at; but I am told eight dollars is nearer the mark.

The cost of labor, you see, is over twice as

p. 2, col. 5 much as the cost for materials. Now, if the duty of fifteen per cent on raw materials were taken off it would enable the manufacturer to sell nonpareil type for nearly two cents per pound cheaper.

I thanked Mr. Milne for his kindness and departed.

The following day I looked over the Mills bill as passed and found there were mistakes in some of the figures in Mr. MacKellar’s circular, the principal error being his statement that tin is taxed forty per cent under the Mills bill. Tin under the Mills bill is free, as at present. But such mistakes as this are common enough in protectionist arguments, and I will not take up the space of THE STANDARD to go over the whole circular.

I find on reading over my manuscript I have shot an animal that I was not gunning for. That hundred pounds of nonpareil, after liberal charges and profits upon it had been paid, could be sold for forty-four dollars and fifty-six and a half cents. But the price at any of our foundries when I last bought nonpareil was fifty-eight dollars!—thirteen dollars and forty-three and a half cents over the total cost of production, with a profit of twenty per cent added. How much of that does the poor, in-danger-of-not-being-protected journeyman type founder get, I wonder? I heard some years ago that there was a type manufacturers’ trust; now I see it. I do not wonder now at Mr. MacKellar’s fears; nor do I wonder at Mr. Walker’s. I can see where the Mills bill would “prostrate” American type founding.

I had to go down town on an errand Monday, and happening to pass by Mr. Walker’s business place, the thought struck me that possibly since I had last bought type a change might have taken place in the price which would account for the difference of thirteen dollars and forty-three cents I had found between the cost and profit of manufacture and the selling price. So I stepped into the office and asked what nonpareil was selling at now. The bookkeeper answered, “Sixty-four cents a pound.” I caught my breath and staggered out. Had the Mills bill done this? thought I. Sixty-four cents—six cents more than it was a year ago—increasing the monopoly profit which I had found from thirteen dollars and forty-three cents to nineteen dollars and forty-three cents. Nineteen dollars and forty-three cents out of sixty-four dollars—over fifty-one and a half per cent^sic of the cost of the type—taken from the pockets of the purchasers, for what? Not to protect the industry, surely! Not for the benefit of the laborers. Well, then, for whom? He who swipes your handkerchief goes to the island—if he is caught. But he who chokes nineteen dollars and forty-three cents out of you every time you buy a hundred pounds of nonpareil, through being a member of the type founders’ trust, wearf^sic much jewelry, eats juicy steaks, and is admired for his “enterprise.”

WM. MCCABE.

An Answer from the Portland “Oregonian” That is Not an Answer.

NEW YORK.—The Portland, Ore., Oregonian has been slightly ruffled by my letter in THE STANDARD on June 23. It attacks and makes an appearance of refuting my statements, and after all fails to disprove any of them. The Oregonian said:

You of the east who are bawling “land monopoly,” just look this way. Here are millions of acres you can have just for the trouble of coming to get them. Come right along. No sense in squatting down in the eastern cities and yelling “land monopoly.” Come out here and become “monopolists” yourselves. (Henry George’s paper please copy.)

I pointed out that I had traveled all over Oregon and Washington territory nineteen years ago and again nine years ago, and specifically named the sections of country I had visited [see STANDARD of June 23] and had found that nearly all the accessible land had been taken up—a very small portion by settlers, the bulk by railroad corporations and land speculators; and that while there was room enough, as the Oregonian says, in Oregon and Washington territory for millions, yet “at all the entrances to this paradise stood the land grabber and monopolist,” who demanded toll before the seekers for homes could enter in. “Let any person,” I said, “whose eyes are turned to that country put money in his purse, for he will need it if he wants to get a foothold there; and despite what the Oregonian has said, there is no more use for a moneyless man in Oregon or Washington territory than there is right here in New York.”

To these assertions, after printing its own paragraph which brought out my letter, the Oregonian makes answer:

One William McCabe, taking this for a text, writes a letter to Henry George’s paper under the inquiry, “Where Are Those Acres?” He professes to have been in Oregon twice—the first time nineteen years ago, the second time ten years ago; yet he couldn’t find any of those acres, and now he wants to know where they are.

“Are they,” he asks, “anywhere near Portland? Anywhere near East Portland? Anywhere in the counties back of Portland? Anywhere in the Willamette valley? Anywhere along the upper Columbia river, east of the Cascade mountains, in the Walla Walla country, or at Puget sound?” Mr. McCabe says he didn’t find land for the settler in any of these localities, and renews the inquiry, “Where are those acres that can be had just for the trouble of coming to get them?”

By some it may be regarded as amazing that anyone should make such inquiries; but the fact should excite no wonder at all. Mr. McCabe is one of those who look for a thing hoping never to find it. If he traveled over any considerable part of Oregon and Washington nineteen years ago, or ten years ago, he ran over millions of acres that could be had for the taking. But no doubt he kept in the towns and cities, where the land was “taken up” some time before he came.

In Oregon and Washington, since he first came, nineteen years ago, three hundred thousand people have found homes, and there is land for three millions more. Here, in a country of nearly two hundred thousand square miles, there are now less than half a million people, and there are vast areas remaining where there is not one settler within fifty miles of another. Land, however, cannot be had for the taking right adjoining the cities of Portland, Seattle or Walla Walla; but since Mr. McCabe came to this country and couldn’t find land, cities like Tacoma, Spokane Falls and many smaller have been built on land that was then unoccupied, and that he might have had as easily as anyone else. Ten to twenty years hence other like cities will have been built on lands which men of Mr. McCabe’s sort can’t find now, and never will find.

One of the assertions of his letter is that railroad grants have swallowed up all the lands that present settlers do not own. Considerable areas are indeed covered by railroad grants, but they are as nothing compared with what remains. And even within the grants only half of the lands are covered; the other half is open to settlers and five-sixths of all the lands are touched by no grants whatever.

The least likely of all places to find lands for settlement is in the saloons and barrooms of the towns, even in a new country. It is only by sticking very close to them that men cannot find in Oregon and Washington “millions of acres to be had for the taking.”

It is evident that the editor of the Oregonian avoids answering my question. I asked “Where are those acres that can be had just for the trouble of coming to get them?” and I still pause for an answer. Mr. H. C. Crockett, of Weston, Kings county, Washington territory, who had a letter in THE STANDARD of July 7, while deprecating the statements in my letter, admitted that the land speculators and mill companies and loggers held a large part of the choicest lands along Puget sound, and what land there was still open to settlement was “difficult of access,” and that there “was no use for moneyless men in this [Oregon and Washington territory] country; and people who wish to take government land should not attempt it with less than five hundred dollars, and they could find use for more.”

In one portion of its “answer” the Oregonian speaks of cities that have grown on land that “Mr. McCabe couldn’t find,” which was unoccupied nineteen years ago, and which “he might have had as easily as any one else”—meaning “Spokane Falls and many other smaller cities.” I admit I know nothing about some of these places, but “Tacoma” I do know all about, and I also know about Kalama, Columbia City and “some other smaller cities;” and the assertion that I “might have had” the land on which they were built “as easily as any one else” is a falsehood.

The story of the building up of the town of Kalama, and its subsequent downfall, is probably known to more than one Oregonian, who have good reason to remember it. It was one of the large swindles of a larger swindling railroad company. The town, as the editor of the Oregonian probably remembers, was laid out in 1870 or 1871 by the Northern Pacific railroad company on the Washington territory bank of the Columbia river, about forty miles from Portland. It was given out by the company that Kalama was to be the western terminus of the Northern Pacific railway. Unsophisticated Oregonians sold their farms and other property and flocked to this “new metropolis,” and put their life earnings into lots. Upon these lots they built houses and waited for the railroad to come there and “terminus.” From five hundred to two thousand dollars was the price of a lot 25x100 feet, where erstwhile flew the birds of the air and roamed the wild beasts of the forest, and land could have been had for nothing. Two or three thousand people gathered there and poured their treasures into the terminal office on the hill. Well, the railroad reached there, but did not stop. When the company had got the last possible dollar out of the gulled people, it moved its terminus to “some point on Puget sound.” That was only seventeen or eighteen years ago. Kalama was abandoned; and the last time I was there it had a population of five or six persons, who lived off the occasional traveler who happened to pass that way. The houses built during the “boom” were being used by the five or six inhabitants for kindling wood. The people who bought the “lots” and built the houses had wandered sadly and sorrowfully off to begin life again elsewhere. That is the story of Kalama.

Now for Tacoma. It was expected, and the judgment of topographers was unanimous

p. 3, col. 2 , that Seattle would be the terminus. But the Northern Pacific people had been so successful in their Kalama scheme that they determined to try it again. They secured the land on which Tacoma now stands, and as in the case of Kalama, they laid out the town and offered lots for sale. The public didn’t bite, and the “boom” didn’t come to Tacoma until the railway company had built their road to it and had their docks and warehouses ready for business. When everything indicated that that was where the Northern Pacific company would have to stop, then the public came in and bought lots—slowly at first, as if mistrusting the people with whom they were dealing. Now, I understand, there’s quite a town there; but about the spot where once flourished Kalama still hover the spirits of the poor people who were swindled out of their last dollar—by the same corporation that built Tacoma.

The story of Columbia City is a much pleasanter one. The projectors of that enterprise lost every dollar they had. Reason: The public didn’t bite.

WM. MCCABE.

A Single Tax Prohibitionist—The Moral Side the Strong Side—Louis Lesaulnier’s Idea.

CHICAGO, July 27.—I think single tax men will be pleased to know that, in the person of Major G. J. Blewett, the prohibitionists of the Second Indiana district have nominated one who earnestly believes in the doctrines of “Progress and Poverty.” Major Blewett was one of our most earnest speakers at Vincennes, and I cannot doubt that while teaching the monstrous evils of the saloon, he will also teach the monstrous injustice of landlordism. He is a brave, true man, and he will do much during this campaign to destroy the fetichism which so long bound the people to the car of destruction.

Permit me in this connection to add my testimony against indirection in the advancement of our cause. If we win, we must win upon the ethical strength of our position. I would rather have the moral conviction of one man like Hugh O. Pentecost, willing to sacrifice all that life holds most dear for the sake of a great truth, than ten thousand men whose cupidity has led them to seek what they have thought to be an advantage.

But, really, all things work together for the advancement of our cause. I am not willing to quarrel with any one’s methods. I am, indeed, willing to bid godspeed to any man who has taken up the cross of the new crusade, whatever his line of march, for I find the weakest of the brethren confusing the enemy and adding to the honor, the glory and the conquering power of our cause. Even our internal dissensions have been a spur to some of us, and in good time, I trust, we shall all be found rallying beneath the white banner of our faith.

But let us not hide our light. Let us set it rather on the mountain top, a beacon to wandering feet. Let us teach men the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The man who petitions for the single tax without knowing its scope and its beauty, may fly from us as from a pestilence if landlordism raises its alarm in behalf of “vested right;” but if you make that man know the truth, his feet are planted on a rock, and the winds may blow, the rains descend, yet he will stand firm—a bulwark as impregnable as Gibraltar.

I have caught an idea from the note of Louis Lesaulnier in this week’s STANDARD, suggesting that a premium be offered for a pictorial diagram contrasting our present system of taxation with the proposed single tax system, and I have already brought the matter to the attention of a brilliant young Chicago artist. I fancy that a prize of say [$200?], made up by popular small subscriptions, would induce many artists to compete for it. In order to catch the spirit of the subject they must read “Progress and Poverty.” To do that is to become converts, and to become a convert is to become an active propagandist of the truth. It seems to me that we can make a good investment in this direction, and you may count me in as a contributor to the fund.

WARREN WORTH BAILEY.

A Free Trader Starts the Vermont Quarrymen to Thinking—The Democrats Aroused to Activity.

RUTLAND, Vt., July 29.—Last Friday evening we had a debate on the tariff between Dr. M. R. Leverson of New York and John D. Spellman, a young lawyer of this town. Dr. Leverson presented the case of free trade in a clear and forcible manner.

After our town hall, which seats about 1,200 people, had been crowded to its utmost capacity, there were still many who were unable to get even a peep at the speakers.

Both political parties were well represented, and each side expected its advocate to come out victorious. It seems to me that that meeting must demonstrate to the leaders of the democratic party, at least of this state, that the way to make converts to democracy is by open debate—by forcing the republican restrictionists to the wall, for they are absolutely unable to cope with even the least informed of the single tax men. Mr. Spellman evaded the question entirely, and the several direct questions which Dr. Leverson requested him to answer were in no way alluded to. His address was made up of the shallowest kind of political buncombe and the meanest kind of demagogy. He appealed to the lowest prejudices, even going so far out of his way as to declare free traders to be disbelievers in God. He attempted to excite Irish prejudice against the English people, and misquoted facts about tariff legislation.

You are probably aware that this is the marble producing center of the world. Dr. Leverson made use of the tariff on marble to set people here to thinking. He showed that the production of cheap stone don’t mean cheap wages. He illustrated by taking a cubic foot of stone cut here, the average price of which was $3. This price included a tariff of 65 cents and wages at a rate between $1, the minimum, and $2, the maximum, paid per day. He compared with this a cubic foot of marble taken from works near New York, sold at $1. Marble cutters there receive $3.50 to $4 per day, and a day’s labor consists of but eight hours work. Having thus shown that cheap marble did not mean low wages, and showing that the abolition of the tariff would result in a cheapening of marble, Dr. Leverson asked who got the 65 cents of protective tariff?

Spellman failed to inform his hearers who, though they repeatedly called for an answer. The cry has gone out through the shops, and the marble cutters are excited. “Who gets the sixty-five cents?” they are asking.

Yesterday the street presented a peculiar appearance. There were little knots of men here and there discussing the tariff question. The democrats are jubilant, but the republicans are daunted, and have resorted to calling free traders anarchists.

The democrats have issued a challenge to any man in the state to joint debate with the president of the Jackson democratic club, with the ringing cry, “We fling down the gauntlet, let him who dares pick it up.”

The president is Thomas H. Brown, a marble polisher by trade, a young man under thirty, and self-educated. We pit him against any man in the state or country, and agree to forfeit the expenses of any debate if he is beaten.

His Reception of the Clay County Miners—Debate With a German—A Rude American Scoffer.

INDIANAPOLIS, July 30.—A lot of Indiana coal miners were last week kindly taken by their bosses to call on General Harrison. The republican candidate for the presidency kindly talked to them and told them what he and his class proposed to do for the benefit of “our working classes,” and the newspapers report all that he said, but they fail to record the responses made by one of the visitors, who after their bosses had made their formal presentation, seemed to think it his place to act as spokesman of the miners. His name I learned was Hans Auswurf. His English was badly broken, but I have refrained from any attempt to imitate it. His responses were so frequent, however, that Mr. Harrison’s speech, instead of flowing on smoothly as is indicated by the published reports, was really a dialogue of this sort:

Harrison.—You come here as representatives of the diversified interests of your country. You are fortunate in already possessing diversified industries. You have not only agriculture, but the mine and the factory which provide home markets for the products of your farms.

Auswurf.—No, no; we don’t have any mines or farms. The bosses who brought us on this excursion have them. We work in the mines.

Harrison.—You come, as I understand, from all these pursuits, to declare that in your opinion your interests as farmers, as miners, as mechanics, as tradesmen, are identified with the maintenance of the doctrine of protection to American industries and the preservation of the American market for American products?

Auswurf.—Yes. That is what the boss said. That’s what we came over here for—to protect American industries. Since we got here we have found that they need it. There appears to be something the matter with them.

Harrison.—Some resort to statistics to show that the condition of the American workman is better than that of workmen of any other country. I do not care now to deal with statistics.

Auswurf.—That’s right. The boss has been giving us tracts printed in German, and so full of figures that we don’t know what they are all about.

Harrison.—One fact is enough for me.

Auswurf.—Hurrah! That’s right. Anybody can understand one fact if you give him time enough.

Harrison.—The tide of immigration from all European countries has been and is toward our shores. The gates of Castle garden swing inward. They do not swing outward to any American laborer seeking a better country than this.

Auswurf.—That’s so. If the gates of Castle garden hadn’t swung inward none of us would have been here to help protect American labor, and then what would have become of American labor? These gates don’t swing outward either. Do you hear that, you stupids, who are talking of going home again when you can get enough money to pay your passage?

Here there was an interruption, one of the delegation wrathfully asking Auswurf if he meant to say that there was any law preventing a German in America from returning to his old country. Auswurf answered no, but said he thought it would be a devil of a time before his interlocutor got money enough to pay his passage back. “I saved enough to pay my passage here,” replied the other. “Yes; but it costs more to go back,” answered Auswurf; “and besides you are already twenty dollars behind at the company store, and how can you ever get enough ahead to pay your way back home?” The workman was silenced, and the altercation ended. Mr. Harrison waited patiently until this conversation in German ended, and the dialogue was then resumed as follows:

Harrison.—My countrymen, these men, who have toiled at wages in other lands that barely sustained life and opened no avenue of promise to them or their children know the good land of hope as well as the swallow knows the land of summer.

Auswurf.—We do! we do! Only some people are never satisfied. That fellow I was just talking to says it’s only a land of hope and not of fulfillment. He’s stupid.

Harrison.—They testify that here there are better conditions, wider and more hopeful prospects for workmen than in any other land.

Auswurf.—Yes we do, and if anybody don’t want to testify that way he can’t work in the Clay county mines while I am foreman.

Harrison.—The next suggestion I have to make is this: That the more work there is to do in this country, the higher the wages that will be paid for the doing of it.

Auswurf.—Hear that, you stupid? The reason you didn’t get more wages is that you don’t do more work.

Harrison.—I speak to men who know that when the product of their toil is in demand in the market, when buyers are seeking it, wages advance with the demand; but when the market for your product is depressed and the manufacturer is begging for buyers, then wages go down. Is it not clear, then, that that policy which secures the largest amount of work to be done at home is the policy which will secure to our laboring men steady employment, the best wages?

Auswurf,—Yes, that is so^sic. If we could only sell things all over the world we would have plenty of work to do at home and Clay county miners would have such steady work that they need not get behind at the bosses’ store. No, we will never do as much work as we might do at home till we can sell things to somebody besides ourselves. Look at those Englishmen——

Just here the mine owner who had first introduced the delegation seized Auswurf by the arm, using language at the time that would have shocked the republican candidate had it come to his ears, and Mr. Harrison proceeded:

A policy which will transfer work from our mines and our factories to foreign mines and foreign factories inevitably tends to the repression of wages here.

“What about a policy that transfers workmen from foreign mines and factories to ours; does that tend to raise wages here?” shouted an American workman who stood back of the crowd watching the scene.

Mr. Harrison ignored the rude interruption, and thus concluded his address:

These are truths that do not require profound study.

The rude American moved off, but as he did so he replied, yet more rudely, “I’ll be d——d if you don’t seem to think so. You clearly have not given any profound study to them.”

Mr. Harrison looked after the fellow with a calm but pitying glance, and took no other notice of the insult than to remark to Col. New that the corruption and demagogy that marked democratic ascendency was causing the working classes to become more and more forgetful of that respect for their betters which they owe to the men who give them employment.

Herr Auswurf returned presently, apparently somewhat crestfallen; and after giving an order in German to the delegates to cheer for Harrison and Morton, he marched the miners back to the train.

I managed to muster up enough German to ask one of the silent miners how they liked it all. He said that they did not understand what the gentleman said, but they thought he was a nice looking man, and that if he should run for governor again, six years hence. after they had had time^sic to get naturalized, they might vote for him. The principal saloon keeper over at the mines said that Harrison and his party were for free whisky, and he supposed that they were therefore not opposed to beer. Our correspondent assured the newcomer that after many years

p. 3, col. 6 of experience he could say that the politicians of both parties were equally fond of all sorts of liquors, and the German went away much pleased with the assurance.

[As no one else appears to have heard these interruptions, we conclude that our correspondent has either phenomenally acute hearing or a lively imagination.—ED. STANDARD.]

What the Children in Our Schools are Learning of Their Own Bodies.

The Popular Science Monthly for August contains a good article by “a teacher” on the manner in which physiology is crammed into children in our schools. The writer complains bitterly of the ignorance, carelessness and pedantry of the text books in use, and thus goes on to show the result:

We may judge somewhat of how a study is in general taught by the oral or written answers given by a number of pupils, in various schools, in reply to questions upon the study. About a year ago there appeared in the London Architect the following:

If instruction in sanitary matters is to be continued in schools it will be necessary to supplement the lessons with visits to some such place as the Parkes Museum of Hygiene, unless the school boards are satisfied if the children get hold of a lot of hard words, or rather of sounds resembling them. At present it is supposed that sanitary science may be taught as easily as morality, by listening to a teacher read from a book. The children fail to catch the words, or they attach no meaning to them. Here, for example, are verbatim copies of the exercises in one of the Greenwich schools:

Infections are brought on by bad smells, such as small pox, measles, scarlet fever, glass pox, s. c., they are brought on by bad drainerges suers; they must be well ventalated.

Infection disease are caught by touching such as charcoal, chloride of lime, etc.

Measles, feaver are called disfectionous because they are catching.

Fainted. If a person has fainted, take her out in the open air, lay her down with her head. And do the clothing round the neck and dashed cold water the face and hand and put smelling salts to her nose.

Degestion is paines in the head, paines in the stom-ach, bad tempers.

From degestion comes consumption, information. head-ache, neuralgia.

These exercises may be thought amusing, but it should be borne in mind that every word represents more or less pain to some unhappy child, in endeavoring to recall ponderous words which were without meaning. Education in sanitary matters is desirable, but, as it is conducted at present in public schools, it must injure children’s minds by habituating them to the use of words they cannot understand.

In the English official reports we read that “an examination of girls in board schools for prizes offered by the national health society, revealed some curious items of information. One reply to mention any occupation considered injurious^sic to health” was “occupations which are injurious are carbolic acid gas, which is impure blood.” Another pupil said, “A stone mason’s work is injurious, because when he is chipping he breathes in all the chips, and then they are taken into the lungs.” A third says, “A boot maker’s trade is very injurious, because the boot makers press the boots against the thorax; and therefore it presses the thorax in, and it touches the heart; and if they do not die they are cripples for life.” With a beautiful decisiveness, one girl declares that “all mechanical work is injurious to health.” A reply to a question about digestion runs, “We should never eat fat because the food does not digest.” Another states that “when food is swallowed it passes through the windpipe;” and that “the chyle flows up the middle of the backbone and reaches the heart, where it meets the oxygen and is purified.” Another says, “The work of the heart is to repair the different organs in about half a minute.” One little physiologist replies: “We have an upper and a lower skin; the lower skin moves at its will, and the upper skin moves when we do.” One child enumerates the organs of digestion as “stomach utensils, liver and spleen.”

In the clever little book compiled by Miss Le Row, entitled “English as She is Taught,” appear the following genuine answers by pupils in reply to questions upon physiology and hygiene. Presumably most of these answers are from American pupils in American schools:

Physillogigy is to study about your bones, stummick and vertebry.

When you have an illness it makes your health bad as well as having a disease.

The body is mostly composed of water and about one-half is avaricious tissue.

The body has an infinite number of bones joined together by the joints.

The spinal column is made of bones running all over the body.

Digestion belongs to the lower animals.

Digestion is the circulation of blood.

Digestion is reducing our food to plump.

Digestion is when food is taken into the stomach.

The gastric juice keeps the bones from creaking.

The eyes are set in two sockets in a bone which turns up at the end and then becomes the nose.

The three coverings of the brain are the diameter, the perimeter and the trachea.

The growth of a tooth begins in the back of the mouth and extends to the stomach.

As an additional contribution to answers, we add the following, taken by the writer from the note books of pupils of one of the high schools of this country:

Anatomy is dissecting of bodies generally lifeless.

Anatomy is study of parts of the body, physiology of action of parts, hygiene is application of these parts. Kinds of bathing, adapted to the age, quantity, quality and health of the person.

Supernator are the muscles about the back.

The hygiene of a muscle should have proper rest and exercise.

Hygiene is the study of the time and manner p. 4, col. 6 of the action of the muscles and large blood vessels.

The mouth is the commencement of the alimentary canal, and it extends through the throat, œsophagus into the stomach. The extent of the mouth helps the digestion of food.

Nervous system a decided part of the body.

A young person who goes to parties and has great excitement has generally some brain trouble, such as St. Vitus dance.

It is far more reliable to drive out the fire of a room and put on extra clothing than it is to put on no clothing and sit in front of a burning fire.

Soap is important in carrying off the fat of the body.

What is eaten by the body has sometimes been taken as food.

The third cavity is the pelvis, which contains the vital organs.

In a diet of twenty-four hours a man should eat some of all the nutritious articles.

The first step in digestion is mastigation and insalivation; second, the muscles of the gullet.

A person is in fair health when he has the affinity to accommodate himself to change of climate and the ability to endure.

Respiration is the exchange of carbolic acid for oxygen.

The times for bathing depend on the age of, location of and heat of the individual.

An Iron Manufacturer Shows How the Tariff Works.

Here is a letter from an Iowa iron and steel manufacturer to a Chicago single tax man which bears very damaging testimony against that part of the tariff relating to wire rods. The letter has been reproduced in fac simile for distribution during the campaign.

BURLINGTON, Iowa, June 5, 1888.

C. H. Whiting, esq., 137 Wabash avenue, Chicago, Ill.—

Dear Sir: Referring to our conversation regarding the excessive duty on imported wire rods, I think you will agree with me that the figures which I give you below will bear out the statement that it is an enormous and exorbitant tax upon a large portion of our population, the only persons receiving any benefit from it being some five or six manufacturers of wire rods in this country.

At the present time No. 5 wire rods can be bought f. o. b. Liverpool or Amsterdam for £5 10s. sterling per ton, which in American currency amounts to $24. The duty on No. 5 wire rods under the present exorbitant tariff is six-tenth of a cent per pound^sic. The ton referred to is the gross ton making 2,240 pounds, and the duty on it would amount to $13.44, which you will see is something over fifty per cent of the original value of the steel rods. No. 6 rods are imported under an ad valorem duty of forty-five per cent. Nos. 5 and 6 wire gauge rods form the bulk of the importations and manufacture.

Now taking the price f. o. b. Liverpool or foreign port of shipment and adding to that the duty, also ocean freight and insurance, these three items added together make the market price for the American rod manufacturer.

Owing to improved machinery very little manual labor is used in a modern rod mill, not over fifteen or twenty skilled workmen are required to manage and perform all labor connected with it. Modern machinery has been brought to such a state of perfection that manual labor is almost entirely done away with, and it is simply a matter of machinery, so that the cost of manufacturing rods in this country does not exceed ten per cent, even though labor may be higher here than it is on the other side. This, you will observe, puts into the pockets of the manufacturers here all the profits which are made in the foreign market, and from forty to fifty per cent additional, so that those who have possession of a wire rod mill make a moderate fortune every year of their lives.

Another fact to be taken into consideration is that three-fourths of the wire rods used in this country, amounting to from two hundred to two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, are imported from abroad. Now, who pays this difference between the price of raw material on the other side of the ocean and the market on this? Of course, this is added to price of the finished^sic product and the consumer must pay the bill, or in other words, pays the tax or duty, indirectly it is true, but nevertheless the money comes out of the pockets of all the consumers of wire, in whatever shape or form it may be, the farmers paying the largest proportion of this extraordinary duty because they are the largest consumers, the majority of the product going into the manufacture of barb fence wire.

Now, when we come to consider its effect upon the workingmen about which our high protective tariff friends prate so much, that view is entirely fallacious and misleading. There are in all about five thousand workingmen employed in the manufacture of barb fence wire, nails, telephone and telegraph wires, and various other forms into which wire is turned, such as screws, hooks, etc., where there are perhaps less than five hundred workmen employed in rod mills, so that you will see the five thousand workmen are working at a disadvantage on account of the dear raw material for the benefit of the few who are producers of rods. This is entirely contrary to the spirit and genius of our American government, which is founded upon the principle of “the greatest good to the greatest number.” This is taxing the many for the benefit of the few.

The question of tariff as relates to steel wire rods is no longer a local question. It effects every consumer^sic north, south, east and west, but the great west and south are the principle sufferers^sic because they are the largest consumers and are non-producers of this material. Now, a whole volume might be written upon the subject; but as I am not a writer of political economy and have not the time nor inclination to enter into all the details connected with the tariff, I trust that I have made the matter sufficiently clear and plain so that you will understand why this tariff is oppressive, and as before stated, it not being a local question, it should not be a political one.

It cannot be explained by the other side why the few large producers in the state of Pennsylvania should require all the balance of this vast nation with its millions of consumers, to pay tribute to them. It is a very unjust thing and like all other wrongs and fallacies it must eventually be done away with. Our republican friends may be able to make political clap-trap and buncombe out of it for the want of a real issue between the two parties at the present time in this great country, but truth and right will eventually prevail. This high protective tariff system will, when properly understood by the people of this country, be done away with, just as slavery and other great evils which have fixed themselves upon the body politic, have been abolished. Very truly yours,

T. MCCOSH.

Law and Politics.

NEW YORK.—(1) Can a person who is not a citizen of the United States sell real estate or leave it to his heirs in this country?

2. Give me the views of the democratic and republican platforms in the ensuing campaign.

3. If the republican and democratic nominees for president should die, would the republican and democratic nominees for vice-president take their place?

RAYMOND.

1. At common law an alien could not take real estate by inheritance, nor could any one, either native or alien, inherit from or through him; but he could buy and sell real estate, subject to the right of the government to divest him of his title by a direct proceeding for that purpose. This is the law in this country, except as it has been altered by legislative enactments. In New York state the legislature has provided that a citizen may take from or through an alien; that a resident alien who has taken the preliminary steps of nationalization^sic and intends to become a citizen may take real estate, but cannot lease it until he is naturalized, and that if a resident alien conveys or wills real estate and dies, the grantee or devisee, whether citizen or alien, may hold the real estate so conveyed or willed, provided that if he be an alien of full age he cannot hold against the state unless he proves his intention to become a citizen. In New York, therefore, a person who is not a citizen of the United States may sell or will real estate to resident aliens who intend to become citizens, and if his heirs are citizens they may inherit from him.

2. The republican platform declares in favor of a protective tariff levied nominally upon imports, but intended to restrict importation. The democratic platform declares against this policy; and though it does not pronounce in favor of free trade, points in that direction.

3. Not necessarily. Should a candidate for president die before election, the national committee of his party would probably name a substitute, who might or might not be the present candidate for vice-president. Should he die after election, but before the electoral college performed its functions, the electors of his party would in their discretion name another person for president.

Tory Protectionists.

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn.—Is it not a fact that Messrs. Gladstone, Parnell, Davitt and their co-workers are free traders? Is is not also^sic a a fact that Messrs. Salisbury, Balfour and their advisers are protectionists?

J. L. FROST.

Gladstone, Parnell and Davitt are free traders; and their party, so far as any party distinction exists in England on the issue of protection or free trade, is a free trade party. Whether or not Salisbury and Balfour are protectionists I do not know; but the protection element in England belongs to the tory party. It was the tory party that fought for protection until it was compelled to succumb to the efforts of men like Cobden, who taught English democrats to see that protection is a weapon of landlordism.

Protection in France and Germany.

AUBURN, N. Y.—Our tariff is said to average [47.10?] per cent. Please inform me through THE STANDARD what is the average in France and Germany. If I am correctly informed their tariffs are as high as ours. Protectionists claim that the high tariff is what induces people to come to the United States. The blessed tariff does not seem to have the same effect in other countries.

PRESCOTT A. PARKER.

I have never undertaken to compute the average tariff in France or Germany. I am informed that protection in France though less than in the United States is much greater than in England, and that in Germany it is about the same as in the United States, while in Russia and Italy it is higher.

What really induces people to come to the United States is the better opportunity it affords to make a living. This is not due to the tariff, but is in spite of it, and would be much greater if the tariff were abolished. That there is more emigration from the countries of higher protection goes to prove that it is not protection, but something else, that makes our opportunities to earn a living better than they are abroad. If it were protection German and Italian emigration ought to stop, and Englishmen should turn their faces toward Germany and Italy. Protection cannot cheapen land; on the con- trary its tendency is to increase its value. Whatever does that is injurious to labor, for cheap land makes high wages and dear land makes low wages.

Money and Trade.

PHILADELPHIA.—A and B have an argument concerning the following points:

1. B contends that money has no value in itself, excepting its material worth—in other words, that if a workman receives a ten dollar note as wages, he has not received the wealth due for his labor, but merely an evidence legally entitling him to that amount of wealth.

2. B holds that a reduction of ten or fifteen per cent of the average duties would not necessarily result in a reduction of the total income from tariff revenue.

3. A claims that any balance of commerce between two countries (nations) is settled by money, which B denies, asserting that such balances are settled by bullion.

4. B claims that “land” (meaning that term to embrace all the natural elements and forces) never produces wealth without the application of labor.

As we have no works of reference at hand, will you kindly state which is right and oblige?

W. F.

1. B is right. Money as such is but a measure of values and medium of exchange. Let a workman receive for wages two silver half dollars, each stamped by the United States as money of that denomination; with these he can buy one dollar’s worth of anything in the market, including one dollar’s worth of silver bullion. But if he hammer out the stamp, thus changing his two pieces of money into a commodity, he cannot buy a dollar’s worth of anything with them. They will then buy but about four-fifths of a dollar’s worth of anything, including silver bullion. So money (excepting the material of which it is composed) is not wealth: and when a laborer receives money he is not receiving the wealth due him but only an

p. 6, col. 2 evidence of title to wealth of a certain value.

2. B is right again. It would not necessarily reduce the total income from the tariff; it might increase it. If the average reduction were made by scaling down all duties, the tendency would be to increase the revenue; if it were made by enlarging the free list, the tendency would be to diminish the revenue; if it were made in part by reducing duties and in part by abolishing them, the tendency would be to increase or diminish revenue in accordance with the effect on the importation of dutiable goods. If the tariff on hardware were 35 per cent; on dry goods, 50 per cent; and on wooden ware, 15 per cent, the putting of wooden ware on the free list would make an average reduction of 5 per cent, but that would not encourage the importation of hardware and dry goods, on which the duty was unchanged, and revenues would fall off by the amount that had been received from duty on wooden ware. If the rate on hardware were reduced to 30, on dry goods to 45, and on wooden ware to 10, that, too, would make an average reduction of 5 per cent, and by encouraging importation might increase revenues. This will illustrate the principle, but no one can predict with exactness the effect on revenues of a reduction of duties. The framers of the Mills bill claim that the free list will more than offset any increase of revenues from mere reductions.

3. Balances between nations are not settled altogether by either money or bullion. Suppose the balance of trade at any time to be against England and in our favor, then the five pound draft which an Irish servant girl sends to her parents in Ireland to pay their rent, helps to settle the balance. The girl deposits the value of five pounds in one of our banks; the bank gives her a draft on a Dublin bank, and the Dublin bank pays five pounds to the girl’s parents. The New York bank will then be indebted to the Dublin bank in the sum of five pounds, and in the adjustment of national balances England’s debt to us will be reduced by the amount of that transaction, though neither money nor bullion will have crossed the Atlantic. The same thing occurs when charitable contributions, mining dividends and other payments without consideration are transferred from one country to another. But what A and B have in mind is the ultimate balance which is settled, according to the common notion, by a shipment of money. As to that B is right. Though the debtor nation may ship money, the creditor nation receives it, not as money, but as bullion. The material of which the money is composed is assayed and the bullion value, not the money value, is credited. So that in fact all ultimate balances of trade are settled with commodities.

4. B is right again. Wealth is some- thing which labor has produced from land. Land has some of the characteristics of wealth, as value and utility, and is therefore often mistaken for wealth; but to regard it as such leads to confusion of thought. It is not material by what terms different things are distinguished, but it is of the highest importance that the terms shall always be used so as to distinguish things that essentially differ. If the term “wealth” be appied^sic to a natural element on which no labor has been expended, it is used as a synonym of the term “land.” You can readily see what confusion must result from sometimes using these terms as interchangeable and at other times as distinct. If we use “wealth” to distinguish products of land and labor, we cannot use it to describe either land or labor.

The Tariff and Trusts.

CENTRAL FALLS, R. I.—Please explain the following: You say that with free trade it would be impossible for trusts to exist. Now, I understand, that there is no duty on coffee; still within the last month there has been a corner in that, and when we took the duty off coffee an export duty was put on it. Now wool being a necessity, why can’t they (on the other side) put an export duty on that, providing we let it come in our ports free.

J. G.

THE STANDARD has not said that with free trade it would be impossible for trusts to exist. What we have said and say now is that it would be more difficult for trusts to exist. Trusts will not be impossible until production as well as exchange is free.

What you call a corner in coffee was not a corner; it was only a gambling transaction on the exchange. Such transactions cannot be prevented, and are not particularly injurious to any one but the gambler who loses. They are limited in extent by the confidence which one gambler has in the ability of the other to pay his losses.

The Brazilian export duty was not put on coffee because we took off the import duty. It was put on before, and it affected countries which made no change of import duty, as well as ours. That export duty was imposed solely for local or personal reasons, and could not have been collected off buying nations if coffee had not been a national monopoly^sic. If we should put an export duty on wheat, who would pay it? Not the foreign buyer, but the domestic producer. But if we had a monopoly of wheat raising we could within certain limits compel the foreign buyer to pay export duties. And this principle answers your question about wool. A foreign country having a monopoly of a certain kind of wool which we use could make us pay an export duty, which would relieve the land owners of that country at the expense of its wool producers, whose profits and wages would be lower in consequence of our smaller demand. But because a foreign country might by an export duty incidentally injure our producers and directly ly injure their own, is no reason why we should directly injure ours by an import duty.

Coal Miners.

NEWARK.—At a political stump harangue here in Newark the other evening, the protectionist speakers, after a long discourse on the benefits derived from the tariff of 1842, the magnificent history and principles of the republican party since 1861, the great achievement of gaining control of the government when its finances were in a deplorable condition, and leaving it in 1884 with a handsome surplus effected by the tariff, brought forth two illustrations of their principles, namely, that coal is brought from England merely as ballast, and that the wages of the English pauper miner is so low that we cannot pay our miners the present standard of wages

p. 6, col. 3 and compete with this labor; next, that wool can be raised so cheaply in Great Britain that our stock raisers would be obliged to sell their sheep for mutton, as it would be impossible to compete with foreign wool growers.

May I ask you what the difference in wages between English and Pennsylvania miners really is? The fallacy of the latter is easily discernible.

R. JORALEMON.

The difference between the wages of coal miners in England and in the United States is not less than twelve cents a ton in favor of the English miner. The wages for mining coal here is from sixty-seven cents a ton down to forty cents, and in England it is from seventy-nine cents upward. Besides this difference in money wages, the English miner gets his own coal free while the Pennsylvania miner is charged for it at mine prices—between $2 and $3 a ton.

There is something sublime in the im- pudence which claims that the tariff on coal is maintained for the benefit of the miners, when the miners get sixty-seven cents a ton for mining and the tariff duty is seventy-five cents a ton. If there were no tariff the miners, according to protection logic, would have to work for nothing and pay eight cents a ton for the privilege.

American Patriotism.

CHICAGO.—I have been reading up your land theory and would like to ask a question or two in reference to it.

1. Suppose we adopt the scheme of taxing land values, and as a result wages take an upward tendency, would not the volume of immigration to this country beeome^sic so great as to almost, if not at times entirely, check that advance, and thereby deprive us of the benefit (or full benefit) of the change? High wages are bound to attract the people of the entire globe to the spot where they are paid, and the higher they are the quicker they will get there, so it seems useless to me to raise the “standard of comfort” in this country unless something is done to shut off the tide of immigration.

2. But assuming that your answer is that the opportunities will be such that we could accommodate any influx that might occur, there is another point to be considered. Would it not bring upon us people of other countries at such a rate as to practically extinguish our individuality as a nation? Already the foreign element is a deciding factor in politics, and we go about in constant fear of offending German or Irish voters, and simply because they are German or Irish. Most of these people cling to their own language, read their own newspapers, celebrate their old country holidays; in fact, try to make things in this country as near to the one they left as possible. In fact they have no sympathy with our institutions, and take no pride in the past history of our country. Love of country, the mainspring of patriotism, is wanting; they are here simply and solely for the almighty dollar.

These facts are impressed on me more to-day than ever before; it is my first Fourth of July in Chicago, and the lack of interest shown in the day is painful to one who was brought up in the east. Not a cent was appropriated by the city for public celebration; in fact, we have no Fourth here—how can we when two-thirds of the people are foreign born and know nothing about it? In view of these facts would not the adoption of your plan overwhelm us with people who would swallow us instead of our swallowing them?

A. H. HAWKES.

1. In your second question you have anticipated the answer to your first. Our opportunities are practically unlimited. We could put the population of the world in these states, if unused land were free, without checking the advance of wages. Indeed, the greater the number that came the higher would our wages rise. But the whole population of the world would not come. The depopulation of other countries by emigration to this would cause a decline of land values abroad until the condition of working people there would be raised so nearly to a level with the condition here that emigration would check itself. There is another and more important consideration, which is that the single tax once adopted in a country of the magnitude of the United States, and its benefits demonstrated, no other country could long avoid its adoption.

2. The only kind of immigration that could extinguish our individuality would be that of a different race. Our national characteristic results from opportunities for the enjoyment of freedom which are greater than the opportunities of other freedom loving people. Any of these peoples coming to us and finding here such liberty as the single tax would secure to all, would immediately develop the one great American characteristic which is already latent among them. Witness the case of English, Irish, German and other immigrants who have been fortunate enough to better their condition here.

If foreigners put the almighty dollar above the love for their adopted country they are not worse than Americans who do the same. The lack of interest shown in the celebration of the Fourth of July is not an alien characteristic. Indeed, I am inclined to think that you will find the traditions of that day dearer to the immigrant than to most of our native born population.

English Revenues.

BROOKLYN, N. Y.—It would be very interesting to myself and perhaps to many of your readers if you would tell us how Great Britain raises her revenue for the support of the government?

E. F. BLAISDELL.

Partly by a tax on real estate of four shillings to the pound, based on valuations of the latter part of the seventeenth century; partly by stamp duties; partly by excise; partly by duties on imports. These are the principal sources of national revenue.

Panics and Free Trade.

NEW YORK.—(1) Was there a panic in this country in 1857 on account of a reduction of the tariff?

2. A high tariff advocate is trying to convince me that if we had free trade in this country it would shut up all our manufacturing establishments. Is that true?

A SINGLE TAX CONVERT.

1. No. There was a short panic in 1857 due to wildcat banking and land speculation, and the tariff was reduced the same year; but the panic was not due to the reduction. The tariff was reduced from a protective to a revenue basis in 1846, and it is conceded by well informed protectionists that times were prosperous from that year down to 1861, with the exception of the six months’ panic of ’57. This alone is enough to show that the panic of ’57

p. 6, col. 4 was not caused by the tariff reduction of that year. That two things happen at about the same time does not prove that one is the cause of the other. But protectionists constantly get tangled in the fallacy that it does. Your question is an example. The protectionist argues: The tariff was reduced in 1857; there was a panic in 1857; therefore the reduction of the tariff caused the panic. He might as well adopt this syllogism: The tariff was reduced in 1857; James Buchanan was inaugurated president in 1857; therefore the reduction of the tariff caused the inauguration. When the protectionist can show you that a panic has followed a reduction of tariff, and that there is no other cause for the panic than the tariff reduction, you may accept his conclusion.

2. Don’t let him fool you. This is the latest dodge of the protected monopolist who wants to continue in the enjoyment of his pleasure. Would cutlery factories close if the tariff were taken off steel? would steel mills close if it were taken off of iron? would iron furnaces close if it were taken off of coal? Not at all. What would happen would be this: The owners of iron and coal mines would get less royalty, the iron furnace would get its ores cheaper, the steel mills would get its iron cheaper, the cutlery factory would get its steel cheaper, and as the people would get their cutlery cheaper they would buy more, and the business of making cutlery, steel and iron would be greater than before. So with all kinds of manufacturing. The tariff simply increases the profits of monopolies at the expense of consumers.

How a Farmer Sees It.

AMY, Dunn County, Wis.—I am a farmer, over seventy years of age. I am in favor of taxes being mostly placed on land, and of all of them being taken off improvements and the products of useful labor. If it could be done, I would like to have all bonds, mortgages and notes taxed, as I think they do not always represent honest labor. Bankers’ notes, I think, ought to be taxed to death, as they are fictitious money, and represent only fraud. I am aware the land tax will greatly reduce the cash value of my land, but it will continue to give as good crops as before, and if I wish to sell and move to another place other land will also be cheap; so I lose nothing if I buy again. I have some boys; if they should buy they will not have to pay the earnings of so many years for it as I did for mine. I find that the direct taxes I pay are trifling compared to the indirect ones I pay every time I buy store goods, machinery and other items necessary to the farmer. Tariff, transportation, commissions, interest on fictitious money and on watered stock and rents of dwellings and stores compel the merchants to buy cheap and sell dear. This tends to impoverish farmers and all the merchant’s customers, and when the merchant’s customers are poor it is not easy for them (the merchants) to get rich.

Protection against the causes of foreign and domestic pauperism and bankruptcy is the kind of protection I would like best.

HENRY BROWN.

The single tax will reach the bonds, mortgages and notes to which you object. So far as any of these are burdens upon industry they are the fruits of land monopoly. If land were free, as under the single tax it would be, there soon would be no bonds, mortgages or notes which did not truly represent labor products. Then the bond holder, the mortgage holder and the note holder, instead of being to a greater or less degree in partnership with the landlord (often being in individual cases the landlord’s superior), would be in partnership with the producer, aiding as well as dividing with him, and no where reaping except as he had sown.

Bankers’ notes are now taxed out of existence, but this is for the benefit of national banks, which are invested with the privilege of providing the community with money. It seems to me clear that all money of whatsoever material made should be coined exclusively by the general government.

The effect of the land value tax on you as a farmer and your sons as a farmer’s sons you see clearly and correctly, and you are not too old to make the farmers of your neighborhood see this as clearly as you do. Can you not give some of your time to the work of impressing upon the minds of your friends the fact which you so simply and forcibly express in your letter?

JASON WALTERS, Sullin, Mass.—The uniform envelope system of voting does not, and could not be so modified as to secure that secrecy and purity of the ballot for which the Australian method is designed. So long as private parties are permitted to supply ballots an excuse for corrupt machinery exists, and bribery and intimidation can be carried on. Massachusetts has adopted the Australian method and you will soon be ready to admit from experience that it is superior to any possible modification of the envelope system.

LOUIS F. POST.

Texas Pensions Her Idlers and Prosecutes Her Workers.

Houston, Texas, Echo.

Henry George maintains that the present system of taxation is crude, expensive and corrupt, and in addition thereto is a sort of fine on production. In our opinion Henry George is right, and we need not go further to prove the correctness of his views than the assessor’s tax list notice for 1887, now before us. In special notes on the blank we read the following important questions which the assessor puts to every producer or nonproducer:

“Have you erected any new building since April 12, 1887? On what lot of land? What was the entire cost thereof, paid and unpaid, on the 11th of April, 1887? Did you make any additions or improvements on any building owned by you since April 12, 1886? On what lot or land situated? What was the entire cost thereof, paid and unpaid, on April 11, 1887? Was any building owned by you removed from April 12, 1886, to April 11, 1887? On what lot or land situated? If removed, to what place?”

It will thus be seen that the assessor follows up the producer with an eagle eye, and when found adds a penalty to whatever he produces; but the man who waits the advent of population to make his land valuable scarcely ever pays additional tax until he commences to improve it, when the assessor adds the penalty under the provisions of the law. In this state realty, unimproved, is is valued only once in ten years, thus favoring the speculator, while the man who makes two blades of grass grow where but one grew before, or erects houses, is made to pay the penalty before the shingles are on or the paint dry. The fixed improvements on land are subject to tax when the carpenter and contracter^sic have the plans drawn, while the real estate monopolist whose acres adjoining are greatly enhanced in dollars, the assesser^sic passes him by as the owner of “unproductive” or “wild land.” Thus a premium is paid to the non-producer and a penalty laid on the worker. Society, under such custom or law, permits the loafers to levy indirect tribute on the workers.

A Novel with a Plot: THE TRUTH ABOUT TRISTREM VARICK.

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THE QUESTION OF THE DAY. ANTI-POVERTY AND PROGRESS.

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p. 7, col. 6

An Economic Brush Heap.

Mark Twain once wrote a piece of which he felt very proud, and to which he was wont to refer as an illustration of the ease with which the ordinary reader can be induced to believe the most utterly absurd story, if only the absurdities are so arranged and varnished over with irrelevant statements and verbiage that it requires a little mental effort to detect them. The sketch in question was a description of a harrowing tragedy of some sort, and turned upon the finding of a gashed and mutilated body. The condition of the body was nowhere described in full, but scattered through the entire sketch were little incidental statements of the horrible atrocities that had been perpetrated upon it. In one place the reader was told that the right leg had been cut off and the right arm bent as if in a paroxysm of pain, with the thumb pressed hard against the nose. Then came a lot of description of surrounding scenery, followed by a statement that the left arm was missing. and^sic the fingers of the right hand spread out like a fan. And so on through the entire sketch, which was a pretty lengthy one. The left leg was gone, the head was missing; the body had been cut in two and the lower part carried off. The viscera had been taken out; the upper half of the body was gone: the right arm couldn’t be found. Altogether the dead man was in a horrible condition. The story was widely quoted, and it was quite a long time before anybody found out that it was all a joke, and that Mark Twain had been describing the corpse of Mr. Nobody with his thumb to his nose.

What Mark Twain did intentionally and with much labor, a great many men do unintentionally and without effort of any kind, save that of dipping the pen in the ink at intervals and guiding it along the surface of the paper. These men have minds which Mr. Croasdale once aptly described as brush heaps—in which all sorts of facts and fancies are heaped together, higgledy-piggledy, without order or arrangement, ends sticking up in all directions, branches intertangling—a terrible mess altogether. When one of these men wants to write something he just goes to his brush heap and yanks; and out of the tangled mess that answers to his yanking he constructs—by the simple process of flinging it down—a smaller brush heap, which he rejoicingly calls an essay, and sends to the magazines. And the funny thing about it all is that if the brush heap man only has sufficient ignorance to thoroughly believe in himself he will find plenty of people who will read his essays as men take patent medicines, with a feeling that the stuff must be good, or it wouldn’t be offered them.

The Rev. G. H. Hubbard is one of these brush heap men. He lives at North Cambridge, Mass.; and he has written for the New Englander and Yale Review an essay on “The Economics of Speculation,” which is a very tangled mess indeed. THE STANDARD reader who wants to look at Mr. Hubbard’s brush heap as Mr. Hubbard flings it down must invest thirty cents in the magazine containing it. The most we can do is to take here and there a stick or two, and lay them alongside each other.

Of course, Mr. Hubbard falls foul of “Progress and Poverty.” In these economic brush heap minds, whatever projecting end you may happen to pull on, “Progress and Poverty” is pretty sure to come out with the rest of the tangle. Here is what the reverend Hubbard’s first yank brings forth:

In his work on “Progress and Poverty” Mr. George says: “Production and consumption fail to meet and satisfy each other. How does this inability arise? It is evidently and by common consent the result of speculation. But of speculation in what? Certainly not of speculation in things which are the products of labor—in agricultural or mineral productions, or manufactured goods; for the effect of speculation in such things, as is well shown in current treatises which spare me the necessity of illustration, is simply to equalize supply and demand, and to steady the interplay of production and consumption by an action analogous to that of a fly wheel in a machine. Therefore, if speculation be the cause of these industrial depressions, it must be speculation in things not the production of labor, but yet necessary to the exertion of labor in the production of wealth—of things of fixed quantity: that is to say, it must be speculation in land.”

This is the way in which the founder of the great anti-poverty society disposes of the question of speculation and makes it pay tribute to his pet theory. His conclusion is at once illogical in itself and wholly inconsistent with observed facts. Speculation is speculation, wherever it appears, and its nature and effects are everywhere the same. The most casual study shows us that speculation in land is a mere peccadillo when compared with the other forms of speculation carried on in America.

Mr. Hubbard’s brush is brittle. It must have lain rotting in his mind a long time. If he had managed to pull out a little more of “Progress and Poverty” he would have discovered that Henry George—who, by the way, didn’t found the anti-poverty society—by no means “disposes of the question of speculation” in that curt fashion. The passage quoted is from the first chapter of book V, in which the author traces the cause of industrial depressions to the fact that industrial activity always and invariably increases the value of land, and in doing so narrows the field for its own employment; and fortifies his argument, not only with undisputed facts, but with prophecy which has been fulfilled to the letter.

However, when we lay hold of another piece of Mr. Hubbard’s brush, we find that he is willing to admit at least a part of the argument of “Progress and Poverty.” He doesn’t believe that speculation in land has anything to do with industrial depression. But he is quite willing to admit that speculation in other things has nothing to do with it either.

Doubtless Mr. George, in the expression “current treatises,” refers among others to the works of John Stuart Mill, who says: “The operations of speculative dealers are useful to the public when profitable to themselves; and though they are somewhat injurious to the public by heightening the fluctuations which their more usual office is to alleviate, yet whenever this happens the speculators are the greatest losers.” Similar statements

p. 8, col. 2 may be found in the writings of other well known economists. With them I have no dispute; for their meaning is clear to one who reads their works, and the truthfulness of their conclusions is unquestioned.

All right. Speculation in land is harmless; and speculation in other things is a benefit to society. Surely, then, Mr. Hubbard is going to speak in praise of speculation. It must be so, for he tells us:

Saints speculate and sinners speculate. Not only bankers and brokers, but merchants, mechanics, lawyers, doctors, legislators, ministers of the gospel, dry goods clerks, newsboys and bootblacks endeavor to multiply their legitimate earnings by some form of speculation. Even ladies who must earn their own livelihood are trying their skill in the way of speculation; and many a snug little fortune has been accumulated by the keen speculating instinct of women.

A thing that saints and ministers of the gospel do—a thing, moreover, that will multiply legitimate earnings—must be an essentially good thing to do—especially since the ungodly, as well as the saints and ministers, indulge in it. But wait a bit. Turn over a couple of leaves and see what you think of this:

In our great metropolis we see “grinding poverty and fabulous wealth walk side by side.” In the tenements and attics are huddled together multitudes of poor workers of every sort struggling night and day against starvation, not a few of them driven to lives of sin or a suicide’s death by the powers of despair. Close by them, on the grand avenues, we may meet men whose fortunes are almost incredible. The Vanderbilt property exceeds two hundred millions of dollars, and Jay Gould forgets whether he signed a check for five millions or fifty millions. What is the cause of this inequality? What has taken the money from the pockets of the many and swept it into the coffers of the few? I answer in a word—Speculation.

Whew! We’ve heard some pretty hard things said about saints and ministers of the gospel, but never before anything so hard as this. And by a “reverend,” too! Now give another yank at the brush heap:

A. T. Stewart was not a speculator, yet at his death he was worth fifty million dollars. John Jacob Astor accumulated twenty millions, of which only a small portion was the fruit of speculation. The elder Vanderbilt amassed a fortune of from sixty to a hundred millions, much of it entirely independent of speculation. . . . When Mr. Vanderbilt obtained control of the Harlem railroad, and by his skillful management raised the price of the stock from about twenty per cent of the par value to over two hundred per cent, the profit derived was natural and legitimate. The increase in the price of stock indicated a corresponding rise in value brought about by the improved condition of the railroad.

Speculation in land at least not an evil. Speculation in other things a decided good. Speculation the chief cause of poverty. The elder Vanderbilt not a speculator. Honestly, now, did you ever see a heap of brush more tangled and confused? It’s good—it’s bad—it is—it isn’t—what the mischief does the man mean? Take the rest of the heap to pieces, and see if we can find out. So! A pull altogether now, and here it comes. Now we shall learn something:

We must carefully distinguish between the two different senses in which the word speculation is used. When Mr. Mill and economists of his class use the word they apply it to transactions based upon the actual possession and exchange of the commodities involved. The man who buys up the surplus wheat crop this year that he may profit by the probable shortage next year is a speculator in this sense of the word. So also is the man who buys railroad or bank stocks and holds them till an increase in their value enables him to sell them at a good profit. Speculation in land belongs strictly to this same class, since it implies the actual buying and selling of land. I do not know that there is any form of speculation in land that does not imply a real transfer of ownership. . . The man who actually buys a number of shares in some good railway and receives his dividends from the earnings of the road, however large those dividends may be, is deriving profits for which the work of the railroad is an adequate return to society. The man who buys a whole railroad at once is not necessarily a speculator any more than is the grocer who buys a dozen of eggs in the expectation of selling them again at a profit.

This is the kind of speculation that the Rev. Hubbard believes in. It isn’t speculation to speculate in things, provided you really speculate; in other words, provided you really buy the things and expect to make a profit by their rise in value. If a man engineers a corner in wheat he isn’t speculating, so long as he buys up all the wheat offered him. On the other hand, if he doesn’t buy all the wheat offered him he is speculating; and since a wheat deal so managed would very soon peter out, his crime brings its own punishment. It isn’t speculation to speculate successfully. A speculation only becomes a speculation when the speculator speculates in such a way as to make it certain that the speculation will fail. This is a crooked piece of brush indeed. And when we yanked it out of the pile we brought this twisted up with it:

The commercial history of America abounds with illustrations of the way in which the prices of the most necessary articles are artificially raised and lowered when there has been no real inequality of supply and demand. Corners in wheat, gold, iron and coal are of frequent occurrence. Thousands of poor people may be starving for want of bread while millions of bushels of wheat lie stored away in the elevators, held to compel a rise in prices. And when the rise comes a few men are made rich by means of the injury they have inflicted on society. All this is plainly evil.

This is funny. If a man “buys up the surplus wheat crop this year that he may profit by the probable shortage next year,” he is conferring a benefit on mankind. But if he holds it in an elevator “to compel a rise in prices” he is doing something “plainly evil.” The Rev. Hubbard is hard to please. Let us take another pull at his brush heap and see what else it yields:

The form of speculation which prevails most extensively in our country to-day is wholly different from this. It consists in the transfer of paper contracts merely and has little or no foundation in actual exchange of commodities. It is in reality a form of gambling upon the chances of a rise or fall in the price of any commodity and is carried on without reference to real possession. Thousands of young men speculate in stocks who never have money enough at any time to purchase whole shares of any stock. Having scraped together a few dollars they invest in “margins,” that is, they deposit with a broker enough money to cover the change in value of a few shares of stock within a limited

p. 8, col. 3 range. If the stock falls to the limit within the time specified, the depositor loses his money. If it rises, he wins the amount of increase. In either case he has not owned a single share of stock, and perhaps his broker has not. Similar to this are the methods of speculation in the various exchanges. While a few men really buy and sell wheat, the majority of speculators buy and sell promises. . .

The paper contracts of the various exchanges already mentioned, involving billions of dollars, imply an actual loss on one side and gain on the other of hundreds of millions. This enormous sum of money does not represent any benefit conferred upon the community, but is absorbed by the fortunate speculators without any return whatever, leaving the country at large so much poorer. Worse than this, real prices everywhere are largely determined, not by the natural law of supply and demand, but by the fictitious prices of speculators. Men pay for bread, not what it costs to raise the wheat and manufacture and carry it to them, but what can be extorted from them by the tricks and combinations of exchange gamblers. The variations in the prices of the different necessary commodities as reported in the exchanges are felt most keenly by the poor laborers of the world. Every transaction of a speculative nature increases the cost of the commodity handled by the amount of profit made.

This is a fresh line of thought with a vengeance. The men who buy and sell on margin are the wicked speculators who do all the mischief. The quotations on our exchanges are settled without the actual delivery of the things sold. Stranger than all, when A wins a bet from B about the price of stock, it is the public at large, and not B, who pays the loss. The reverend essayist evidently knows nothing about exchanges, or he would be ashamed to put his name to such utter bosh as that.

And yet the Rev. G. H. Hubbard is probably a well meaning man, who would think clearly if he knew how—nay, more, who could think clearly if he would only try. His trouble is, that like many another hasty writer, he uses his reasoning faculty, not in forming his opinions, but simply and altogether in defending them. The social tangle that perplexes him into making this extraordinary exhibition of himself is easily unraveled by anyone who will take the trouble to trace causes and effects, and resist the temptation to take things for granted. We advise the Rev. Mr. Hubbard to burn his brush heap, study facts, and do a little real thinking.

Moral Principle in Public Affairs.

Why should we not give over discussing questions of political expediency and sectional or class interests, and aim simply to do what is right? This is the question that W. L. Trenholin propounds in the July Forum:

Here is the core of the trouble that besets our times: here is the chief, but a hidden, source of the social unrest, the industrial disorders, that mar the symmetry of American prosperity; economic truth has not acquired ethical force.

In the United States society is constructed altogether upon the industrial basis, and modern industry is a living organism framed upon a vast network of reciprocal relations and dependencies. The currents of its life circulate with the velocity to which steam impels; electricity is its nerve force, the sciences are its faculties, the arts constitute its members, its great heart throbs with all the productive energies of nature raised to incalculable power by the mechanical achievements of human invention. Each man or woman or child who works, each human being who contributes to the matter or to the force which together constitute the totality of our industry, sustains some relation to every other such contributor; every person is an industrial point where the capillaries of supply and of distribution coalesce; every one is incessantly emitting the products of his industry and absorbing the products of others’ industries; the channels of general distribution and supply are gorged with the superfluities of all on the way to supply the deficiencies of all.

Natural laws pervade this wonderful system and sustain it. Nothing but natural law could hold its myriad forces in balanced play, guide through its mazes such masses of material, adjust to every man’s back his burden of labor, bring to every mouth its daily bread. Natural law would go further, apportioning to every man his due share of industrial opportunity and his proper dividend in the total product of wealth; but man, voter and legislator, doctrinaire and charlatan, man in his unwisdom has presumed to interfere. Statute laws, usurping the function of natural laws and invading their sphere, have projected disorder into the machinery; the rythm^sic of its movements is disturbed, abnormal conditions are created, so that our wondrous resources, energies and achievements are running abnormally to two products, millionaires and mendicants!

Natural laws, when obstructed or overborne, transfer their energy to sub-laws, and in our case such sub-laws have produced, on the one hand, corporations and trusts, on the other hand labor organizations. The first are castles and strongholds of accumulated wealth, the second are the walled cities and intrenched camps of the “producers of wealth.” Here is war where we should have peace, and where nature would have maintained peace but for man’s meddling.

A rapidly expanding industry demands absolute freedom of environment; within and beyond the peripheries it successively transcends there must be room for both the old and the new activities, scope for constantly augmenting forces, no obstructions, no counteractions. These conditions do not exist among us; no wonder that the old frames and casings are strained and cracked by the energies pent within them, for no strength of material can resist the force exerted by cell multiplication in natural growth.

This great expansion of industry is not quite a hundred years old; but see how it has changed the physical face of the country, the occupations of the people, their social habits. What corresponding changes have we made in our laws, civil and criminal? How have we adjusted conveyances of property to the accelerated movement in the transfer of ownership? What efforts have been made to modify the precedents and the practice of our courts in harmony with the new relations generated by the spirit of industry that impregnates every source of individual or corporate activity? The material gains of the century cannot be computed, its intellectual progress has been bewildering, in literature and in art there has been a veritable efflorescence, science has attained a development beyond the scope of eighteenth century conjecture; but in economics we have stood still, nay, we have even drifted back from where our fathers were fifty years ago.

The one science of all others which can enable us to take proper account of our gain in wealth, in productive force, in commercial effectiveness; the one science that can teach us to make this wealth a national blessing

p. 8, col. 4 without its becoming a social curse; the one science that can enlighten us as to the duties arising out of industrial relations, and guide us in grafting a new morality upon the dead wood of the old systems, has been, and still is, neglected among us. We have passed under a new social dispensation, but the light of its gospel is denied to us. In our colleges and universities economic science has less vitality than the dead languages; in legislatures and in congress it has not passed beyond the stage of superstition. Statesmen account it foolishness; to the politician it is a stumbling block.

But there is a higher and nobler view of the situation. Let it be admitted, for the sake of argument, that economic truth has an ethical sanction; let it be admitted also that economic science can adjust equitably the relations of capital, labor and all other factors of wealth; must it not follow that both religion and morality will thus have the door opened to them to reoccupy their old seats of social anthority^sic? Will not religion be inspired to formulate a nineteenth century statement of one’s duty to one’s neighbor and stimulated to enforce the observance of the duties thus defined? Will not morality take jurisdiction of economic offenses and a conscience be evolved that is capable of comprehending the true inwardness of “the management of properties?”

He who believes that God governs the universe must also believe that the laws of nature are his ordinances; and he who feels it a duty to learn and to live up to the written word of God cannot escape the obligation to learn and to live up to those laws which he has wrought into the very nature of things, and which he has fitted the human mind to discern, define and classify, and which he compels it to recognize as belonging to the highest order of verities. The scientific man realizes that the laws of nature represent absolute truth, that their invariability is not only indispensable to existence but is the fundamental concept of all reasoning, and therefore the ultimate basis of every form and degree of belief; while the theologian must recognize in them the ordinances of that constitution with which God has endowed the universe, the conditions prescribed by infinite wisdom for the eternal exercise of infinite power.

The sanction of scientific truth being complete and the economic organization of society being obvious, can it be doubted that there is the very highest obligation resting upon every one to study this science, or at least to see that those who have mastered it are intrusted with the making or the administering of the laws which impinge upon industrial interests and adjustments? It is only through the medium of this science that we can fully realize how true it is that we are “members one of another;” it is only by its light that we can fully live up to the golden rule, “Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye unto them;” it is only by its teachings that we can allay the turmoil between capital and labor, adjust the economic rights of the community to the industrial freedom of the individual, and reconcile the security of property with the progress of society; it is only by its aid that we can detect and remove influences that are now disturbing the equitable distribution of wealth and threatening us with calamities of portentous magnitude.

All true. There is no more delightful study than economic science. There is none whose truths are more intimately connected and intertwined with religion. Political economy is the hither side of God’s garment—the science of God’s kingdom upon earth. It teaches men how to live in accordance with the precepts of Christ, taking no thought for the morrow, laying up no treasure, giving to those that ask, and loving their neighbors as themselves. Mr. Trenholin’s^sic appeal for moral principle in public affairs is an illustration of the way in which men’s mind are^sic turning from darkness into light—from the cold and sordid selfishness of political empiricism to the radiant glory of scientific truth.

A Mixed Up Professor.

To the graduates of Smith college the name of John B. Clark, A. M., is no doubt familiar. For the information of others it may be stated that he is professor of history and political science at Smith college. Smith college is in Massachusetts.

Professor Clark possesses an excitable temper and a mental organism of great complexity, two qualities which he displays with effect in a recent publication of the American economic association(1). It having been proposed to tax land up to its full rental value, Professor Clark is excited to great wrath.

“Would it be robbery?” he exclaims. “No, it would be the quintessence of robbery. The act of the highwayman, who should demand your money, take it from your purse, and complacently present to you the purse itself as the sole thing to which you have a right, would be in comparison a mild offense.”

But here it seems to occur to the professor that such an exhibition of temper is unbecoming the occupant of the chair of history and political science in Smith, and after retiring for a moment into the innermost recesses of his complex mental organism, he emerges with the remark that “the logic of the two cases would be identical.”

As THE STANDARD reader is not quick to perceive the logical identity of a proposition to take from his purse the money which a man has earned with a proposition that the community shall annually take from a land owner the value which it annually gives to his land, it may interest them to note the processes by which Professor Clark arrives at his “logical” conclusion. If they have ever found pleasure in attempting to analyze an atom or to realize infinite space, they will enjoy following the professor word by word and thought by thought in his book; but if they have not had this mental discipline, they should at least take a preliminary course of “fifteen puzzle.”

Professor Clark first sets about to define capital:

Ask a manufacturer, “What is your capital?” and he will probably express his answer in dollars. Ask him “In what is your capital invested?” and he will specify the buildings, machines, land, materials, etc., in which his productive fund now chances to be embodied. These concrete things will figure in his thought as the containers of his capital; while the content itself will appear to him to be a value, an abstract quantum of wealth.

This colloquial distinction between what capital is and what it is invested in, or to put it more accurately than Professor Clark does, between what a man’s capital amounts to and in what it consists, the professor adopts for purposes of scientific analysis, giving to the former the term

1. “Capital and Its Earnings.” May, 1888: American economic association, Baltimore, Md.

p. 8, col. 5 “pure capital” and to the latter “concrete capital:”

Capital in the concrete consists of commodities that aid production. It is instrumental wealth—that which directly satisfies no natural wants, but helps men to obtain the things that satisfy them.

Having now got a definition which includes land, since that is “a commodity that aids production,” and twenty years ago would have included slaves, as they were “commodities that aided production,” and would include the ocean, if it were parceled out to owners by metes and bounds, for its parcels would then be “commodities that aid production,” the professor describes “pure capital” as—

An abstract fund, the destiny of which is to migrate through an endless series of outward forms. . . . It lives by transmigration. Pure capital stays longer in some forms than in others. It remains for an instant in steam, and for an hour in the fuel that generates it. It stays for weeks in unfinished products, for years in the machines that make them, and for decades in the buildings that house them. How long may it remain in the land under the buildings? Here, indeed, is an exception to the rule of endless wandering. Pure capital that rests itself in land^sic is at liberty to stay there indefinitely.

If the professor’s mental organism had been less complex it might have occurred to him that the fact that “pure capital that vests itself in land”—his mode of describing land value—may stay there indefinitely, indicates a rule as to land instead of an exception to a rule of capital. But in that case he could not have shown the logical identity between highway robbery and a certain system of taxation; so let it pass.

We now have capital neatly bisected into the pure and the concrete, the latter including the earth, which isn’t capital at all if labor products are. The process, it will be observed, is much the same as if we should so analyze Professor Clark as to describe his distinguishing title as the “pure professor,” and the professor himself as the “concrete professor,” with a definition for the latter comprehensive enough to include Smith college itself.

The next step is to distribute the earnings of capital. Here again the professor makes an exploration of the field of business colloquialisms. When a man receives an income from the value of a thing, is it not a percentage, and does he not call it interest? And when he receives an income for the use of the thing itself, does he not call it rent? Therefore, the professor calls the income of “pure” capital interest, and the income of “concrete” capital he calls rent:

The entire income resulting from the ownership of property is thus interest when regarded in one way; it is rent when regarded in another. Ascertain the total market value of all instruments of production, find what proportion of that amount these instruments annually earn for their owners, and you have the total income of the property holding class, as such, in the guise of interest. Make a list of the instruments themselves and place opposite to the name of each the sum that it annually earns, add these amounts and you have the total income of the property owning class, as such, in the guise of rent. In this connection practical thought makes no distinction between land and other material instruments that are let to hire, and neither should science do so.

But why science should regard the same thing as two different things is not explained. Recurring to our analysis of Professor Clark into the pure professor and the concrete professor, we might illustrate this division of the earnings of capital by a similar division of Professor Clark’s salary. When regarded as the income of the “pure” professor we might call it interest; when regarded as the income of the “concrete” professor, we might call it rent. And pray, would that throw any light upon the nature of the professor’s salary?

In political economy, as in any other science, when the same thing approaches in two guises, it is pretty safe to suspect that at least one guise is a disguise. And that is precisely what we find here. This division of capital into pure and concrete and this twofold name for the same income of one capital are not adopted merely because they lead to complexity, and therefore gratify a natural craving of the author, but because the complexity to which they lead confuses the natural and obvious distinction between land, the natural source of production, and capital, an artificial agent of production, and between the interest of capital, which is an increase of the capital, and rent of land, which is a mere toll or tax for its use. Professor Clark in making this unique outline of political economy to meet the emergency which so excited his temper, appears to have taken a hint from the youthful artist who drew a cat with six legs and wrote under it: “I know that a real cat has only four legs, but I put six on this one so it could run away from the dog.”

But the professor makes an admission which is fatal to his six-legged cat. He says:

Land is an aggregation of three kinds of utility. It has properties that man did not create and cannot destroy; it has others that mankind, by collective action, create; and still others that individuals impart by the direct employment of labor.

Now it is plain that the last of these utilities has a characteristic which the other two lack, namely, that it is a product of individual labor. This difference demands a distinct classification, which is usually made by classifying the latter utility with capital, the characteristics of which—utility, value, labor product—are common to both. But the professor “skips the difference” and proceeds:

Rent is paid for utilities of the second and third kinds. These qualities of the soil that are in the fullest sense original and indestructible, the qualities that would have existed if man had never been created, and that would continue in their present condition if the human race were to perish, have at present no direct influence on rent.

There is a good deal of cautious qualification here, but the statement is sufficiently positive to show that the author has never discovered, bought or leased, an iron, coal or paint mine, or an oil well. He recognizes what he calls the “place utility” of land, which is created by man through the advance of settlement, and the exclusion of railroads^sic and other improvements that “annihilate distance.” This place utility, however, can never be

p. 8, col. 6 a full monopoly, because “man is making the world accessible;” but we look in vain for any natural explanation of the right of the owners of the “place” to appropriate to their own use the “utility” which they do not create. But it is just at this point that the six legged cat is expected to bring its extra legs into play. It is not food, clothing, shelter and the comforts and luxuries of civilization that are the prime subject of property right, but “wealth in the abstract, mainly in the form of pure capital;” which—

When invested in land has the same rights that elsewhere belong to it. Whether nature or society, or individual man made the earth as an economic entity, man makes by personal sacrifice the value that he pays for it. That value is the subject of his claim.

An argument equally applicable if applied to the value of a slave, and vicious in either case because it ignores the fundamental principle that no human power can confer upon any man a moral right, by way of investment or otherwise, to confiscate the earnings of other men.

Professor Clark is withal somewhat of a humorist. After tiring himself and his readers with a description of the complex process of constructing an artificial economic cat with legs enough to get away from a natural economic dog, he drops into such diverting trifles as that our nation is “a home-owning community;” that it keeps “the door of land ownership open,” and that the man who does not buy it either has no pure capital, or^sic has what is to him a better use for it.” The last joke seems to be an adaption of an old one by an Irishman who said there was no real famine in Ireland because “Ivery body was atin’, savin thim as wasn’t hungry, and thim as had nothing to ate!” The other jokes are probably original.

“It is the Value of the Improvement Only, and Not the Earth Itself, That is Individual Property.”

The extract printed below is from Thomas Paine’s pamphlet, published in 1795^sic, entitled “Agrarian Justice.” This pamphlet was issued as a reply to a sermon of Watson, bishop of Llandoff^sic, entitled “The wisdom and goodness of God in having made both rich and poor:”

Taking, then, the matter upon this ground, the first principle of civilization ought to have been, and ought still to be, that the condition of every person born into the world after a state of civilization commences ought not to have been worse than if he had been born before that period. But the fact is that the condition of millions in every country in Europe is far worse than if they had been born before civilization began, or had been born among the Indians of North America of the present day. I will show how this fact happened.

It is a position not to be converted^sic that the earth in its natural, uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life proprietor with the rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal.

But the earth in its natural state, as before said, is capable of supporting but a small number of inhabitants compared with what it is capable of doing in a cultivated state. And as it is impossible to separate the improvement made by cultivation from the land itself upon which that improvement is made, the idea of landed property arose from that inseparable connection; but it is nevertheless true that it is the value of the improvement only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated land owes to the community a ground rent, for I know no better term to express the idea by, for the land which he holds; and it is from this ground rent that the fund proposed in this plan is to issue.

There could be no such thing as landed property originally. Man did not make the earth, and though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it; neither did the Creator of the earth open a land office from whence the first title deeds should issue. From whence then arose the idea of landed property? I answer as before that when cultivation began, the idea of landed property began with it; from the impossibility of separating the improvement made by cultivation from the earth itself upon which that improvement was made. The value of the improvement so far exceeded the value of the natural earth, at that time, as to absorb it; till in the end the common right of all became compounded into the cultivated right of the individual. But they are, nevertheless, distinct species of rights, and will continue to be so as long as the world endures.

It is only by tracing things to their origin that we can gain rightful ideas of them; and it is by gaining such ideas that we discover the boundary that divides right from wrong, and which teaches every man to know his own. I have entitled this tract “Agrarian Justice,” to designate it from “Agrarian Law^sic.” Nothing could be more unjust than an agrarian law in a country improved by cultivation; for though every man, as an inhabitant of the earth, is a joint proprietor of it in its natural state, it does not follow that he is a joint proprietor of cultivated earth. The additional value made by cultivation, after the system was admitted, became the property of those who did it, or who inherited it from them, or who purchased it. It had originally an owner; whilst, therefore, I advocate the right, and interest myself in the hard case of all those who have been thrown out of their natural inheritance by the introduction of the system of landed property, I equally defend the right of the possessor to the part which is his.

Cultivation is one of the greatest natural improvements made by human invention. It has given to created earth a tenfold value. But the land monopoly that began with it has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss; and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before.

In advocating the case of the persons thus dispossessed, it is a right and not a charity that I am pleading for. But it is that kind of right which, being neglected at first, could not be brought forward afterward till heaven had opened the way by a revolution in the system of government.

It’s Very Clear.

Toronto Grip.

“Don’t you see,” said the manufacturer to the workingman, “that a duty on imports protects me, because it enables me to get higher prices from the home consumer than I could otherwise get.”

“Yes,” replied the workingman, “and I am a home consumer.”

“True,” responded the manufacturer, “but you can afford to pay the higher prices because the tariff gives me big profits and I am therefore able to pay you wages in proportion.”

“Why don’t you do so then?” asked the workingman.

“Because I am not in the philanthropy line of business, and I don’t have to. Labor comes in free of duty, and the competition of laborers governs the rate of wages.”

“I see,” said the workingman. “I never could clearly understand before how the tariff kept up wages, but of course I see it now.”