WHAT PROTECTION HAS DONE FOR AMERICA.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume V, Issue 1393, 1 December 1884, Page 2

WHAT PROTECTION HAS DONE FOR AMERICA.

The state of trade in the United States is so bad, notwithstanding a more than usually abundant harvest, that it can scarcely fail to communicate a strong impetus to the Freetrade movement, which is rapidly gaining ground in the Western States. Manufacturers, especially those whose industries are heavily protected, are shutting down their mills. In Pennsylvania half the ironworks and glass fac-

tories have been closed. The Edgar Steel Company, which employs 5,000 men, has given notice to its operatives that they must either accept a reduction of wages or the works will be stopped. In Pittsburg, the great manufacturing centre of the S ate, there are, it is estimated, as many as 4,000 tenements which have been vacated by their recent occupants, owing to their inability to pay rent for them. So great, indeed, is the poverty, and so urgent the distress which prevails in that city, that at the close of the financial halfyear the poorhouse officials had pretty well exhausted the sum appropriated for the relief cf the destitute during the current twelve months, leaving the second half of the year unprovided for The depression in the steel and iron trade has become almost chronic. Eleven years

ago Mr Powell, superintendent of the Clifton Ironworks, declared that “ the entire rolling-mill, nail factory, and

foundry interests of the West were comr pletely paralysed and rendered unprodactive.” in nine years, he said, protection bad augmented the cost of production 60 per cent.; not only so, but it had increased importations, and had permanently enfeebled the industry. At that time fully one-third of the American furnaces were out of blast; and in the following year, namely in 1874, the trade journal of the Iron and -steel Manufacturers’ Association announced that half a million of workmen were out of employment, 200,000 of whom were iron-workers, coal and ore miners, and mechanics and laborers connected with this branch of industry. In March, 1876, the. President of the Iron and Steel Association of Pennsylvania addressed a memorial to Congress, in which he stated that “ one-half the furnaces and rolling-mills in the country were standing idle ; ’ that iron

master after iron master was failing, and that the wages of iron-workers were necessarily reduced so low that they and their families cauld scarcely escape destitution and starvation.” Eight years previously the Hon John Covode, one of the protectionist representatives of Pennsylvania in Congress, had publicly declared that “American workmen were in deeper dis-

tress than ever before in the history of the country and since then, writes Mr T, 6. Shearm ui, in the ‘September number |of North American , lievietv, “we have

gone through still mire distressing and disastrous periods, lasting froth 1873 to 1878, and from 1832 to 1884, until to-day multitudes of protected American miners and mechanics are working for 50c or 80c (2s to 3s 4d) a day, without steady employment at those rates. The average rate of wages in American cotton mills, in proportion to the number of hours of work, is actually less than it is in England, and in many large branches of protected industry the rate of wages has fallen almost to the starvation point” In fact, £ merican manufacturers are simply repeating the unhappy experience of the Mother Country from 1815 to 1846, while her principal industries were under the ban and blight of Protection. As a matter of course, the depression spoken of above hashed a most injurious effect on the retail trade of the United States, where the failures during the drat six months of the present year have been abnormally numerous, while those of Great Britain for the same period have been only 2,368, as compared with 6,662 for the first half of 1880. Several towns and country banks in America have sue- [ combed to the pressure of the times ; i and the collapse of a great manufacturing firm l;ke that of Stafford and 00., who have been losing money by their cotton mills at Fall River and Rhode Island for the last two years, and of the house of Burger, Hurlbut, and Livingston, an old sugar-refining firm in New York, was expected to be followed by the fall of many other establishments of equal magnitude. But the most alarming feature of the Commercial and manufacturing crisis in the United States is the probability of its being followed by a serious calamity in the grain trade. For, while it is stated that wheat is cheaper in Chicago than it J has been for a quarter of a century jpast, it is also cheaper in England than it has been for the last hundred years. In the former market it is 22 cents a bushel less than it was a twelvemonth ago ; and we

read of a railroad oar of winter wheat, some 4 what out of condition, having been told at 43 cents per bushel. From this had to be deducted 85 cents for freight, leaving 10 cents (or sd) for the grower, out of which he had to pay commission and other incidental expenses. As for the time'to come, American wheat will be exposed year by year to an increasingly active competition with that cf India, where wheat can be grown, as has beon*sliown by i r Hunter, at Is 6d a bushel, and where there are thousands of square miles I of fertile soil, which ’would spoediljfbo brought under cultivation: if native farmer could calculate upon from 16s to 18s per quarter for his produce. .■ •. Let the cry of agricultural distress oboe be raised in the Central and Western I States of America, and the people of that country will make short work with the I tariff. Already, as we learn from the' I letter of Mr Bookwalter, of Springfield, I Ohio, manufacturer of agricultural maohiI nery, published iu the Pall Mall Gazette, I the Freotrade doctrine has rooted itself Iso deep'y in the popular mind in that I part of the Union that whole commnnjI ties are already as much for Freetrade as I Great Britain herself. There are at least 24,030,000 of the population engaged in 1 agricultural pursuits, he tells us, and for I every LlO invested in manufactures, there are L9O ~ invested in land, I while the mainstay of the railways, which I have cost L 1,400,000,000 sterling, is the 1 traffic in grain. Bence, when the battle I comes to be fought out, there Will be an 11 immense preponderance of strength arrayed LI on the side of commercial freedom. At t I present, it appears, the American farmers , I are taxed £o the extent of L 120,000,000 , I a-year in order to provide the protected , I industries with L? 0,000,000, and it is , I suggested that it would be better to pen* s I sion off the whole of the privileged manu- , I facturers and their workmen than to snbI I mit to the existing system of spoliation.— T Argus.