HENRY GEORGE ON PROTECTION.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume V, Issue 1585, 15 June 1887, Page 3

HENRY GEORGE ON PROTECTION.

The following, from the pen of Hetity George (the famous working man's advocate) on protection m .America, will be read with interest :— :" In Bpite of all our firotection — and for the last 24 years at oast the advocates of protection havo been free to carry thoir experiments as far as they chose — the condition of tho laboring classes of the United States has been slowly but surely sink ; ng to that of the 'pauper labor' of Europe. It do"s not follow that this is because of protection, but it is certain that protection has proved powerless to prevent it. To discover whether protection has or hf>snot benofittsd the working classes of United States, it is not necessary to army tables of figures which on'y an expert can verify and determine. The determining facts are notorious* It is a matter of common knowledge that the capitalist / corporations, rings, and combinations to whom we have given power to tax the American people for the protection of American industry pay their employeH as little as they cao, and have no scruple of importing the very foreign labor against whose products the tariff is imposed. It is notorious that wagf i In the protected industries are, If anything, lover than m the unprotected industries, and that although the protected, industries do not emjJtoy more than one-fifth of the working population of the United States, there occur In them more strikes, more lock-outs, more attempts to reduce wages, than m til other Industrie*. la the highly-protected Industries of Massachusetts, official reports deolore that the operative cannot get a living without the work of wife and ohildren. In the highly-protected industries of Now Jersey , many o£ the ' protected' laborers btb children, whose parents are driven by their necessities to find employment for them by misrepresenting the'r age, so aa to evade the State law. In the highly-protected Industries of Pennsylvania, laborers— for whose sakes, we are told, the high protection is imposed—are working for 65 cents a day, and half olad women are feeding furnace fires. 'Pluok me' stores, corporation tenements and boarding houses, Pinkerton detectives and mercenaries, aid all the forme and evidences of the oppresr sion and degradation, of labor, are, throughout; the country, characteristic of <h,3 protected Industries.' 1