What Protection has done for Chicago.

Cromwell Argus, Volume III, Issue 115, 23 January 1872, Page 6

What Protection has done for Chicago.

(Australasian.) Protection is looking up. Its great and glorious principles have achieved another victory in America. Their operation has been such as to furnish thousands of mechanics with lasting employment at high wages. Masons, bricklayers, carpenters, joiners, upholsterers, plumbers, painters, glaziers, plasterers, cabinetmakers, carvers, carpetweavcrs, excavators, and lauourers of all kinds will be at work for months to come in rebuilding the city of Chicago, and in refurnishing its houses and restocking its stores. But what —some sceptical freetrader will ask —has all this got to do with protection I Marry, a great deal. Protection laid Chicago in ashes. As how? “Thusly.” The owners of the slate quarries of Pennsylvania are rigorously protected against foreign competition. Slates, therefore, are too dear to admit of their being generally used for roofing purposes. Consequently, substitutes have to be provided. At Chicago this substitutes took the shape of paper steeped in pitch and covered with gravel. This was the inflammable covering of the buildings in that unfortunate city. Consequently when the late fire broke out, it leaped from house to house and from street to street as rapidly as a train of gunpowder ignites. The flames ran along the roofs of the edifices with appalling veloI city, and the melting pitch dropping into the j rooms below greatly increased their combustion. “ Chicago has really been burnt down,” as th q Spectator says, “in order that Pennsylvania]! quarry men might plunder the public comfortably.” And why not? Why should they not be protected as well as the i manufacturers of slop clothing in New York and Boston, where the condition of the female white slave is more deplorable than the negroes before slavery was abolished ? To be sure, 12,000 houses were destroyed, about 100,000 people rendered homeless, and property to the value of £30,000,000 or £40,000,000 was consumed. But what is that compared with the assertion of a great principle—the principle that each industrial interest is to be allowed by law to levy black mail upon all other interests, and “thedevil take tne hindmost” ! Chicago, roedified, ought to have a monument like that on Fishstreet Hill, and there should be recorded on tlie pedestal how the great city Avas burned ' to ashes as a stupendous sacrifice to the prin- | ciples of protection in the year 1871.