THE INSATIABILITY OF PROTECTION.

Feilding Star, Volume XIV, Issue 27, 20 August 1892, Page 2

THE INSATIABILITY OF PROTECTION.

TO THE HDITOH OF THE STAH. c Sih,—lt would be as easy to satisfy £ the conhrnued toper with a limited " amount of stimulent as it would to satiate * the de?ire of the Protectionist for more J protectiou, and this has beon shown in * the boot trade. Notwithstanding thut t there has been for some time a very beayy protective duty on Enghsti or foreign boots and .shoes, which duty, 1 believe, goes fully half way towards prohibition, yet there has been dissatisfaction as the bootmaker's strike some time back has proved, and there has also been a cry for heavier protective duties. Protection has been appropriately compared to quack medicine. The patient who has a stroug constitution can swallow a large quantity of spurious drugs without a great deal of yisible harm being done, but the opinion of the professional physician will bo that the patient would have beon better without any of it, and so protection affects this couutry we having a large produce export trade, which reaches the London market duty free. England has a deuse population and a multitude of consumers aud workers, whereas this country has a sparse population but a greater proportion of producers aud a constantly increasing production, therefore as long as the trade is mutually beneficial the more free it is the better. Production is the outcome of industry or labor, and I need not go over the ground again to show the amount of open air work protection tends to cut off. We cannot shut out Euglish made boots and shoes without, in a measure, injuriously affecting the import trade which would be an injustice to England and her working people, while it would only tend to monopoly and pauperism in this country. One writer is in favour of gettiug rid of English boots and shoes upon the plea that they are a cheap aud inferior article, but depend upon it that there would be cheap and inferior articles manufactured locally to suit buyers who will purchase a cheep article. Machinery for manufacturing boots aud shoes quickly, with the aid of an exceedingly small proportion of labor, is at work in this country already, aud a suddeu increase in the output would enable those with capital and machinery to monopolize the trade, giving the hard working tradesman, without capital, a very poor chauco in the temporary exciteineut caused by increased competition, and an attempt to keep down prices to attract customers. The effect then would bo to cripple oco in trade, to encourage monopoly, and evontually to raise the all round price of boots and shoes, when the poor would have to pay the piper as well as the rich. As a wage reducing scheme protection is second to none, the monopolist being tho only class benefitted by it. A serious defect in articles by writers favouriug protection against freetrade, is their vagueness. Those writers mauy be highly educated, but, unless they study those questions, beginning at the A.B.C. for the simple natural law of mutual advantages denyod by free trade (being the basis of all honest dealing); but they only look at one side, or some theory of their own imagination, therefore they will get into a hopeless sate of confusion. Thus it is that there are articles written which neither the writer nor the reader can satisfactorily explain. My advice to such writers is to begin at the beginning of any question, or else the instruction of a child might as well be commenced in the middle of the fourth or fifth standard. Tho correctness of some of my letters favouring freetrade has been ques tioned, but as the writer did not point out, or prove, where they were incorrect, there is no noed of an answer. I am, etc., A Colonist.