Correspondence.

Feilding Star, Volume XVI, Issue 145, 15 December 1894, Page 2

Correspondence.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FREETRADE AND PROTECTION. TO THE EDITOR OF TUB STAn. Sir, — To gain influence and popularity among the working classes is one of the chief motives of those who favour the scheme of Protection, but as to the working man being benefited by a scheme which goes against natural laws by forcing industry is a great delusion. It is a system -which attracts workmen to towns and becomes a breeding ground tending to the increase of pauperism. It is a narrow-minded policy because the thoughtless are led to believe by prejudice, or the blind leading the blind, that those industries add to the total amount of work done in the labor market, but quite ignoring the fact that trade creates labor, and by crippling trade a much greater amount of work done by seamen and the town and country laborers, inclusive, is reduced, seamen are forced to find employment on land, and so the unemployed and pauperism is increased, and thus it was that the direct effect of M'Kiuley Tariff Bill on English trade, was to lay up a number of tho merchant vessels in England, thereby causing a reduction in the rate of seamen's wagos or throwing out of employment by closing factories many artisans and others in England, the injurious effect of this action was felt all over the British colonies, also the colonial labor market;, because England's commerce cannot bo injured to any great extent without her colonies being sufferers thereby. The coal strike in England further increased and aggravated the evil effect. Protection or forcing industry being a delusion in name as well as in its working, can never be explained, as delusion cannot be turned into truth nor vice-versa. The simple and inaiu rules contained iv the principle of Frcctrade or reciprocity can be understood by an intelligent child, but there is no principle involved or justification in obtaining benefits from other countries ami •wifcholdiug benefits from them iv vefcuvu, and 41ms it ia that upholders of forced industries confuse their dupes in a labyrinth of figures and problems which bias can twist in any direction, tho lecturer aud listener often becoming equally puzzled upon the subject, and so correspondents writing in favor of the above scheme are like individuals lost in the bush, wandering about iv a narrow circle returning to the same spot over and over again. But the question may arise, Has the operation of the McKinley tariff been beneficial to tho United States ? My answer is that, permanently, it could not, because although England was robbed and part of her trade and industry attracted to America yet this unnatural addition to industry in the United States would soon be glutted with material and labor (as almost everything is overdone in that country), and so it would produce the same injurious offect in the labor market that I have already stated. No doubt tho cute Yankee desires to get rid of a great quantity of cheap out-of-date, machinery and produce, raised by cheap colored labor, and receive a limited amount ol just what he is in need of in return, but will other countries bo gulled into pursuing a trade of this sort ? No one can deny that England trades with the United States. Scope, and the investment of British capital, have been among the chief causes of prosperity in that country, but in a letter signed 11 Patriot," published in the Star of the 3rd instant, tho cause of unrivalled prosperity is put down to the scheme oi policy of Protection pursued in tho States. If " Patriot " is a British subject it does not seem to me very patriotic to omit the above causes. The prosperity of the United States recently is nothing to boast about, as the report by telegram of tho condition of the poor in New York by John Burns, and Broadrim's last New York letter published by the Wanganui Chronicle, has shown. I am, etc., A Colonist.