Tax The Other Fellow

Henry Watterson, the brilliant Kentucicy journalist in the Louisville Courier-Journal pays his respects to the sectional aspect of a protective tariff in these words: Reduced to its last resource, crowded into the ditch by the intelHgence of an awakened people, and seeing its privileges slipping away from it, protection drops its raask and stands forth the hideous, selfish and sectional thing it has always been in spite of its thin veneering of patriotisin. But what a shifting of the scène and a swapping of roles there has teen. New England, sleek and prosperous and bursting with plenty gathered from protected industries, sees with alarm the growing competition ■of the West and South, and demands a new adjustment of the tariff to suit new conditions. The South, long the only refuge of tariff reform, now harbors a band of clamorous protectionists who deniand protection for an iron industry in which they can already beat the world through natural advantages. The West and Northwest, with vast aericultural interests, vitally concerned in the removal of every barrier that impedes the farmer's free entry into the markets of the world, now resound with the cali of mine-owners and lumber merchants for protection and bigger profits. From the Southwest, sold into slavery to a sugar bounty, rises the cry of the sugar-growers, who have come to distrust their ability to stand alone without tariff crutches. And all want protection against what? Practically against each other. The subsidists of each section want authority to force other sections to buy their producís. Our industries have been diversified with a vengeance, and each demands the right to levy a bounty while claiming exemption for itself, all quarreling like a band of robbers over the división of the booty, which, in the long run, is wrung from the farmers' unprotected product. It is idle to attempt to recQncil' these jealous interest and wrangling sections on any protective basis, yet to such cheese-paring is the protective policy now mainly applied. The protection of one is the injury of another. Each wants the best of it in the shuffie and deal and an extra ace up his sleeve. It is simply impossible by anysystem of protection to equalize the natural difference in soil, resources and productiveness in a country as big as this and as diversified. The longer we try it the worse the tangle. We stretch the blanket over one corner and another raises a shrill cry that it is exposed to the cold blasts of competition. The hot-house system of forcing has induced undue sensitiveness to breezy rivalry that would be only stimulating to a soundly developed industry. All buy the products of other protected industries under protest and want a higher duty on their own. The "home inarket," which we have been at such pains to build up, is not giving satisfaction. There are too many sellers for the buyers, and disappointed sections and industries turn and rend each' other. It will always be so until we get back to sound principies of free trade in and with the markets of the whole world. In a field so vast, each industry must needs fairly stand by its own ability to contribute to the wants of the race, or it will not stand at all. The fírst actual approach toward abolishing the vicious system shows how deep the poison has gone. It is section against section, one industry against another. The sooner we have done with it all, the better for our temper as for our pockets. And from that fixed goal the Democratie party, in proof that it is national in its sympathies and broad and firm in its purposes, must not suffer itself to be diverted by sectional appeals.