Chance For The Sheep

That a protection rarirt on wool has utterly failed to accomplish its purpose to keep up the price of that article, has been proven beyond cavil. For years past our wool growers have been accustomed to go to congress and have the tariff rates on their product "fixed" to suit their desires, and yet in spite of all this the price of wool has steadily declined. Protectionist orators in advocating the wool schedule of the McKinley bill assured the farmers that under its beneficent provisions they would receive fifty cents per pound for their wool. How have these prophecies been fulfilled ? Wool declined from the day the measure became law, and now with the McKinley Act still in full and complete operation it brings but little more than a third of the promised price. The 'whole history of wool tariffs in this country is but a repetition of this experience. In view of these facts and the probable removal of the duty on wool the following statement of the case from the Courier Journal is to the point. "It used to be the caper, but it don't go now," runs the ditty. That's what's the matter with the wool men. This session of congress has provided them with a new sensation. Heretofore they have only had to ask for what they wanted and a Republican congress would promptly undertake to give it to them. And, although it has been almost literally an undertaking at the expense of the wool industry, the wool men have continued, in their fatuous worship of the protection fetich, to demand more and yet more of the thing that has so utterly failed to build them up. They demanded it as usual of the present congress. They plied the members with all the familiar statistics about the number of American sheep to be fleeced by free wool, of the number of people engaged in the woolgrowing business or affected by it, and of the enormous value of the industry that would be wholly and instantly destroyed by free wool. Congress has penetrated the sophistry of these claims at last and there is said to be no probability that the senate will attempt to change the free-wool schedule of the Wilson Bill as it carne from the House. The wool men may be blind to it, but the rest of the country sees very clearly the absurdity of an effort to support the price of wool against the competition of the finei pool and the immense yield of Australia. Wool has been steadily avored under the policy of proection. It has had whatever duties t wanted. Yet the price has not jeen increased. On the contrary it ïas declined and is now lower than ;ver, with the McKinley Bill in full iorce. Instead of the tariff checking imports of foreign wool, our imports have in ten years increased 124 per cent. while our domestic clip lias increased only a little over 7 per cent. Our consumption of wool increased 30 per cent. in the same ten years, and most ot the increase is in the consumption of foreign wool. We have given protection a fair chance to show what it could do for wool. It has failed to do what it promised. The old arguments have been discredited by experience. The senate will stand by the house, and the American sheep will have a chance to show what it can do when let alone.