A Dishonest Claim

In his flamboyant speech attacking the Wilson bill Congressman Burrows declared that the passage of that measure - which places copper on the free list - would "ruin" the copper mining industryof the Upper Península. The Journal exposed the groundlessness of this claim at the time by citing the fact that the Calumet & Hecla company had declared a dividend of 20 per cent. on its watered stock, which represented its earnings for 1893, the year of the McKinley bilí panic. Now comes the Engineering and Mining Journal of New York and shows that the copper out put of this country in 1893 was 144,011 tons, and that of this product 80,387 tons were exported. The Engineering and Mining Journal also calis attention to the interesting fact that the domestic output has largely increased since two-thirds of the old duty was cut off by the McKinley act. It is nonsense to say that an industry which produces one-half of the world's output of copper and exports 55 per cent. of its product, or 80,000 tons, which is more than one-quarter of the world's entire annual supply, needs to be protected here at home against imports of foreign copper by a tariff duty. But this plea is a fair sample of a great many by which the defenders of McKinleyism have sought to prevent a revisión of the monopoly tariff.