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Free Hides

Free Hides image
Parent Issue
Day
7
Month
March
Year
1902
Copyright
Public Domain
OCR Text

FREE HIDES.

In this country no man raises cattle for their hides. A tariff tax will not increase or diminish the domestic production by one hide. We import South American hides because we need them. Twenty-five per cent of the leather manufactured in this country is made from foreign hides and skins. The tariff upon them is simply and purely a tax, burdening the people and crippling our manufacturers in foreign markets.

Our American tanneries make the best leather in the world. They use not only the vast production of the hides in our own country, but last year imported hides and skins to the amount of $33,000,000, making of leather from the foreign hides and skins alone more than fifty millions.  The Englishman, the German, and other foreign manufacturers buy that American leather to take home and manufacture into shoes to compete with us, and, when they take it out of the country, our government pays them for doing it a bounty, alias rebate, of 99 per cent of the duty that may have been paid on the imported hide, amounting to from 5 to 10 per cent; and no way has yet been found for American manufacturers to get like treatment.  The result is that a considerable portion of the upper and much of the sole leather made in the United States from imported hides is sold to foreign manufactures at a lower price than we can buy it, by 5 to 10 per cent.

This hide duty is a serious handicap to the American shoe manufacturer in competition with the foreigner for the export trade.  As a revenue duty, it is a failure; for the rapidly increasing rebate, together with the cost of collection, will soon absorb the income, and the opportunities and temptation to fraud in regard to rebate are numerous.  It protects the foreign manufacturer against American, and nobody else.  It encourages the tanner of leather for export to buy foreign hides whenever they can be bought for nearly the same price as the domestic because he can get his profit in the rebate.