The Sugar Trust In Trouble

The Sugar Trust in Trouble.

The following editorial in the Sunday Chicago Tribune, in view of the action of the House of Representatives in voting to remove the differential on sugar is timely. This tax yields practically no revenue and is for the benefit of the sugar trust only. This tax places from $6,000,000 to $8,000,000 in the coffers of the sugar trust each year and this sum is abstracted directly from the pockets of all the people because sugar is an article of universal consumption. Its enactment originally was due entirely to the influence of the sugar trust on congress and particularly in the senate. The Tribune comments on the trouble the sugar trusts is in as follows:

The people of the West will shed no bitter tears over the vote of censure of the House of Representatives on the sugar trust. Nothing would bring greater happiness or joy to the people living away from New York than to have the duty removed on refined sugar. If it had not been for the previous alliance between the refiners and the beet sugar men that duty would have gone long ago.

The duty is one of the most indefensible items of the tariff schedules. It gives employment to a comparatively small number of men. It imposes a tax upon an article of universal consumption. It helps to accumulate vast fortunes at the expense of the people, while it brings little or no revenue. If the row between the republicans in the House of Representatives could have the result to put the sugar trust in the vocative all good citizens will rejoice.

We will not say - for it would not be parliamentary to say it - that when thieves fall out honest men come to their dues, but when the protection barons get to fisticuffs it is quite likely that justice will creep in under the cancas. If Congress were to do nothing else than to order the sugar trust to the rear it would live in the memory of all men forever.

The object lesson which Mr. Carnegie is teaching daily in the distribution of his 200 or more millions to libraries - all of which may be considered contributions to the conscience fund - and the lesson which is taught in the enormous fortunes piled up by the Havemeyers have not been without their effect upon the public mind. The steel barons, the sugar barons, and the world barons cannot postpone the day of reckoning much longer. The people have stood this sort of thing about long enough. The barons have been unwrapped of justice long enough. It is time they were brought to book and denied the advantage of levying tribute upon seventy-six or eighty millions of people for the benefit of "their own private pockets all the time."

Nobody denies to thrift, industry, and intelligence their due rewards, but the system of legislation which gives to a few men the right to despoil their fellow-citizens for their private. benefit cannot long endure. Its days are numbered. The sugar trust, the steel trust, and all the other trusts having rapacity for their watchword and dishonest legislation for their motive power cannot be tolerated by a free and independent people. This country cannot continually exist, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, half free and half slave. It will either be all one or all the other.