Stand By The Home Market

Cheapness is the bait with which free trade attomeys seek to allure the great industrial classes to aid in destroying the home inarket by smothering it with importations froin abroad. Between this time and the next national election voters will have an opportunity of investigating this proposition and all that its fulfillment implies. Xo question can arise in connection with the election of law makers in the proper decisión of which our people have so niuch at stake. Everything that we eat as well as all that we wear is the product of labor. In providing many of these labor constitutes ninety per cent. of their cost, while the average will be in excess of three-fourths. Keeping this fact in mind, the man who depende upon his labor for his living needs no college professor to inforin him that wages should have to stand the greater share of any reduction in cost to consumers. There can be no escape from this alternative. Why can European countries produce some lines of goods cheaper than they can be made in the United States ? Not because they can procure the necessary raw materials required in their locture so much eheaper, but because labor can be had there for one-quarter to two-thirds the price paid here in the same lines. It requires cheap labor to produce cheap goods in Europe, and eheaper labor will be necessary in this country to produce eheaper goods here, except as this end may be secured through improveinents in machiuery equally open to both countries. It is from this point of view that the issue between Protection and free foreign trade assurnes an especial interest for the millions of industrial voters to whom free trade attorneys are now so earnestly appealing. If"the prices of edible producís are to be reduccd, the remuneration of the farmer must be lessened. On the other hand, if clothing and household goode are to be supplied eheaper, the work involved in their preparation must be done by somebody who will be content with lower wages than are now paid. If those now working in mines and shops and factories in the United States will not consent to this arrangement there will soon be little work for them to do, for free trade will place many lines of goods upon the shelves of our dealers for less money than the same goods can now be produced for under the scale of wages paid in all the leading industries by United States employers. All of which is well' known to the free trade attorneys, who are careful to keep the fact to themselves while drumming up votes for their favorite policy. Meantime those who are their proposed victims had best not close their eyes to facts patent to all who choose to look for them.