Wellington R. Burt

EDITOR ARGUS; The republicans nominee for president, and their principles are very harmonious in the matter of Chinese immigration and Chinese protective ideas, and the Courier has a great time defending them. 

In the last issue it tries to make its readers believe that the reason why foreigners seek this country and send for their friends, is because of its high tariff and dread the time when democratic free trade will reduce the working American's wages to the level of European wages. Perhaps the Courier will announce next week that large numbers of people are emigrating from free trade Great Britain to higher tariff Germany, Italy, or still higher Russia; it might as well invent statements pretending to be facts as inferences . But it actually has drawn on its imagination for European wages are higher than American, for a given amount of work done. This is acknowledged by all honest Republicans. The only advantage the American possesses is that he does more than double the amount of work, and gets a little larger weekly wages than the European. Because a high tariff exists along with comparative prosperity in America; therefore, American prosperity is because of the high tariff; argues the Courier. Because a cracked liberty bill exists in connection with American prosperity; therefore, our prosperity is because of the cracked liberty bill. The one is no more absurd than the other. What the republicans can't prove is the connection between the so-called protection and high wages. 

But how about the first foreigners who came to this country? Even the Courier ought to know that they left a highly protective country, and came to one without a custom house, and afterwards went to war rather than to submit to this so much praised protective business. 

The man who fastened lead on his heels when he wanted to jump high, was only a little more obtuse than the people who raised the cost of living by taxation, in order to raise wages and called it protection; he of the leaden heels came down quicker when he got up in the air, and the protected worker gets rid of his earnings quicker, but both have to exert themselves more for what they attained, than if they were in a natural condition of freedom. 

But if the Courier wants to know why the worker here gets more for his weeks work than his foreign brother, and therefore foreigners and this country a desirable place to live in; let him study political economy, and he will learn that it is because there are more opportunities for labor; and that there are more opportunities for labor because there is more land for labor to apply itself to. The Courier hinted something in this direction when it admitted in its issue of the 23rd of May that "it is more difficult for our sixty-two millions to find profitable employment in '88, than it was for thirty-five or thirty-six millions in '71. So the mighty tariff is not almighty, and sixty two millions find it more difficult to live, than thirty-six millions some years before, and that in a country the lowest estimate of whose resources is that it could sustain one-thousand million people. 

The great difficulty is that the republican policy has not only brought to life and fostered trusts, iniquitous fiscal systems, and protective monopolies, but, while lowering the purchasing power of the workingman's wages, has lessened materially his opportunities for remunerative labor, by allowing its natural resources such as timber, minerals, and land to be locked up in the hands of the most unrelenting tyrants known- commonly called land speculators. To these sources can be traced ninety-nine per cent of the poverty which all good people wish to abolish and the noble Cleveland has started out to revise that policy and the natives and foreigners who oppose him will be very obtuse.