Where Protection Fails
WHERE PROTECTION FAILS.
High Duties on Steel Rails Do Not Prevent Lockouts and Strikes.
The country has never seen a time, perhaps, when there was such an abundance of evidence to show that protection cannot guarantee "steady work and high wages." That high tariff organ, The Boston Commercial Bulletin, furnishes the following two items, placing them together:
The rolling mill and pipe works at Scottdale, Pa., have been closed down indefinitely, as have been also the Charlotte furnace and coke works. About 10,000 men are out of employment in Scottdale alone. The Frick company has also shut down nearly 1,200 ovens.
The officials of the Illinois Steel company give the following reasons why the rolling mills at South Chicago, Ills., have been shut down. They say: "We are trying to settle a scale of wages with the men for the coming year, and want time to adjust it. We have been negotiating with the men for ten or fifteen days in regard to the wages, and I can't tell how long it will be before we arrange the entire scale. We will be obliged to make some reduction in wages, as the mills in the east have done so, and we want to meet the difference." The Illinois company's mils have generally been shut down at this season for repairs.
This statement that the wages of steel rail workers have been reduced is of interest in view of the facts brought out in the senate debate on the steel rail tariff last summer. A dispute having arisen as to the difference between the labor cost of making steel rails in America and in Europe, an inquiry on the subject was sent to Carroll D. Wright, United States labor commissioner. He reported that the labor cost in one ton of rails in Europe is $11.32 and in America $11.59, a difference of twenty-seven cents. In his letter to Senator Carlisle, moreover, Mr. Wright made the following striking statement:
"You will pardon me if I call your attention to one analytical feature which should be observed in the use of the analysis herewith forwarded. Labor cost in one ton of steel rails--I mean after all the materials have been assembled in the steel rail works and are ready to be subjected to the proper manipulations for the production of standard steel rails--should be less per ton relatively in this country than in Great Britain or on the continent, because American producers of standard steel rails dispense with at least one expensive process still adhered to by the foreigner producer; and furthermore, our materials, ore, etc., are purer than those used in most other places; so the quantity of ore, for instance, required for the production of a ton of standard steel rails is less in this country than in other places, and of course the labor required to produce one ton of steel rails is, so far as the purer materials are concerned, less here than abroad."
To cover the difference of twenty-seven cents a ton the two houses of our high protective congress put a duty of $13.44 a ton on steel rails. The price of rails is now $24 a ton in England and $28 in the United States. The American railmakers are now consolidated into only six or eight establishments, and they have a practical monopoly of the home market.
The shutdown of the Chicago concern is not the only evidence that the steel railmakers are not getting all that high protection promised. The great steel rail king of this country is Andrew Carnegie. The following interesting news item has recently been printed: "Five hundred employees in Carnegie's steel works at Bradford, Pa., have struck for the advance in wages which was promised before the McKinley bill was passed, but has since been indefinitely postponed."
Here is another from a Philadelphia paper:
The Edgar Thomson Steel works of Carnegie Brothers & Co. (limited) have again broken their phenomenal record at rail making. An output of 1,441 gross tons of rails in twenty-four hours is now the record, the best previous performance having been 1,417 tons. The best day's work by any other mill is said to be 1,312 tons.
The difference between the price in England and America, as above given, is $4 a ton, which would be $5,764 on Carnegie's one day's output. To insure Carnegie against the competition of the cheaper English rails the McKinleyites imposed a tariff of $13.44 a ton, which, on Carnegie's 1,441 tons, would amount to a tariff protection of $19,366.04.
How beautiful a thing it is for brethren to dwell together in unity and tax themselves to make millionaires!
The widow of the late Vice President Hendricks will read a paper before the National Council of Women, to meet in Washington on the 22d of February. The beautiful thought that a man and his wife are one receives conclusive demonstration through the public interest that always follows the widow of a prominent man.
Mrs. Richard A. Proctor, the astronomer's widow, proposes to perpetuate her husband's name by building an observatory on Mission heights, at San Diego, Cal. It is estimated that the building, with the telescope, will cost about $25,000, and the bulk of this sum Mrs. Proctor hopes to raise by lecturing.
The university at Geneva has just made an M. D. of the young Polish Countess Wanda von Szcawinska. Her graduation thesis was a remarkably learned paper concerning the eyes of crustaceous animals and the effect of light and darkness upon them. The Countess Wanda will practice in Poland.
The famous Ida Lewis, the Grace Darling of the United States, has received an invitation of the United States, has received an invitation to go upon the stage as the heroine in a life saving scene, before which her Puritanical soul recoiled. She still lives at the Newport lighthouse.
As a rule women are better conversationalists than men, being endowed with a readier talent for repartee, a quicker wit and a keener intuition of the fitness of things.
Patience is half-brother to laziness.