THE ISSUES OF THE PRESENT CAMPAIGN. THE TARIFF QUESTION. Shall we have Protection or Free Trade? Shall we permit foreign goods, made at starvation wages, to flood our markets, and close our workshops? Or shall we put a duty on such foreign goods, and thus “protect” our workingmen from low- wages, and squalid homes? What has Protection done for our country? INCREASED OUR WEALTH, So that our Nation is to-day the wonder of the world. Up to i860, the result of the labor and savings of the whole United States amounted to fourteen thousand million dollars ($14,000,- 000,000.) We had been for two hundred and fifty years earning and gathering this amount. Our present protective tariff was obtained under Abraham Lincoln, in 1861, as soon as the Republicans came into power. What has it done for us in the last twenty years? We have increased in wealth during that period nearly three times as much as in the whole two hundred and fifty years previous. Our wealth now is the enormous sum of forty- four thousand million dollars ($44,000,000,000.) Think of gaining property at the rate of one hundred and twenty-five million dollars a month! No wonder Mr. Gladstone said, “America is passing by us at a canter. There can hardly be a doubt, as between the America and the England of the future, that the daughter at some no very distant time, will, whether fairer or less fair, be unquestionably stronger than the mother.” Bismarck says that American prosperity “is mainly owing to its system of protective laws.” Mulhall says, “Every day that the sun rises upon the American people, it sees an addition of two and one-half millions to the accumulated wealth of the Republic, which is equal to one-third of the daily accumulations of mankind." PROTECTION HAS INCREASED OUR MANUFACTURES. From i860 to 1880 our manufacturing interests were trebled, increasing from one thousand eight hundred million dollars
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