82 been kept? Far from it. On the contrary, the Democrats in Congress have endorsed the Morrison bill, with its horizontal reduction of twenty’per c^nt., and fifty thousand of Mr. Hurd’s speeches declaring that wool should be on the free list, have been scattered. The farmers will not be deceived a second time. IRON. But for protection, we should have no iron industry worth mentioning. We could not have competed with the starvation wages of England. When “ low duties,” or “a tariff for revenue only” was adopted in 1832, by Democrats, the fires were put out of all the fifty-eight blast furnaces in this country, save one 1 Again, in 1846, the Democrats, who are always helping England, and should go there to live, if they enjoy her rates of wages, obtained low tariff. What was the result? Says Professor Bowen, of Harvard College, “Within three years, in Pennsylvania alone, one hundred and sixty-seven out of three hundred and four blast furnaces were stopped, and the remainder produced only one-half as much as before. Two hundred establishments for the manufacture of wrought iron reduced the product one-third.” By this wild piece of Democratic statesmanship, 40,000 laborers were thrown out of employment. Each time the duty was lowered, England flooded our markets with iron, not necessarily cheap, for as soon as she found little competition, she raised her prices. Within seven years after the Republican protection of 1861, the iron product ran up to over one million six hundred thousand tons. In 1883 it was over five million tons (5,146,972.) Our iron mines in i860 produced 900,000 tons of ore, but protection has brought the annual yield to nearly nine times that amount, or 8,000,000 tons. Do we want English-Democratic free trade again? Let the votes in November make answer. PROTECTION AIDS THE FARMER. One of the favorite arguments of the free trader is that the farmer is losing money while the manufacturer is getting rich—• that the farmer is p'ayinghigh prices, being “robbed,” and receiving no good in return. What is the true condition of things ? The number of farms has doubled in the past twenty years—there are now four millions. The amount of acreage has nearly doubled, much faster than the increase of population. The production of corn has increased 109 per cent.; wheat 165 per
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