Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/42

32 actually lessened the demand for native wool, with the effect to lower its price. Apart from this, it is a notorious fact that the price of wool does not ever bear the relation it ought to, on protection theories, to the rate of the duty. I once traveled with a wool-buyer, years ago, when a lower tariff than the present one prevailed, when he bought wool of the farmers, to speculate on, and gave one dollar a pound for it, which was the market price. Does any wool-farmer expect to get over half that now? A very intelligent farmer, on whose hundreds of acres the wool product has been a feature for sixty or seventy years—a man who holds general "protective" opinions—told me frankly that the tariff, touching wool, gave no enhancement of price. He confessed that he had got very high prices for wool under a low tariff, and very low prices under a high one.

As this wool-bribe is a menace to direct and equal laws, and is the price offered the farmers for support of legislation absolutely hostile to them, suppose we look a little further on its effects. Here are some facts for farmers to think over. Twenty-one years ago there were thirty-eight million sheep in this country east of the Mississippi River. We have "protected" them all this time, and there ought fairly to be now, under a decent ratio of growth, at least fifty million. Are there this number? On the contrary, there are now only eighteen million one hundred thousand. And they and the wool itself have greatly declined in price. It is said that, since 1875, there has been an increase in the number of sheep of about thirty per cent. But this is accounted for by the extension of farms in our new Territories. The large flocks there are chiefly owned by aliens or absentees, and even these flocks, with their peculiar local advantages, are declining in value. Not a fraction of this increase in number can be due to the tariff, and no benefit comes from it to the growers of wool in the older States.

To supplement these facts properly, read the following answers to questions propounded by the "Massachusetts United Questions Club," given by ex-Congressman John E. Russell:

Question 4 is as follows: "Does the tax on foreign wool imported put the price of that up so much that, although the price of American wool is lower than it ever was before, yet our domestic woolen manufacturers are put at a great disadvantage with foreign manufacturers, so that we can not make goods at so low a cost or of so good a quality, except such kinds of goods as can he made wholly of domestic wool?" Mr. Russell replies that the specific duties on woolen cloths and flannels put the American manufacturer of fine goods at a sad disadvantage, confining him to the home market, and that the high price he is compelled to charge for goods narrows and restricts his market. Mr. Russell continues: "Makers of the fine flannels that are sold in competition with the best English and French goods import South American wool that has been sent to France and there cleansed of dirt and burs, and scoured. The duty on this wool is thirty cents a pound. There is no wool raised in this country that will answer the same