Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/83

Rh But Mr. Wanamaker does not speak alone. I have before me a number of circulars announcing with emphasis to the trade that glass, china, axes, saws, all sorts of hardware, zinc goods, guns, powder, lead, musical instruments, strings, buttons, flannels, gloves—especially the cheaper kind, hosiery, upholstery goods, woolens, clothing, dress goods, carpets and what not are sharply rising in price, and that the trade must be prepared for it. The list will soon, if it does not already, contain every article on which duties are raised; and rich and poor, especially the wage-earners, the men of small incomes, will have carefully to revise their household budgets. They will find that to-day, with the funds at their disposal, they must content themselves with 15 to 25 per cent. less of the necessaries and comforts of life than before the McKinley tariff made McKinley prices. The rich, of course, can manage to get on; but the poor will keenly feel how truly Mr. Wanamaker spoke, when he said that “the manufacturers have their way, and we shall have to pay much more.”

The poor man will be less inclined to believe to-day than he was a month ago that precious argument of the protectionists, that the tariff tax is mostly, if not altogether, borne by the foreign manufacturer and the importer. Nor will the poor man be now so much impressed by the other argument, that by the operation of our high tariff a multitude of industrial products have grown cheaper, in the face of the fact that the general cheapening of industrial products has been owing to the wonderful progress of discovery and invention, and the astonishing improvements in the means and methods of production, and the further fact, now clearer than before, that our high-tariff policy, by artificially raising prices, serves only to deprive the American people of their fair share of the benefit arising from that progress.

And what has the protectionist to say by way of