Los Angeles Herald, Volume 36, Number 14, 1 May 1891 — THE AMERICAN PROTECTIVE TARIFF LEAGUE—THE PATH OF WISDOM. [ARTICLE]

THE AMERICAN PROTECTIVE TARIFF LEAGUE —THE PATH OF WISDOM.

The American Protective Tariff league may hold banquets and felicitate each other on the McKinley bill, its chairman, Bliss, may bloviate, and Levi P. Morton may go through the motions of a speech, and even the Napoleonic McKinley himself may sing the praises of high protection, and blush visibly when they associate his name with the governorship of Ohio, but all the same the party which has dared to outrage the aspirations of the American people by increasing the war tariff—or rather the post war tariff, which was higher than the war tariff itself—is doomed. The percentage of the American people who approve of this peculiar tariff performance is, in fact, quite small. Ninetenths of the people of the United States, at the time the McKinley bill was passed, had arrived at the conclusion that at last we had reached a stage at which a moderate and judicious reduction of import duties was a highly rightful as well as expedient thing. To run counter to such a legitimate aspiration of a whole people was not only to invite but to compel defeat.

No howl about free trade—an abstraction in which no sensible people tike stock —can deaden the popular sense of this great national injustice. The people asked for bread and they were given a stone.

Never was there a clearer way opened before a party than that which invites the Democracy to power and opportunities of usefulness on a national scale. All it has to do is to sit down upon the extremists in its own ranks, and success will'come almost without effort. The late lamented Samuel J. Randall wrote the platform on which Mr. Cleveland was elected in 1884. It reprobated Republican extravagance and said, in effect, that the tariff should be revised in accordance with the changed conditions following the war, and that the duties which were imposed by it should be so adjusted as to afford protection to the» American laborer, always keeping in mind the cardinal Democratic idea of a national government economically administered. Mr. Henry J. Watterson was allowed to write the national platform of 1888, on which Mr. Cleveland was defeated, and it subtly insinuated the ideas so dear to Watterson himself. The importance of a phrase was illustrated in the campaign of 1880, when General Winiield Scott Hancock, perhaps the most interesting man who ran for president for forty years prior to that date, wrote a letter in which he alluded to the tariff as a "local" question. It is almost universally conceded that if General Hancock had either left that letter unwritten, or had omitted that phrase, he would have beep elected. The true policy of the Democratic party is to nominate for president a man who embodies the just, conservative but decisive demand of the American people for tariff reform, and to so frame its national platform as to give to the American workingman the guarantee of a fair and honest protection against the pauper labor of Europe. If this is done, all the American Protective Tariff leagues in the world cannot save the Republican party from an overwhelming overthrow.

David Bennett Hill embodies that personality. So do others, and notably Mr. Cleveland. But Mr. Cleveland has been once defeated. Precisely what force should be accorded to this last point it is for the party to carefully consider. Perhaps the solution which will be finally favored will be to look outside of the Empire state for a candidate. But, if it shall finally be decided to take him from that state, the Democrats of New York should themselves be permitted to name the man.

That the heathen Chinee is no respecter of persons when it comes to a matter of business, is shown by a little incident that happened at .Monterey yesterday. President Harrison, in making a purchase from one of the almondeyed celestials, offered in payment a one-dollar silver certificate, which the heathen looked upon with distrust, and Ah Ben had to dig up one of Uncle Sam's big silver dollars. As the prurient Benjamin is wont to niako scriptural applications, especially when seconded by his pious postmaster-general, no doubt his mind recurred to the text, when accused of possessing spurious money: "Why do the heathen rage and the wicked imagine a vain thing?"

It is impossible to avoid recurring occasionally to the extraordinary figures of Mr. R. B. Porter's census, particularly to those which relate to the quantity of land set out in vegetables on this coast. The Hkkali) has referred heretofore to the statement made in a census bulletin that in the three states of California, Oregon and Washington there were only 590 acres in potatoes last year, and we drew attention to the unusual fertility of a soil which could produce such

quantities of this tuber from such a limited acreage, Los Angeles county alone having shipped six hundred carloads of that vegetable east during that period. Our proportion of this 690 acres must have been very prolific indeed to admit of such immense shipments. Another instance of the great proportions to which shipments of vegetables to the east from this county have swollen is found in the fact that an Italian gardener near the Ranchito shipped last year ninety carloads of cabbages and cauliflowers to Kansas City and other eastern points. For a section so cavalierly treatea by Mr. Porter this is doing reasonably well.

It is now the hope of ex-Senator Blair to be sent to Japan to fill the vacancy in the diplomatic service, caused by the death of Minister Swift. The question is will so progressive and enlightened a nation as the Mikado rules over, be willing to put up with China's leavings.