And of this there could be no better illustration than the tariff.
The tariff, under the policy of protection, was originally a means to
raise the rate of wages. It has been made a tool to increase the cost of
living. The wool schedule, professing to protect the wool-grower, is
found to result in sacrificing grower and consumer alike to one of the
most rapacious of trusts.
The cotton cloth schedule was increased in the face of the
uncontradicted public testimony of the manufacturers themselves that it
ought to remain unchanged.
The Steel interests by a trick secured an indefensible increase in the
tariff on structural steel.
The Sugar Trust stole from the Government like a petty thief, yet
Congress, by means of a dishonest schedule, continues to protect it in
bleeding the public.
At the very time the duties on manufactured rubber were being raised,
the leader of the Senate, in company with the Guggenheim Syndicate, was
organizing an international rubber trust, whose charter made it also a
holding company for the coal and copper deposits of the whole world.
For a dozen years the demand of the Nation for the Pure Food and Drug
bill was outweighed in Congress by the interests which asserted their
right to poison the people for a profit.
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