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group, there can be no sane division of opinion upon the subject.
The Negro is not a manufacturer in the United States of any article
protected by the tariff; he therefore receives no benefit as a manufac-
turer; but more strange than all, and be it said to the shame of the
protected manufacturers of the North, East and West, that of the
ten millions of Negroes in this country, there are not five thousand who
are employed in any capacity in the highly protected industries of
the country of their birth, and therefore as a race they are receiving
none of the benefits of the vaunted high wages said to be paid to labor
by those industries.

But the Negro is a consumer, and an extensive consumer of every
article produced by those pets of the Republican administrations, and I
say without fear of contradiction that the Negro wears better clothes,
eats better food, drinks better wine and smokes better tobacco, in pro-
portion to the amount of compensation received for his labor, than
any other class of people in these United States. Every one knows
this to be a fact; the shopkeepers and tradesmen of every city and
hamlet know it to be a fact. Then why, in the name of all that has a
touch of common sense, should the colored people be so blind to every
sense of duty to themselves, to their families and to their race as to
favor with voice or votes such an iniquitous system of taxation for the
benefit of those industries, which compel them to stand and deliver, in
many instances, double the price they would otherwise have to pay for
the most ordinary necessities of life?

HOW THE LABORER IS PAID

The real price of labor is the amount which you can buy of the
necessaries of life with the day's wage. Vour prosperity is not
measured by the price of the day's labor, but by what you have left
of that price after you have bought the necessaries for yourself and
your family for that day. The money you receive for a day's labor is
only a means devised by men to avoid the inconvenience of paying you
for a day's labor in kind. The object of work on the part of every man
is to obtain the necessaries of life for himself and his family. If, in-
stead of receiving two or three dollars a day, you were to receive a
pair of shoes or a coat, you would not be deceived as to the wages
of that day's labor. The manufacturer may increase the amount of
your daily wage, but so long as the Trusts increase the price of the
necessaries of life more rapidly than he increases your wages, you are
really receiving a lower wage than before.

INDIRECT TAXATION HEAVY UPON THE POOR

Our method of indirect taxation by the imposition of duties bears
with great severity upon the poor. It is a tax on what men eat and
drink and wear, rather than on what they possess, and the average
laboring man, whose entire property will not perhaps sell for $1,000
pays about as much tax as the wealthier man worth a hundred times
more. Alexander Hamilton said: "Protection to be available must
be got out of the belly and back of the great mass of people." Richard
Cobden, in 1841, said of the Corn Law:

"The family of a nobleman paid to the bread tax about one half
penny of every hundred pounds of his income, while the effect of the
tax on the family of the laboring man was not less than twenty per
cent." Every particle of clothing on your body, from the boots on
your feet to the hat upon your head, without one single exception,

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costs you from fifty to one hundred and fifty per cent. more than it
would without the tariff. The Trusts sit by your fire and your table,
tax every piece of glass, cutlery, and pottery in your house, make you
pay tribute upon every piece of wool, cotton, and furniture in your
home, and rob you steadily, day in and day out, by their excessive
prices. Remember that this increased price does not go to sustain the
government. More than nineteen-twentieths of it, at least, goes into the
treasury of the Trusts. Even now, in ten thousand villages and cities all
over this land, your wives are in the markets, with your wages in their
hands, buying a few comforts in the shape of cotton or woolen goods
sugar, dress goods, carpets, glassware, pottery, cutlery, or furniture,
and paying therefor from fifty to two hundred per cent. over the
value of the imported article without duty, about every penny of
which goes into the treasury of the Trusts.

This method of taxation, this graft, masquerading as protection,
has the effect of extorting from every man and woman a sum of money
which belongs by right to the purchaser. Nothing but the fact of its
skilful indirection has kept the people from rising in protest and
sweeping from power the representatives who have made this possible
The duties are mysteriously incorporated in the price. The added
price adds not a cent to the value, not a mill to the government, but
forever swells the total of the profits of the mannfacturer

An interesting table of occupations in relation to the tariff (as
compiled by Edward Atkinson) is as follows;

Employed in gainful occupations:
Males ........................................................23,754,205
Females ..................................................... 5,319.912
................................................................ 29,074,117

AGRICULTURE
Subject to foreign competition ....................... 200,000
Free from foreign competition ...................10,181,765

PROFESSIONAL SERVICE
Free from foreign competition .....................1,258,739

DOMESTIC AND PERSONAL SERVICE
Free from foreign competition .................... 5,580,657

TRADE AND TRANSPORTATION
Free from foreign competition .................... 4,766,964

MANUFACTUERS, MECHANIC ARTS AND MINING
Subject to urgent foreign competition .............400,000
Subject in part to urgent foreign competition ..400,000
Free from foreign competition.....................6,285,992

A review of these figures should readily convince colored men of
intelligence that their welfare would be much enhanced if the duties
on life's necessities were entirely abolished.

We are living in an age of evolution; an evolution that is fast
changing this glorious land of freedom into a land of industrial slavery;
a slavery that will eventually be harder for the masses of this country
to bear than the chattel slavery from which the Negroes of this country
have recently emerged. And one of the most marked instances of
this evolution which is going on is the almost absolate absorption of a
once great and powerful political party by the great Trusts of the
country; by the almost complete control of all governmental func-
tions by this same great and concentrated infinence. When we take
up our daily paper and read therein that a bare majority of one in our
Supreme Court decides that the combined wealth of the Vanderbilts,

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