History of Buchanan County, Iowa, with illustrations and biographical sketches, Part 129

Author: Williams bros., Cleveland, pub. [from old catalog]; Riddle, A. G. (Albert Gallatin), 1816-1902
Publication date: 1881
Publisher: Cleveland, Williams brothers
Number of Pages: 574

USA > Iowa > Buchanan County > History of Buchanan County, Iowa, with illustrations and biographical sketches > Part 129

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least burden of tax; that which represents the most should bear the greatest. The principle has generally prevailed in all our tariff laws relating to sugar.

As the law now stands, the duty is adjusted by classifying all sugars into seven grades. First, the lowest, crudest, and cheapest product, which comes in liquid form and is known as melada. On that we levy a specific duty equal to about forty per cent. ad valorem. The next grade of sugar is represented by the specimen I hold in my hand, and is known in the trade and to our law as Dutch standard number seven. Until a recent period all sugar was manufactured by the simple process of boiling down the cane-juice and clarifying the product by means of clay. By that process the purity and strength and hence the value of all crystallized sugar were exhibited by its color. Here, for example, [holding up a specimen], is a specimen of the lowest and crudest forms of crystallized sugar. Gentlemen will notice its dark color. It is

LIFE OF JAMES A. GARFIELD.

known and graded as Dutch standard number seven, and forms the second class in our present l.w. Here holding up another specimen ] is another specimen advanced higher, embodying more human labor, having less impurity in it, being advanced to a condition fit for use. It is known as Dutch standard number twenty.

Then follows a discussion of the details, in which many gentlemen of the house participated, in the all- togethery way of that body. He is now an opposition member of the ways and means, giving the ruling major- ity the benefits of his thorough mastery of the subject, as faithfully given to the country now, as when he guided the policies of the ruling party. He contrasts the pres- ent law with the Robbins bill, which sought to consoli- date the grades of sugar, and he again touches the broad field, which he always illuminates. Hear him:

Of the grades under No. 10, Dutch standard, there were received thirty-five million dollars out of thirty-seven million dollars; and of the grades under No. 7 I think about fourteen million dollars or fifteen million dollars. But from No. 10 down we get thirty-five millions of the thirty-seven millions collected on sugar. What effect this change will have on the revenues it is difficult to say ; but I have no doubt it will wholly prevent the importation of the lowest grades, will increase the price of sugar to the consumer and probably decrease the revenue. At all events it is a dangerous experiment to make in view of our pres- ent financial necessities.

But 1 desire to show how it will operate as a protective measure. 1 have already shown that by our present law sugar pays a duty of forty per cent., forty-five per cent., forty-six per cent., forty-nine per cent., sixty-eight per cent., etc., increasing in rate from the lower to the higher grades. Now note the effect of consolidating the lower grades, as proposed in the Robbins bill, and fixing the single rate of two and forty-one hundredths cents per pound. Melada, which is the lowest grade and now pays about forty per cent., will then pay eighty per cent. ad valorem. The second grade, (that is, sugar not above No. 7.) which now pays forty-five per cent., will then pay sixty-eight and one- half per cent. ad valorem. The next grade will pay sixty per cent., the next higher fifty-three per cent., the next higher forty-five per cent., and the next forty-two per cent. ad valorem.

In short, the Robbins bill is an inverted cone; the lowest grade of sugar must bear the highest rate of duty, and the highest grade will bear the lowest rate. In other words, the less labor there is in the im- ported product, the heavier the rate of tax upon it; and the more labor, foreign labor remember, there is in it, the least burden of tax will be put upon it.

The fundamental doctrine of protection is completely overturned and reversed by this bill. Yet it is by no means a free trade bill. It so happens that on the grades upon which the extreme high rate of duty is imposed, our friends from Louisiana will recieve a very considerably larger protective duty than the present law gives them. Hence the favor with which this proposition is received by gentlemen from that portion of the country.

Mr. Kelley. ] desire to say that there is such a noise coming from the galleries that we sitting here by the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Garfield] cannot hear what he is saying.

The Speaker pro tempore. Unless silence is observed in the galleries they will be cleared.

Mr. Garfield. Now, Mr. Speaker, I object to this bill, first, because it violates the fundamental principles of a just and equitable taxation; and I object to it in the second place because it puts a prohibitory duty upon the low-grade sugars that are refined by American skill, and

become the cheap sugar in common use among our people. It injures one portion of our industrial interests and gives an unreasonable pro- tection to another. It violates the canons of free trade on the one hand, and of protection on the other. It destroys absolutely the business of refining the cheap low-grade sugars, and will increase the cost of sugars most in use.

Let me illustrate still further. How is it that this day while I speak to you sugar is cheaper in the United States than it has ever been before? Because we have built up in this country a great industry, by which we are eclipsing the world as refiners of sugar. When the French manufacturers were at Philadelphia at our centennial, they were amazed to see that our sugar products there rivaled the best products of the Old World. They did not understand how it had been done. But it was the result of the same skill that has enabled America to surpass so many other countries in the recent exposition at Paris, and to carry off more medals in proportion to their exhibitors than any other five countries of the globe.

We were so successful in the refining of sugar that two years ago we were exporting seventy million pounds of our refined product. It was becoming and it will become, if we are allowed to carry on this in- dustry, a great element in our export trade. We are trading with Cuba and South America ; we are compelled to depend largely upon the tropics for our raw material. Is it not wise for us to be able to send back the refined product in exchange? Or shall we so legislate as to give an undue protection to our Louisiana planters, and drive the refining business out of the United States, allowing Cuba, England, and other countries to do our refining for us? Refined sugar we must have. The day is gone by when our people will eat the animals which abound in the raw unmanufactured sugars of the world. I say, there- fore, that this bill as drawn sins against the consumer and against the refining interest and unreasonably protects the producing interest of the country.

Let me illustrate a little further. In the Phillipine islands there is a class of people who have not enough intelligence and resources to take the first simple step toward clarifying sugar. They have no limestone on their islands; they cannot even furnish the lime to drop into the sugar vats and clarify the product just a little. But they take the juice of the cane and boil it down in the crudest, rudest, simplest way, by labor the cheapest and least skilful; and when they have reduced it to a black, cheap form of crystallized sugar, the dirtiest yet known, they put it up in sacks of one hundred and fifty pounds each, so that a man can carry it on his back to the landing to be shipped away. Our people are buying largely of that low grade of sugar from the Phillipine islands. We are buying it also from other countries where the produc- tion is of a low grade. This sugar we bring here, and by our skill and labor make it into a cheap, clean sugar for table use. Shall we now by law impose a prohibitory duty on all that trade and industry, an eighty per cent. rate or a sixty-five per cent. rate, keeping it all out and bring- ing in only the sugar that has been advanced by the higher and more intelligent processes of our nearer neighbors, thus cutting off the whole business of refining these low-grade sugars? I hope not.

1 know there is some controversy among the refiners themselves. Some of them-indeed, quite a number of most estimable gentlemen- say, "Let this bill pass and we can do a better refining business than is done now; we can refine the high-grade sugars." Now, I am glad to have those gentlemen work the higher grades of sugar and make a success of them; but I see no reason why our refineries should not also take the lowest grades of sugar, that which has the least value, the least labor in it, and bring it up by our American labor to a cheap, useful, merchantable form; and, therefore, I am unwilling, for the sake of helping one class of refiners, to destroy another. I do not believe it is necessary to destroy either.

I regret that the refiners do not unite on some common ground on

POLITICAL ECONOMY.

which all could have had a fair chance. But there seems to have been an internecine war among them; and with such a war I have no sympathy,

There is so much information as well as discussion in this admirable performance, that one leaves it with much regret.

From his great speech in reply to Rand. Tucker, of the month of June, 1878, I can only quote this copious passage :

Too much of our tariff discussion has been warped by narrow and sectional considerations. But when we base our action upon the con- ceded national importance of the great industries I have referred to, when we recognize the fact that artisans and their products are essen- tial to the well-being of our country, it follows that there is no dweller in the humblest cottage on our remotest frontier who has not a deep personal interest in the legislation that shall promote these great na- tional industries. Those arts that enable our Nation to rise in the scale of civilization bring their blessings to all, and patriotic citizens will cheerfully bear a fair share of the burden necessary to make their country great and self-sustaining. I will defend a tariff that is national in its aims, that protects and sustains those interests without which the Nation cannot become great and self-sustaining.

So important, in my view, is the ability of the Nation to manufact- ure all these articles necessary to arm, equip, and clothe our people, that if it could not be secured in any other way I would vote to pay money out of the Federal treasury to maintain government iron and steel, woolen and cotton mills, at whatever cost.

We are often surprised in an examination of the labors of congress, to find under what inexpressive heads lie hidden interesting, often most valuable, matter. Duty on sugar was not very suggestive. We have seen what it covered. Now we come upon hoop-iron, where I lin- ger only to say, that in Mr. Garfield's minority report of the ways and means, of May, ISSo, may be found sev- eral large cubes of very considerable specific gravity, and of great value in the markets of wisdom. It is a com- pact presentation of one part of the mighty subject of iron-of "pig-iron" also, in some of its important fea- tures. This is apparent when I quote from it the effect which would result from the change in the duties, which it most vigorously opposes:

I. It will destroy at least six millions of capital now invested in ma- chinery specially and exclusively applied to this particular branch of manufacture in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio, and other States.

II. It will turn out of employment not less than five thousand artis- ans and laborers who are now engaged in this special manufacture, and about ten thousand more who are engaged in the production of the material of which hoop-iron is made.

IlI. It will transfer the profits of these manufactures to the importers and to our rivals in foreign countries, and will not materially reduce the cost of the furnished products to American consumers. This is shown by the fact that since the importation of cut-hoops, under the treasury ruling of 1878, has been allowed at thirty-five per cent. the importers and foreign producers have fixed the prices at so small a fraction below the price at which the American manufacturer can produce them, that

only a very small advantage has accrued to the consumer; and the home production has become impossible.

IV. It is wholly out of harmony with the duties imposed by existing laws upon every other form of iron manufacture, as may be seen by examining the Revised Statutes (Boutwell's edition), pp. 464, et seg.

It violates two principles which have controlled nearly all our tariff legislation since the foundation of the government: First, that all im- ported articles which are alike in kind and in their relation to the wants and industries of the United States shall be treated alike in the customs laws. Second, that imported articles which comeinto competition with the industries of this country shall bear a rate of duty proportioned lo the amount of skill and labor employed in their production. 1

These extracts also show the steady, far-seeing devo tion of their author, to the vast and varied interests of the Republic, caring for each and all, with the same en- lightened solicitude and sagacity.

Immediately connected with the tariff, and interwoven with every fibre of the system of production in all forms, is the great subject of transit, the means of transporta- tion.

It falls so naturally into this chapter, that I may here place Mr. Garfield's views on our system of railroads, in their relations to commerce, the country generally, as set forth in his speech in the house of June, 1874. The danger of mistranslating is so great, and the reader has such a preference for Mr. Garfield's expression of his own thoughts that time and space must, as most men and things do, give place for him. The trouble is, there is such an exceeding much of him, that one is bewildered by his magnitude, which defies compression. He is not porous. In studying this speech, the place to begin is easily found, though I shall pass to a later paragraph. I cannot give it entire, nor can I find a place short of the end where I would stop, and one can't leave any of him out, at intermediate points.

We pass matter of pith and moment, and break in upon him here:

What have our people done for the locomotive, and what has it done for us? To the United States, with its vast territorial areas, the rail- road was a vital necessity.

Talleyrand once said to the first Napoleon that " the United States was a giant without bones." Since that time our gristle has been rap- idly hardening. Sixty-seven thousand miles of iron track is a tolerable skeleton, even for a giant. When this new power appeared, our peo- ple everywhere felt the necessity of setting it to work; and individuals, cities, States, and the Nation lavished their resources without stint to make a pathway for it. Fortunes were sunk under almost every mile of our earlier roads in the effort to capture and neutralize this new power. If the State did not head the subscription for a new road, it usually came to the rescue before the work was completed.

The lands given by the States and by the National government to aid in the construction of railroads reach an aggregate of nearly two hun- dred and fifty million acres -- a territory equal to nine times the area of Ohio. With these vast resources we have made paths for the steam giant; and to-day nearly a quarter of a million of our business and working men are in its immediate service. Such a power naturally attracts to its enterprises the brightest and strongest intellects. It

LIFE OF JAMES A. GARFIELD.

would be difficult to find in any other profession so large a proportion of men possessed of a high order of business ability as those who con - struet, manage and operate our railroads.

The American people have done much for the locomotive; and it has done much for them. We have already seen that it has greatly re- duced, if not wholly destroyed, the danger that the government will fall to pieces by its own weight. The railroad has not only brought our people and their industries together, but it has carried civilization into the wilderness, has built up States and Territories, which but for its power would have remained deserts for centuries to come. "Abroad and at home," as Mr. Adams tersely declares, "it has equally nation- alized people and cosmopolized nations." It has played a most im- protant part in the recent movement for the unification and preserva- tion of nations.

It enabled us to do what the old military science had pronounced im- possible, to conquer a revolted population of eleven millions, occupying a territory one-fifth as large as the continent of Europe. In an able essay on the railway system Mr. Charles F. Adams, jr., has pointed out some of the remarkable achievements of the railroad in our recent history. For example, a single railroad track enabled Sherman to maintain eighty thousand fighting men three hundred miles beyond his base of supplies. Another line, in the space of seven days, brought a reinforcement of two fully equipped army corps around a circuit of thirteen hundred miles, to strengthen an army at a threatened point, He calls attention to the still more striking fact that for ten years past, with fifteen hundred millions of our indebtedness abroad, an enormous debt at home, unparalleled public expenditures, and a depreciated paper currency, in defiance of all past experience, we have been stead- ily conquering our difficulties, have escaped the predicted collapse, and are promptly meeting our engagements; because, through energetic railroad development, the country has been producing real wealth, as no country has produced it before. Finally he sums up the case by de- claring that the locomotive " has dragged the country through its diffi- culties in spite of itself."

It is unnecessary to particularize further; for whether there be peace or war, society cannot exist in its present order without the railroad.

I have noticed briefly what society has done for the locomotive, and what it has done for society. Let us now inquire what it is doing and is likely to do to society.

The national constitution and the constitutions of most of the States were formed before the locomotive existed; and of course no special provisions were made for its control. Are our institutions strong enough to stand the shock and strain of this new force?

The editor of the Vation declares the simple truth when, in a recent issue, he says;

"The locomotive is coming in contact with the frame-work of our institutions. In this country of simple government the most powerful centralizing force which civilization has yet produced, must, within the next score of years, assume its relations to that political machinery which is to control and regulate it."

The railway problem would have been much easier of solution if its difficulties had been understood in the beginning. But we have waited until the child has become a giant. We attempted to mount a colum- biad on a carriage whose strength was only sufficient to stand the recoil of a twelve-pound shot. -

The danger to be apprehended does not arise from the railroad, merely, but from its combination with a piece of legal machinery known as a private corporation.

In discussing this theme we must not make an indiscriminate attack upon corporations. The corporation limited in its proper uses is one of the most valuable of the many useful creations of law. One class of corporations has played a most important and conspicuous part in securing the liberties of mankind. It was the municipal corporations

-the free cities and chartered-that preserved and developed the spirit of freedom during the darkness of the Middle Ages, and powerfully aided in the overthrow of the feudal system The charters of London and of the lesser cities and towns of England made the most effective resistance to the tyranny of Charles II., and the judicial savagery of Jeffreys. The spirit of the free town and the chartered colony taught our own fathers how to win their independence. The New England township was the political unit which formed the basis of most of our States.

Since the dawn of history, the great thoroughfares have belonged to the people, have been known as the king's highways or the public high- ways, and have been open to the free use of all, on payment of a small, uniform tax or toll to keep them in repair. But now the most perfect and by far the most important roads known to mankind are owned and managed as private property by a comparatively small number of private citizens.

In all its uses, the railroad is the most public of all our roads; and in all the objects to which its work relates, the railway corporation is as public as any organization can be. But in the start it was labeled a private corporation; and, so far as its legal status is concerned, it is now grouped with eleemosynary institutions and private charities, and en- joys similar immunities and exemptions. It remains to be seen how long the community will suffer itself to be the victim of an abstract definition.

It will be readily conceded that a corporation is strictly and really private when it is authorized to carry on such a business as a private citizen may carry on. But when the State has delegated to a corpora- tion the sovereign right of eminent domain, the right to take from the private citizen, without his consent, a portion of his real estate, to build its structure across farm, garden, and lawn, into and through, over or under, the blocks, squares, streets, churches, and dwellings of incorporated cities and towns, across navigable rivers, and over and along public highways, it requires a stretch of the common imagination and much refinement and subtlety of the law to maintain the old fiction that an organization is not a public corporation.

In the famous Dartmouth college case of 1819 it was decided by the supreme court of the United States that the charter of Dartmouth col- lege is a contract between the State and the corporation, which the legislature cannot alter without the consent of the corporation; and that any such alteration is void, being in conflict with that clause of the constitution of the United States which forbids a State to make any law impairing the obligation of contracts.

This decision has stood for more than half a century as a monument of judicial learning and the great safeguard of vested rights. But Chief Justice Marshall pronounced this opinion ten years before the steam railway was born; and it is clear he did not contemplate the class of corporations that have since come into being. But year by year the doctrine of that case has been extended to the whole class of private corporations, including railroad and telegraph companies. But few of the States in their early charters to railroads reserved any effectual con" trol of the operations of the corporations they created. In many instances, like that of the Illinois Central charter, the right to amend was not reserved. In most States each legislature has narrowed and abridged the powers of its successors, and enlarged the powers of the corporations; and these by the strong grip of the law, and in the name of private property and vested rights, hold fast all they have received. By these means not only the corporations but the vast railroad and telegraph systems have virtually passed from the control of the State,

It is painfully evident from the experience of the last few years that the efforts of the States to regulate their railroads have amounted to but little more than feeble annoyances. In many cases the corporations have treated such efforts as impertinent intermeddling, and have brushed away legislative restrictions as easily as Gulliver broke the cords with which the Lilliputians attempted to bind him.

5 x

GARFIELD AS A FINANCIER.

1 do not say that this tax is excessive ; perhaps it is not ; but its rate is determined, and the amount levied and collected, not by the author- ity of the State, but by private parties whose chief concern is to serve their own interests.

We have seen that the transportation tax is the amount paid to the companies for their investment. Ilow much they shall invest, where, and under what limitations it shall be invested, has been wholly left to the companies themselves ; but whether they have invested their capital wisely or unwisely, however much the business may be overdone, the investors must be paid for the use of their capital, and that payment is made by the community.

In most of the States railroads may be built in unlimited numbers wherever five or ten men, who incorporate themselves under the general law, may choose to build then,

This has probably been allowed in the belief that free competition in building and operating roads would produce economy in the manage- ment and cheapness in transportation.

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History of Buchanan County, Iowa, with illustrations and biographical sketches, Part 129

Author: Williams bros., Cleveland, pub. [from old catalog]; Riddle, A. G. (Albert Gallatin), 1816-1902 Publication date: 1881 Publisher: Cleveland, Williams brothers Number of Pages: 574

Author: Williams bros., Cleveland, pub. [from old catalog]; Riddle, A. G. (Albert Gallatin), 1816-1902
Publication date: 1881
Publisher: Cleveland, Williams brothers
Number of Pages: 574