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VOL IV. NO. 14. NEBRASKA CITY EBRMA , OCTOBER 10,1901. . . . /4'"S , 5 CENTS.
PUBLISHED WEEKLY.
OFFICES : OVERLAND THEATRE BLOCK.
J. STERLING MORTON , EDITOR.
A JOURNAL DEVOTED TO THE DISCUSSION
OF POLITICAL , ECONOMIC AND SOCIOLOGICAL
QUESTIONS.
CIRCULATION THIS WEEK , 13,873 COPIES.
TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION.
One dollar and a half per year in advance ,
postpaid to any part of the United States or
Canada. Remittances made payable to The
Morton Printing Company.
Address , THE CONSERVATIVE , Nebraska
City , Nebraska.
Advertising rates made known upon appli
cation.
Entered at the postofflce at Nebraska City ,
Neb. , as Second Class matter , July 29 , 1898.
The demind for
SPECIAL special legislation
LEGISLATION , by various indus
tries in the United
States is constantly increasing. This is
a logical sequence to the teachings of
the high-tariff-for-protecting-the-infant
industries. At a recent meeting , in the
booming city of Sioux Falls , the alleged
National Congress of Farmers demon
strated that some of its members were
quite as familiar with the methods of
milking the public treasury , as they
were with manipulating the dugs of
meek-eyed cows.
An erudite and able paper was pre
sented to that assemblage of tough-
muscled and sweat-
Farming exuding plowmen
the Farmers. in favor of a ship
subsidy of ten mil
lions a year. The author a gentleman
of vast and world-wide experience in
manufacture and commerce declared
that we Americans must have a line of
steamships to cany away the surplus
products of our industrial plants and
our farms or be smothered in our own
grease extinguished under an avalanche
of cereals , fats and fruits.
The next day a learned professor in
formed the National Congress of farm
ers , which repre-
Irrigation. souted by delega
tion less than half
the states and territories of the republic ,
that the arid plains of the west contain
ing more than six millions of acres of
rainless area ought to be and could be
and must be aqueonsly fertilized by
millions of dollars appropriated by the
general government. Thus the peculiar
proclivity for farming the farmers de
velops one hour a tremendous solicitude
as to how we shall get a foreign market
for the bread and meat which we our
selves can never eat and the next a
paroxysmal patriotism for plowing more
farmsproducing more surplus and more
effectually drowning in their own fat
ness the bucolic citizens of the United
States by irrigation to be paid for by
the people themselves out of the Na
tional Treasury.
The advocates of a tariff for protec
tion which shuts out foreign products
and shuts in our
Domesticated. own , which might
have gone out in
exchange for those , have come now to
attempt to domesticate their fal
lacies and apply them here in the
United States. Thus they seek to tear
down one industry and build up an
other by congressional legislation. Thus
they invoke the power to tax which
was vested , by the Constitution , in the
federal government for the sole purpose
of raising revenue , to Mil competition
in a business which is profitable when
it has a monopoly of the market , with
out rivals and is free from competitive
antagonisms. The pre-named congress
at Sioux Falls which convened on Octo
ber 1st , 1901 , was especially favored by
a gentleman who believes in protection ,
in having two editions of the last
speech made by President McKiuley on
September 5th , 1901 , at Buffalo , New
York , reprinted and generously dis
tributed among its members and spec
tators. But the admonitions of that
speech did not seemingly quite pene
trate the false membrane of protection
which seems to have completely en
veloped their brains in some of the
more virulent cases.
President MoKiuley said in that last
speech of his :
* * * "What we produce beyond
our domestic consumption must have a
vent abroad. * * * We must not
repose in fancied security thinking that
we can forever sell everything and buy
little or nothing. * * * The period
of exolnsiveness is past. * * * "
These extracts are enough to indicate
that the late President MoKiuley had
been going through similar mental
processes to those which in January ,
1846 , were confessed and portrayed by
Sir Robert Peel in a speech before the
British Parliament. In that declaration
Peel said : "I will not withold the
homage which is duo to the progress of
reason and truth , by denying that my
opinions on the subject of Protection
have undergone a change. * * * It
may be supposed that there is something -
thing humiliating in making such ad
missions ; I feel no such humiliation.
* * * I should feel humiliated if ,
having modified or changed my opinion ,
I declined to acknowledge the change ,
for fear of incurring the imputation of
inconsistency. "
The parallel between Sir Robert Peel
in 1846 and the President of the United
States in 1901 as to mental conclusions
and moral bravery is strikingly strong.
And yet there are citizens of this repub
lic who ignore the logic and wisdom of
the economics of both Peel and Mc-
Kinley. Thus they seek enactments by
the Congress of the United States
which shall crush one industry to build
up another.
The dairymen of the country are or
ganized , disciplined and drilled as an
army of importun-
Butter. ates to solicit the
enactment of a law
which shall tax ten cents a pound all
oleomargarine or butteriue colored yel
low. Congress gets echoes of their
prayers and petitions from every section
of the country on every day of the year.
These very unselfish butter makers ,
butter manipulators , butter renovators
and butter protectors have an abiding
and irrepressible solicitude for the di
gestion of the American people. They
are so philanthropically anxious as to
the microbes of dyspepsia which may
possibly develop in the human stomach
which has secreted in its marvelous
laboratory of assimilation a few glob
ules of oleomargarine that they main
tain an elegant assortment of able
lobbyists at Washington to bring about
laws that will at one and the same time
protect American digestion from the
terrible assaults of any and all butter
substitutes and the patriotic churn-
workers of the dairies from all competi
tive assaults , on the fields of exchange ,
by the diabolism of butterine and oleo-
margarine. There has never been a
more determined effort to domesticate
the tariff for protection. There has
never been a more beautiful and lov
able example in all the history of manu
facture and commerce of perfectly disiu-
terested benevolence. The butter
makers ask this enormous and destroy
ing tax on all butter substitutes of ten
cents a pound if they are colored yellow.
The butter men ask for a patent , a sole
right , a monopoly , a trust on the color
of yellow "the June tint" of yellow
ik.
