THE FARMERS' WOOL AND IRON QUESTIONS. 31 



CHAPTER VII. 

 THE FARMERS' WOOL AND IRON QUESTIONS. 



THE great scarecrow which Free Traders have set up in the agri- 

 cultural districts of the West, to drive farmers away from the 

 policy of Protective tariffs, is the assertion that such policy forces 

 them to give more of their produce in exchange for less of manu- 

 factured articles than they did under partial Free Trade. They 

 are told, with oracular dogmatism, that every ounce of iron or 

 steel that is contained in their plows, hoes, axes, trace-chains, 

 nails, harvesters, reapers, and other implements is heavily taxed 

 by high import duties, merely in order to feed fat the insatiate 

 greed of a parcel of manufacturing monopolists; and that every 

 tiller of the soil is their dupe and victim. Farmers are also told 

 that every yard of woolen cloth brought from abroad is burdened 

 with weighty entry charges, which largely enhance the cost to con- 

 sumers, the advance in price being added to the domestic fabrics, 

 as well as to the foreign, so that wool is reduced in purchasing 

 power, with serious loss and damage to the wool-grower. We 

 shall prove that there is not an atom of truth in these allegations. 

 Let us see how many pounds of wool have been required, under 

 partial Free Trade and under Protection, to pay for a ton of com- 

 mon English bar iron in this country. This contrast will supply 

 an infallible test for all the points in controversy. As we have no 

 quotations at Chicago for iron during the years before the war, we 

 will resort to the great market of New York City. The Finance 

 Reports of the United States for the years 1863, 1873, and l8 74 

 contain monthly quotations of staple articles in that mart of trade 

 for fifty consecutive years, including the two commodities we have 

 chosen to illustrate our position. We compare the six Free Trade 

 years, 1853-58, with the six Protective years, 1869-74, pitting 



