44 THE FARMERS' LUMBER QUESTION. 



For seven months of the season of 1868, comparing highest price 

 with highest price, lumber could have been bought with fewer bush- 

 els of corn than during the season of 1855. In every month of the 

 season of 1869 such purchase required less corn than it did in 1856. 

 Only in 1857 a year of crisis, panic, revulsion, and collapse is 

 there any showing in favor of the Free Trade policy. While a heavy 

 decline took place in the prices of lumber in that year, the prices of 

 corn were maintained nearly as high as they had been in 1855. Had 

 the prices of lumber in 1857 been just what they were in 1856, the 

 purchasing power of corn for lumber would have been generally 

 less than it was in 1870. However, taking the results just as they 

 stand, the folly and delusion of the Free Trade assertions become 

 manifest ; the more so when we consider that, according to the 

 official reports of collectors of customs on our northern frontier, 

 the Canadians, who are the only exporters of common timber and 

 lumber to the United States, pay the duties out of their own pockets 

 for the privilege of our markets, the entry charges thus falling upon 

 foreigners, not upon American consumers, as is so often alleged. 

 If any credit is to be given to the positive knowledge of experts, 

 then the testimony of the collectors, almost daily brought into 

 contact with the facts of the case, should be conclusive against the 

 mere suppositions and theories of the Free Traders. 



To complete our comparison, we turn to the quotations of the 

 day. The Chicago Tribune gives 62} cents per bushel as the highest 

 price for No. 2 corn on Sept. 2, 1875, an ^ $14 as the highest price 

 by the cargo for boards and strips. At these rates 22.3108 bushels 

 of corn would pay for M feet of lumber figures much lower than 

 the general run of prices in 1855 and 1856. Nor should it be for- 

 gotten that the farmer not only raises corn with less cost to himself 

 per bushel than he did in those Free Trade years, on account of 

 much larger possession of labor-saving implements for the work of 

 agriculture ; and also that he realizes for his individual benefit a 

 greater percentage than then of the current prices of his corn in 

 Chicago, because he has transportation both cheaper and more ex- 

 tensive. In 1875, under a Protective tariff, fewer days' labor, 

 either by the farmer, the mechanic, or the manual day laborer, 

 will purchase a thousand feet of lumber. Such being unquestiona- 

 bly the case, the charge that consumers are oppressed and robbed 

 by the duties on lumber becomes the veriest trash of nonsense. 



