RAILROAD IRON THE TARIFF TRANSPORTATION. 



CHAPTER XIX. 



RAILROAD IRON THE TARIFF TRANSPORTATION. 



LENORA, Fillmore County, Minn., April 8, 1875. 

 To the Editor of the Inter- Ocean : 



Is it a fact that " Cheap Transportation " by means of road-bed, rails, and 

 rolling stock, swollen in cost by a high tariff, is an impossible thing ? Could 

 you publish tables under partial Free Trade and Protective tariff bearing on 

 this point? J. M. WHEAT. 



THE main question put by our correspondent was very point- 

 edly and emphatically answered by Governor Carpenter, of 

 Iowa, in his inaugural address, delivered Jan. 27, 1874, as follows: 



Nor is it the tariff that burdens the farmer. An ingenious writer has shown, 

 by estimating with great care and by unmistakable mathematical value and ex- 

 actness, that if you take the New York Central Railroad and assume that it ex- 

 tends from Chicago to New York, double-track the whole distance, laid with iron 

 weighing sixty-five pounds to the yard, and then assume that this iron represents 

 only half of the road's consumption of iron, and further assume that the original 

 cost of all this iron was increased by the entire tariff which would have been 

 collected on each ton had it been imported when he has granted all this and 

 assumed all this, he demonstrates by actual computation, taking the cost of trans- 

 port of one thousand and twenty-one million tons of freight, the amount this 

 road carried one mile last year, that the exact additional charge on a bushel of 

 wheat from Chicago to New York would be one cent and one hundred and 

 eighty-eight thousandths of a cent on account of the tariff. The tariff will never 

 ruin the Western farmer. 



With such a state of facts, it is plain that road-bed, rails and 

 rolling-stock can not be so swollen in cost by the present tariff as to 

 make cheap transportation an impossible thing. 



An indirect answer to our correspondent's question, with an ar- 

 gumentative force much stronger, is found in a memorial to Con- 

 gress some years ago, signed by more than ninety officers and man- 

 agers of leading railroads in all parts of the country, from Boston 

 to Charleston, Milwaukee and St. Louis. These roads were and 



