of France, Germany and Russia against the United States. It went to the table, in order to give Senator Aldrich an opportunity of making a statement concerning the subject.

This doubtless foreshadows a plan of accomplishing practical reciprocity without resort to the Kasson treaties. Senator Aldrich has introduced bills of the same effect. The plan would be as previously outlined in these despatches, to make the present tariff, with some slight modifications, the minimum schedule and then to construct a maximum schedule which would be in the nature of a penalty upon those nations which did not give us their best rates. Our present free list would remain free only on the minimum schedule. President McKinley is said to have become convinced that this was a better reciprocity plan than that afforded by the Kasson treaties. He did not, in his famous Buffalo speech, commit himself to the latter, but merely to reciprocal arrangements of some sort. Doubtless the next Republican tariff move will be in this direction.

had recent experience with the abuses of the power of private ownership. Yet when another resolution, seeking to commit the union to public ownership of coal mines and railways, was introduced, that also was voted down.

In certain quarters there is a prejudice against the miners' union because the mother tongue of many of its members is not English. Many well-meaning people attribute all the recent troubles in the anthracite region to the fact that so many of the miners are what such critics please to term "ignorant foreigners.'

It is a fact that the by-laws of the United Mine Workers are printed in eight different languages, and that among their members in the anthracite region alone twenty-eight dialects are spoken. Yet these so-called "ignorant foreigners" prove by the great majority of the men they elect to represent them in their national trade conventions that they are imbued with the true American spirit of individual liberty.

While politicians looking for issues to win on, and men of education and high culture, are tinkering with public ownership and other socialistic hobbies, these miners, struggling daily in the arena of life and exposed to all the abuses of a private monopoly, stand fast for the American ideal that every man shall be the architect of his own destiny.

IN respect to our "moral obligation" to Cuba, the New York Sun holds that, when the representatives of Cuba, after an interview with President McKinley, agreed to incorporate in the insular constitution the provisions embodied in the

so-called Platt Amendment, our government morally bound itself to admit Cuba's chief export staple to our markets under conditions decidedly more favorable than those fixed by the Dingley tariff. But the San Francisco Chronicle expresses this view: "Nothing is so important as to prevent the establishment of a precedent that the President has power to morally bind the nation in a matter solely within the jurisdiction of the President and Congress. It is a step toward the czarship. If the promise was made it should be repudiated at all hazards. If the Platt amendment was a consideration for the promise, Cuba should be released from her obligation."

A

AN OBJECT LESSON OF

PROTECTION.

[American Economist.] CHEERFUL news item is cur

rent to the effect that Cheney Bros., the South Manchester, Conn., silk manufacturers, have hardly finished their new velvet mills and the stone dam and power plant of the Hockanum River, and have barely started work on a new $100,000 high school, yet they are planning a $100,000 reservoir to supply water for the village. The new reservoir will be double the capacity of the old one. The expenditure of the Cheneys for expansion and improvements during the past two years will reach the million column. Among the prize winning products of the American policy the silk industry is pre-eminent. It builds whole villages, provides $100,000 high schools, constructs $100,000 water supply reservoirs for public use, and in two years employs in expansion and improve

ment a million dollars in labor and material. And yet there are people who say that this sort of thing is a crime, a robbery, a tax of the many for the benefit of the few, an unconstitutional invasion of the rights of the people to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market. With South Manchester and hundreds of similar object lessons before their eyes, there are people who say such things!

PROTECTION VITAL TO REPUBLICAN SUCCESS.

[Gunton's Magazine.]

NOTHING is clearer in the his

tory of politics in this country than that to surrender the doctrine of protection means defeat for

the Republican party. the Republican party. On the matter of foreign policy and certain other questions, it is not more in line with modern thought and American tradition than the Democratic party, and not so near to the popular heart. If the Republican party compromises or abandons protection, it will surrender the conditions of business prosperity and ought to lose the support of the industrial classes, and there is no risk in predicting it will lose the support of the laboring class. It has no real claim upon their confidence and support on any other ground than protection. Abandon that, and the wage-workers have every reason, both in popular sentiment and practical policy, to abandon the Republican party.

LONG before the coal strike commission began its investigation one thing seemed to have been so well ascertained that it was extremely difficult for anybody competent to estimate the value of evidence to doubt it, namely, that multifarious acts of lawlessness had been deliberately and ingeniously committed against men anxious to work for the wages which they could obtain. During the progress of the investigation the proofs relating to this point have become complete, and there are strong indications that Mr. Mitchell and his followers have now lost a considerable part of the public sympathy which they still retained when work in the mines was resumed.-New York Tribune.

EXTENDED comments on Governor Cummins's extraordinary extraordinary reciprocity platform and the arguments in its support would be superfluous. This ambitious politician is condemned out of his own mouth. He would injure if not destroy some American industries to build up others. He would decrease the production of some American industries and increase the sale in American markets of foreign products. All this is free trade and free trade of the worst kind. Never in all our experience have we read more unpatriotic economic opinions. Their author, who poses as a protectionist, convicts himself of being a dyed-in-the-wool free trader. The Republicans of Iowa owe it to themselves to disown this man who deliberately places them in a false position.Iron and Steel Bulletin.

AT the annual meeting of the American Protective Tariff League, in New York, January 15, the following officers were elected: Charles A. Moore, president; A. G. Paine, first vice-president; Joseph E. Thropp, second vice-president; Wilbur F. Wakeman, treasurer and general secretary. Executive committee: William Barbour, chairman, New Jersey; Frank W. Cheney, Connecticut; W. F. Draper, Massachusetts;

Franklin Murphy, New Jersey; David L. Einstein, New York. Board of Managers: For a period of three years, A. R. Wilson, New York; for a period of four years, J. F. Hanson, Georgia; Charles A. Moore, New York; Theodore Justice, Pennsylvania; William Barbour, New Jersey; Charles E. Coffin, Maryland. The treasurer's report showed receipts for the fiscal year of $38,432.27, and expenses of $36,388.91, leaving a balance on hand of $2,043.36.

CANADIAN advocates of free trade or a low tariff try to set the West against the East. They tell the farmers of the Northwest that protection is a policy intended solely for the benefit of the manufacturers in the Eastern provinces. The low tariff advocates of the United States used to tell the same story to the Western farmers. They said there were no manufacturing industries in the West and never could be. The protectionists, on the other hand, told the Western farmers that the ultimate effect of protection would be to cause the establishment of factories in the West as well as in the East. The farmers of the West gave their support to the party advocating high protection and they are now reaping the benefits of the policy.Industrial Canada.

SENATOR BURTON, Republican, of Kansas, looks for a bitter struggle within the ranks of the Republican party "between protection and reciprocity," as he states it. He says that the old idea of reciprocity was an exchange of noncompetitive products, but that the present idea is to use reciprocity as a means for trimming the protective tariff. He does not believe that the Republican party will consent to the trimming of its magnificent protective system, even if undertaken under any such fair sounding word as reciprocity, but he sees in the rising tide in the Northwest something which must be driven back and fought out of the Republican party.