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About The Columbia sentinel. (Harlem, Ga.) 1882-1924 | View Entire Issue (May 8, 1922)
Vo#. 40 NOTES FROM THE UNITED STATES SENATE. During the session of. the so-called Peace Conference, all the world was told that Japan had agreed to evacuate Shantung, the Island of Sakalin, and Siberia. We were told that Japaii had agreed to cancel the more objectionable numbers of the famous (and infamous) twenty-one points. Secretary Hughes, President Harding, and Senators Lodge and Underwood no doubt believed that Japan would do what she had promised and what was right, but is it not strange that these gentlemen did not remem¬ ber the perfidy with which Japan had treated Korea, and the barbarities which she had practiced upon those weak and inoffensive people. American Elihu Root had acted as - rep¬ resentative when Japan was allowed, in lieu of a war indemnity, to sei'e upon the country which had been her ally during the war with China. The sinister figure of Elihu Rfot was prominent St the Peace Conference, and no¬ body seems to know why he was selected by President Harding, when Ids record is one of unrelieved blackness. Why did not the Americans move tlfat the Conference take a recess, as to the Four Pow¬ er Pact, until Japan could get out of Siberia, Sakalin, and Shantung? ' A recess for thirty days could not have hurt any of the nations represented at the peace table. ' Japan had gone into Siberia with her troops at the same time that ours went there, and she had given a positive pledge that she would withdraw her troops when our country withdrew ours. President Wilson had no right whatever to send American troops against Russia. Congress had not declared war upon Rus¬ sia, and Russia had lost millions of her sol- Ddn’t Vote YourseJf And Your Children, Into Hopeless Bondage. I he eminently respectable and entirely patriotic automobile associations are flooding the State of Georgia with pamphlets, booklets, and propagandists, in favor of the preposter¬ ous proposition to mortgage the people of this generation, and the next, to the extekit of sev¬ enty-five million dollars. One of these booklets is entitled “Georgia Good Roads Primer.,” • On the very first page of this innocent lit¬ tle primer, I find this sub-headline, “It costs TOU NOTHING.” “Question: Will the proposed bond issue of $75,000,000 increase the present rate ot taxation ? “Answer: No. “Question: Where will the State get the money to pay the interest and to retire the bonds? “Answer: From the automobile license fee, and the gasoline tax.” “Good The chaps who got out this Roads Primer,” must have taken you for a lot of boobies. These Chamber of Commerce people look down upon the common man with contempt. They tMnk that a man who does not be ! long to some sucli exclusive, arisocratic insti¬ tution as the Capital City Club of Atlanta, has not any sense. They believe that they can fool him while he is looking on, just as the slight-of-hand man does at three-card monte. Do you not see how they contradict them¬ selves within less than .a dozen lines of their own booklet? First, they say that you can incur a debt of seventy-five million dollars without going ' into debt; and that the interest charge on this enormous issue of bonds can be met by taxa¬ tion, without an increase of your taxes. In the very next breath, the booklet toils you that they will meet both tho interest and the principal by increasing the tax on automo¬ biles and upon gasoline. How many of our people do not use gas oline? How many of them have no automobile, and have no expectation of owning one, within tho next thirty years? To increase the tax on gasoline, increases your taxes, and those of your relatives, neigh¬ bors and friends. 1 To increase the tax on automobiles either hits you, or hits your relatives, pr hits your • m ur im j HMiHr ■m & s Price $2.00 Per Year diers, and had saved Paris from being taken by the Germans in August, .1914, at a when we were admonished by Mr. Wilson t< be neutral, both in deed and in thought. • The American soldiers were withdrawn from Siberia more than a year ago, but has never withdrawn hers, but is reenforcing the army already in Siberia. She has not opened the door of hope to Koi’ea, nor has she taken her hands off the internal affairs of -China. She is exploiting all the resources of the vast.Island of Sakalin, and she has demanded of China upwards of $100,000,000. for the rail¬ road which was built by Chinese labor, and which belongs to China, because China owns the land upon which the railroad is built. It is a well-settled principle of the law that improvements made upon rented proper¬ ty or leased property without the consent of the owner, become a part of the land, and a part of the property of the owner. Therefore this railroad, built by the Ger¬ mans without the consent of China, the lessor, now becomes the property of China, since the German lease was forcibly set aside by Japan, ,Japan has named an impossible price, for the purpose of retaining her hold upon Shan¬ tung, a province which contains more people than are to be found in France, or England, or in Japan proper. Japan is promoting civil war in China, and she has declared her purpose of using the natural resources of China for herself, in case she needs them in the future. Of course, she ivill need them, and by sow¬ ing discord between the various governors of the provinces of China, she will eventually conquer, when China divides against her. The Secretary of War, and the Command cr-in-Cbief of the Armies of the United States went before the Senate Committee on Military neighbors, or hits your friends. Is there any escape from this conclusion? Do these high-handed tax-dodgers of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce and of the Capital City Club, believe that they cau build interstate routes for the joy-riding tourists, who go from Detroit to Tampa, and from Kan¬ sas City to Miami, or from Chicago to Thoru asville! Do they believe that they can make you build immensely expensive roads for their big limousines, and their palaces on wheels, with¬ out increasing your taxes? Use your common sense, for God’s sake! Don’t vote yourselves into hopeless bond age. Don’t give your children and your grand¬ children a reason for reproaching you for the vote you cast, when these ravenous financiers demand of you a radical change in the organic law made for you by Robert Toombs, Charles J. Jenkins, the Judges Reese, Nelson Tift, and that grand old North Georgian, Holcomb, in 1877. Whv do you want to revolutionize the fun¬ damental law of your State, in order to give these automobile manufacturers a stupendous increase of their excess profits? Protect your* children and your grand¬ children from the inroads of these insatiable monopolists, and grafters. The State is like the individual: it cannot incur debt, bearing an interest, without taxing somebody to pay both the interest and the debt. Debts do not automatically pay them¬ selves.' This bond issue will increase the annual taxes by nearly three and a half million dol¬ lars, and in the making of. this bond issue, there will be an immense outlay for linen pa per, for the best kind of engraving, for press work, for brokerage and for lawyers’ fees. The amount of money thus thrown to the sharks who are always gnawing at the Treasu¬ ry, would be more than enough to fill every school house in the State with free text books for your children. What an unnatural legacy to the offspring of your own loins it would be, if you refuse tc give frpe books to those children, at the same time that you went to the ballot box and voted to give those ravenous wolves of Wall Street and of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. (Continued on Page Four.}, - - ■ Thomson, Georgia, Monday, May 8, 19 22. Affairs, one day last week, to strongly insist a, large standing anny. Secretary Weeks said that, while we had no quarrel with any nation on earth, there was “a state of irritability” in foreign lands, and that this state of irritability made it neees sary for our Government to maintain an army of at least one hundred and fifty thousand men. General Pershing took the same position, and said that an army of at least that size was required for the maintenance of our national dignity, and so forth. * President Harding has demanded that the army be kept at ono hundred and sixty-three thousand, This is a queer commentary Upon the boosted triumphs of the Peace Conference. There was no subject upon which our fore¬ fathers were more cordial in agreement than the danger of a standing army in time ol peace. Constitutional The debates in the Conven¬ tion show that several plans were suggested to - prevent a military policy, that had been fa¬ tal to liberty iu the Old World, and which, as our forefathers believed, would be fatal to it anywhere and everywhere. The plan finally adopted and written into the Constitution provides that no military ap¬ propriation shall be for a greater term than two years. Inasmuch as members of the House ol Representatives have to face their constitu¬ encies, and give an acocunt of their steward¬ ship every two years, it was believed that the House would always keep down military ap¬ propriations. Constitution is becom¬ That clause of-the ing i dead letter. Our statesmen seem to have forgotten the The Evolution OF The United States ’ Tariff System. .. When the most extravagant of Bourbon Kings, Louis XIV., squandered so much money on his? buildings and his armies that the French taxpayer was driven almost to desper¬ ation, the King’s great Minister, CoLbert, re¬ sorted io the expedient of placing an import duty upon foreign goods. This had the effect of stimulating French manufacturers and, at the same time, opening up new sources of revenue which appeared to come out of the foreigner. In fact, these duties were paid by the French men and women who had money enough to buy foreign goods. In nearly every case these goods were lux¬ uries, which the wealthy could afford to use and which the poor did not have to buy in onder to support life. This was the beginning of the modern tariff systems. When Frederick the Great had won his final victories in the Seven Years War, wMch he precipitated by seizing the Austrian prov¬ ince of Silesia, his country was well-nigh exhausted in every way. Prussia had no manufactures, and it would have been impossible for her to have competed with the established manufactures of Great Britain, and France. Frederick, there¬ fore, imposed a tariff duty upon goods of for¬ eign make entering his kingdom. It was in this manner that the factories of Prussia were supported, since they, were freed from outsid^ competition. In the, beginning, of our independent 'had na¬ tional life, when General Washington beei made our first President, the demand for pro tection first made by the shoemakers' of New England, as against the well-established shoe factories of England, could present an almost irresistahle plea‘for temporary protection. Under the tyrannical laws which England imposed upon us during Colonial days, there could not be any American manufactures. Tlie mother country would not even allow an American to make nails, articles of prime necessity; nor could American wool be woven in o cloth. The raw materials of America had to he sent to England, to be made into the finished pvt luct, shipped back into America, and sold at prices dictated from England. Consequently, having no manufactures, a: d s-L.i g the need of all such articles as be classed as necessaries fi£ life, and issued "Weekly struggles which took place between kings and pecp'e over this very matter of the standing a rmy. It became the settled policy of the British Parliament to keep a firm hold on the purse strings, in order that the power of purse and sword should not be united in the hands of the king. Charles I. lost his head because of his at¬ tempt to over-ride the House of Commons and the people of England, on this matter of the standing army. In like manner, his son, James II., lost his throne, because of the illegal methods by which he* tried to raise money to support a standing army iu time of peace. . Those who have read about these memo ruble contests between king and the people should refresh their memories by reading the account given by Macaulay in his History of England, and an account given in the larger history 1 y Green. it is high time that our editors, public speakers, and leaders of thought, were real¬ izing that the real purpose "of such men as those who now control both the old parties, is to do in this country what Charles I. and James 11. tried to do iu England. The Kaiser’s standing army was the cause of the ruin of the German Empire, which Bismarck had built up with such toil, and by the shedding of so much blood. Regardless of the warnings of the past, we are treading in the same footsteps which caused every other republic to go down under the iron heel of militarism. In one part of Washington’s Farewell Ad¬ dress, you will find where he mournfully pre^ diets that our Republic may gradually depart from the simple ways of democracy, and will embark upon those imperial policies which led to their doom the republics of antiquity. which would have been cut off from us in time of war, Alexander Hamilton made Ms cele¬ brated Report on Manufactures, and convinced President Washington that a protective policy should be adopted in behalf of industries which were infants, in fact as well as in name, at that time. Neither Mr. Hamilton nor President Wash¬ ington dreamed that the protective policy would be perpetuated, and used, as it is now used, to virtually establish au embargo against foreign goods, where these goods compete with American cloth, shoes, hats, iron and steel products, sugar, building materials, and hun¬ dreds of other necessities of life. r-’ T ' During the long fight which Henry Clay made for the American System, as he called it, he never once went to the extreme of saying that the tariff system should be permanent and prohibitory. In his day, and in my own early days, it was the claim of the advocates of the tariff that the shutting out of foreign competition would be the result of creating competition among American producers, within the tariff wall, and that this competiton in the home market would always keep prices down to a reasonable profit upon the capital invested. Nobody seemed to realize that if we shut out foreign competition the logical result would be, that the home manufacturers would agree among themselves what they would charge, and that the unprotected American consumers would be the victims that were plundered by the monopolists. It has worked out just that way. There are five hundred American trusts that control the prices of the necessaries of life. TJie head men of these vast combinations of capital dictate the terms upon which one hundred million Americans must live. It is because the millionaires who control these huge combinations of capital are not satisfied with reasonable profits, but want from one hundred per cent, to one thousand per cent, dividends, that the high cost of living maintains itself in spite of all that has been said and done against it. l We are told that American manufacturers should be allowed to charge high prices on their products, because foreign labor is so much cheaper than ours. .(.Continued on Peso fovr.}. No 30
