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OUR AMERICAN LETTER.
TARIFF REFORM AND AN INCOME
TAX
MEN AND MONEY IDLE.
'SOMETHING WILL DROP.'
THE NEGRO VOICE AND THE NUDE
FIGURE.
STEALING ELECTRICITY.
JTroni oar own Correspondent. I
New York, February 3, 1S94.
American politics jnst at present are a
hopeless puzzle, even to those who have made
it the baBineES of a long life to watch them.
The currents of action no sooner run appa
rently in one plain direction than they turn
away to an altogether different point of the
compass. Thus, at the last election, the
people eleoted a majority of their representa
tives bo reform the tariff, but it proved that
oeiore snas ooma oe aone sub ouver qaesuoa,
which no one had deemed to be of any special
importance, clamored imperatively for settle
ment. By a great effort the silver question
was taken out of the path — at least,
temporarily — and again the chip of
state was headed for tariff reform,
and a date was even fixed for a final vote upon
it in the Lower House. Bat hardly had the
discussion fairly begun than again a new object
loomed up, swallowed the tariff bodily, and
put itself in its place. To reform the tariff
means of course to reduce duties, and if
duties are reduced the revenues will be
less, and if the revenues are less, a com
pensatory tax must be found to make good the
deficiency. And here came the chance of the
men who bad led in the fight for silver and
bad been defeated, and this time they
have been successful. They had wanted
«ilver( because, living in (he states of the
south end west, they owed money to the men
of *fte states of the seaboard, and it was
cheaper to pay debts in plentiful silver than
in scarce gold. Bat, thanks to the President,
the creditors won. If, however, the debtors
are relieved from paying a good part of the
taxes, and that part of the taxes is then made
a burden upon the creditors, the same grand
' object of helping the man who needs help at
the expense of the rich man who oan do with
out it will' be in a measure achieved. The
creditors almost exclusively belong to a small
class of persons, 85,000 in number, living in
the older states, who have incomes of 4,000
^/tilavia a. VMM. *L¥if1 i-irtam.Tv3e Whv viftti tirierA.
fore make good the deEciency in the
revenue by an {income tax upon these
85,000 fortunate capitalists? But evidently
a man who has more than 4,000 dollars a year
may be very willing to reform the tariff and
yet may object very strongly to making good
the cost of the reformation out of his own
pocket. Such is the unhappy case of the tariff
reformers of the eastern and middle states,
but they had only 44 votes in the House, and
in spite of .their eelfisb. protests the rest of the
tariff reformers passed yesterday a Tariff
. Reform Bill with this obnoxious income tax
? attachment fastened on to it with -hooks of
steeL The Eea York fftrald and a good
many other very eameeo tariil reform
papers gnash their teeth at the odious
-changeling, and denounce it in the same
- breath as 'monarchical' and 'socialis-
tic' Mix judiciously the ideas repre
sented by those two adjectives into a
oonimon whole, and you will really have be
dreadioL * But the soul of the protectionist is
glad, and he remembers that the November
elections arc now only nine months distant.
As soon as it is engrossed — for even in
America we still preserve that absurd custom
of writing by hand instead of printing an
amended printed Bill for transmission either
to the Upper House ot to the President— the
Sill will go to the Senate and its real troubles
will begin. There, even more than in the
House, the fight will eddy about the income tax
provisions, and it is quite possible that toe in
come tax men will agree to almost aoy change
in the duties if only they can save this
one pet form of class taxation. And then,
after a long season, perhaps extending over
months, of squabbling, the Bill will come back
to the House, and a conference committee will
be appointed, which, if it agrees at all, will
agree only upon a compromise measure that
will be satisfactory to nobody. No doubt in
Australia these things are differently and
. better managed. But meanwhile, how fares
that part of the Amerioan people whose bread
and batter is in a greater or lees degree depen
dent upon the tariff? Need it be answered,
very badly? Factories, mills, foundries,
furnaces, mines, and also the importing in
terests as well, are all, as we say colloquially,
. 'hanging on by the eyelids,3' starting
up on short time and then knocking
off again, perplexed, tmoerfcain, looking out
hour after hour for the dawn that never
comes. A million and a half of people are
now absolutely unemployed, and in the banks
and the trust and insurance companies hun
dreds of millions of dollars are lying idle,
no one caring to borrow and use them even at
the most tempting rates. The New York
bankB have a reserve now of 47 per cent., and
all business men know from this how close
must be the approach to absolute stagnation.
But luckily nearly half of the people live by
the soil, and the fundamental industries of
raising corn and pork and cotton bring to
the producers, if not great riches, at least a
. secure and comfortable livelihood. Pocket
money may be scarcer and the country taverns
less vigorous than in times past, but there is still
a warm fire on the hearth and plenty of
plain food in the larder. Scores of thousands
of mechanics and clerks of American birth
have taken refuge in the family homestead,
and await there, not over-uatientlv. a recall to
the brisker life of the city. It is upon the
foreign immigrants that the burden presses
most heavily, and hundreds of thousands of
these in the cities are now living from hand
to mouth or upon charity. The relief com
mittees have shown great wisdom, and there is
Bcaroely any indiscriminate almsgiving. The
best form of help probably has been the
establishment of stores and eating-houses and
lodging-houses, where food and shelter are
Bold at absolute cost. At one store a large loaf
? day old is sold for a cent, and 6 oz. of tea or
coffee or 20 lb. of coal for 5 cents. For 5 cents,
too, a man can get an ample meal of
meat stew, bread and coffee, all of good
quality and decently served. Pawnshops,
where money is lent at 6 per cent, per annum
to the fair value of the pledge, have now also
been added to the list of these semi-charitable
agencies. But it seed not be said that this is
hardly the kind of civilisation which the
signers of the Declaration of Independence
had in mind, nor could the present strain be
-endured indefinitely. The conservative forces
of the country are very great, for in addition
to the well-divided holdings of land there are
soil in the savings banks of the State of New
York alone 750,000,000 dollars; but of course
each month drags down a new host of
bankrupted and deserving persons, and these
people nave no intention either of starving
to death or living for any protracted period
by miserable shifts. Either there must be a
change within a very few months or the patience
of the people will be exhausted. Tariff reform
may, in the abstract, be worth, all this suffer
ing, bub the idle money in the banks and the
idle hands and brains must be made mutually
useful to each other or — to speak Americaneae
— ' something wiU drop.'
It ia worth noting that in the tariff debate
five membem voted for an Amanrlmanh in miuo
all revenue on the George plan by a tax upon
land values. The main speech in ite favor was
made by a rich ironmaster named Tom John
eon, and it was listened to with respectful
attention. This is a sign of a marveUoos
change in the times whose importance can
hardly be exaggerated, for only two years ago
the very mention of '*Peoeres8 and Poverty ' or
'Looking Backward' was hailed in the House
with shouts of derision. The practical
objection to the adoption of the George plan
in America is that taxes are already levied
npon land and improvements combined, and
judging from each data it seems to most people
that the actual value of the 'unearned incre
ment' would fall far short of being sufficient
to compensate for the abolition of all other
taxes. This, of course, does not make oat a
defence of the present system of lumping the
improvements and the value of the land into a
combined sum for the purposes of assessment
without regard to the relative value of each,
but U it be really tone that tbe mere bare rent
of the land itself is a mochsmaller sum than is
generally supposed, the George economy would
- wee a corresponding share of its attractiveness.
Here in the eastern Btates the rent value of
arable land, apart from the interest of the
money spent in bringing it under cultivation
and in fencing it, is certainly just at present
less than nothing, for the railroads have
brought it into competition with tbe richer
land of the western prairies, and the usual
process of value increasing as population
growa more dense has been curiously reversed.
The population has grown actually denser, it
is true, but not relatively, for tbe railroads
have brought within cheap reach of that popu
lation faster. than it has increased a greater
area of new and more fertile land. All farm
lands in the older states, therefore, have
Bonk in value steadily daring the past
generation, and it is only ia rare
oases that they would bring now what it cost
|o reclaim them, while in New England many
farms, though still as fertile as they ever were,
have been entirely abandoned.
People are doing a -gieat deal of thinking,
t - too, as *» the relative 'value of borne and
£ foreign trade. Mulhill eays, probably with
- truth, that tbe American people produce one
,\; third of aU the goods manufactured in the
''?:. . 'entire world, and from the BtatiBtios of con
B.v . , eumption i»; .would seem that 70,000,000
££' Americans consume as mnoh as 200,000,000
-:-.???. Snriifthmeniwotildda, If this be true where
?; :?' ' isuwfon^mad^thatcoaldottnperiuieaB
for the loss of our own ? This at any rate is the
main contention of the American protectionist.
But 97 per cent, of all our exchanges are ab
present among ourselves, leaving ouly 3 per
cent, for our entire foreign trade, both ons and
in. This is not so very wonderful, however,
when one follows oat the commercial life of a
bushel of corn. In Nebraska it sells for 25
cents, and if shipped to Liverpool tbe freight
to the seaboard costs 15 cents more, and tbere
at 40 ceats its American history ends. But if
it stays at home it is perhaps shipped to an
Illinois distillery, the railroad getting & cents
freight, and the dealers one cent each at each
end. Bought at 35 cents, the distiller makes
it into 4i gallons of spirits. He pays Uncle
Sam 4 dollars 5 cents tax, but sells it for D
dollers 12 cents, getting 72 cents for his
trouble in distilling and selling. The waste
grain is fed to cattle, realising 10 cents, and
the spirits, having been rectified at
a cost oi zo cents, are soui «u »
retailer, who having watered them up to
Eeven or eight gallons, or even more, sells
them at 10 cents a drink for about 20 dollars,
of which probably 3 dollars may be charged as
the proportionate cost of the license granted
by the city to eell by the small measure. This
is of course an exceptional case, but in the
bank exchanges the domestic* bushel would
loom up fifty times larger than the busiiel
doomed to exile abroad.
All musical people have heard of Dvorak,
but only a few of them perhaps know thas
since he has come to America he has gone just
a little 'daft' in regard to the capabilities oi
tbe negro voice and the possibilities of the so
called negro melodies. 'So-ualled' is a fact
and not a sneer, for these melodies have been
nearly all written by white Americans, among
at Home,' stands deservedly pre-eminent
But though written by white men they were
undoubtedly suggested by airs heard on tb*
plantations, nor can anyone sing tliem witb
the same magic pathos as the negro. Who
that has once heard it can ever forget 'Way
down on tbe Swanee River' as rendered by a
chorus of ragged roueeabouts on a Mississippi
steamboat? The mist on the river, the weird
drooping of the boughs of tbe trees, the watery
moon, and thrilling through it all the rich,
soft, 6ad voices I There is a nameless, in
describable charm in it all — and Dvorak feels
it even more than we who are to the manner
born. He has taken pains to elaborate what
may be called the standard American negro
melodies, and anyone who can get his scores
will assuredly make a hit in any
English - speaking country where the
negro music is familiar. He has also
gratuitously for many months conducted a
class of colored beys and girls, and is has
beeoms the dream of his life to produce a
colored lyric artist of the first rank. He says
— 'In volume their (the negro) voice is
superior to that of the whites, and in timbre
it is equal, if not superior. Colored people
have certainly every requisite to make good
opera singers. Their fondness of show, their
vanity, love of color, and mimicry make them
natural actors.'
A fad of a specially unpleasing nature has
just been deservedly attacked by tbe Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. At
the Chicago Fair one of the Florida exhibitors
made a great deal of money by Belling little
lizards — American chameleons — he'd by a
chain to a shawl vux. Of course the chaining
was a cruelty, bus nobody protested, for most
of the people who went to Chicago dirt not know
enough to understand that even a lizard had
nerves, and so a smart dealer ordered tens of
tb.ousb.uds of them tor the fall season in 2srew
York. The poor creatures were bred by
wholesale for the market, and for weeks all
snowboards by the hundred, while tbe '' fakirs'
hawked them through tbe leading streetu at
'cut' rates. Women wore them m their ball
dresses, just as a few years ago they wore the
flashing beetles that are caugnt in Mexico and
in Cuba. Here and there some unusually
thoughtful human being discovered that the
lizarde needed food, and m default of flies could
be nourished with sugar and water, bun in
most cases the poor wretches were allowed to
starve to death. For six weeks there was a
veritable slaughter of the innocents, and then
at last, Biniult&neously in iiewton and JNew
York, theie was a crusade or buiaauitariaus
against the Dew fashion, and offenders
were dragged into court and made
to answer for their crimes. The courts,
however, have held that in each cap.e
exact and particular proof of cruelty
must be adduoed, and, of course, under these
conditions repression is rather a matter ot
moral suasion than of peremptory mandate.
Luckily, however, huoi&n vanity is hardly so
serious a factor in this matter as in regard to
the wearing of bird plumage, and so the evil
may persist lees obstinately.
Hawaii has been hitherto pushed into the
background by the tariff discussion, and tbe
Administration has no doubt ardently wished
tbat something else would occur in our foreign
affairs that would make this troublesome affair
a ' back number.' Of coi-n=e tbe attempt to
restore the Queen has utterly failed, urid Mr.
Cleveland is covered with ridicule. He held
back to the latest possible moment the
correspondence tbat showed that Mrs.
Doiniuis bad actually contemplated seriously
the beheading of the provisional chiefs,
the confiscation of their property, and the
exile of their families. That a person of this
kind should have dreamed that such a policy
was under any circumstances feasible is, of
course, more than enough to end torever all
hopes of her return to power, and she will
now, no doubt, find a good deal of trouble in
induoing her projected victims to yield her a
pension. The majority in Congress will pro
bably try to establish a Bet-oft between the
crime of the Harrison Government in helping
the insurgents to oust the Queen and the
crime of the Cleveland Government ia
attempting to help the Queen to oust the in
surgents, but the sympathy of the people is
with the insurgents, and that sympathy
would in case ot need take a very positive
form. If real danger threatened, volunteers
by the thousand would make their way ta the
islands, &ad everyone now knows that tbe
' provisionals' are men of the true Puri
tan stock with plenty of tight in
them. Their weak point is obviously that
they are the ' children of missionaries,' and
that they have continued to get into their own
possession, Yaakee-faahion, five-sixths of all
the property on the islands. Bus ic is only
iair to add that nearly all this property is of
their own creation, and tbe natives are even
off than before they were converted. Ulti
mately the islands will certainly be annexed,
for that is the only logical end to toe situation.
At present, even though a protectorate id
rejected, notice is formally given by both the
political parties that 'any interference with
the islands will be regarded by the United
States as an unfriendly act,9 and this evi
dently imposes upon this country tne respon
sibility of maintaining order. Tbe United
States therefore, while swearing she will
never protect, protects.
There has been a bitter discussion in the
Senate Quadra-Centennial Committee as to
the artistic availability of the nude human
figure. Mr. St. Gaudens, a Kew Yorker, who
did much for the artistic success of tho
Chicago Fail-, designed a shamelessly naked
figure for one side of the World's Fair modal,
and the committee at once protested that it
ought to be draped. Mr. St. Gaudens then
rallied to his eupport the cognoscenti of the
country, and for a little while even the
and were almost persuaded to let the figure
wander forth in the world just as he was ; but
many of tbe New England prize-winners de
clared that they would never consent to accept
so hideously improper a medal, and then
the churches came to their aid, and St.
Gaudens has now been warned tbat he
must either drape his figure or abandon
tbe work to a less prurient hand.
Of course, the real trouble is that both eid-» of
the controversy have carried things to a vicious
extreme. The Puritans won't tolerate even a
goddess of liberty in a low-necked dress,
while the St. Gaudens party avail themselves
of tbe 'honi soit' argument to put forth to
the world what even to liberal-minded people
looks like an obtrusive and offensive lack of
decent covering. At any rate, a medal for
general circulation is hardly a fit medium for
she diffusion of recondite anatomical infor
mation.
Compressed air has found yet another useful
industrial application in the cleaning of rail
road cars. At a pressure of 50 lb. to the
square inch it is carried through a flexible
rubber hose with a small nojale in exactly
the same way as though it were a stream
of water, and it cleanses cushions and
hangings with really admirable thoroughness.
In a fraction of the time required by the usual
method of beating with a stick and then brush
ing it makes duet and even the lighter grease
spots disappear as though by magic, and the
fabric regains its pristine freshness without
losing its nap. The same method will now bo
used in a thousand other similar directions,
and it is quite conceivable that before long a
man may be able so call in a store on his way
down town and have his clothes cleaned and
aired in a few minutes, as the old joke goes,
*? while he waits for five cents.' One shrewd
.Kew xoMEasaaesman, by the way, is znakwga
good dnal of money by soleing and heeling
shoes ''while you wait' at bed-rock prices.
The customers poll off their shoes in the
inner precincts of the store, and sit in
their stockings and read the papers
while the work is done by a dozen hands
stationed in the show-window before an
admiring audience of passers-by. Perhaps
the work is none too well executed, but what
does that matter? The New Yorker, eager to
try all things, likes to be able to show his re
habilitated foot-gear to his shopmates and
tell them about it, and npon the grand prin
ciple tbat we are all but children of a larger
growth, this cobbler by wholesale is amassing
a fortune. Amy one of us who oan devise a
new thing shall, like him, also reap an ex
ceeding great reward.
But of course this is only true so long as one
has wit and honesty enough to keep well
within the law. At the recent bicycle show
in the Madison-Bquare Garden, an English
exhibitor got himself in trouble by misapplied
ingenuity. All the other bicycles, though
bright and beautiful, were still and silent,
while his were surrounded by eager spectators
because, slightly raised above the floor, the
wheels whirled round aa though human
muscles were treading the pedals. Nobody
cared to find out how ne managed is, until the
superintendent of the electric lighting hap-'
pened to pass by, and, in order to solve a sud
denly awakened doubt, climbed up to the top of
the booth, dragged oil eome gay decorations,
and disclosed to view a wire neatly connecting
the light wires with an eiecfrio motor. The
exhibitor thereupon lost his temper and
punched him in the eye, and was forthwith
arrested and held on the double charge of
larceny aud assault. The assault charge held
good, and was settled with a fine, but the
larceny case has yet to be tried, and promises
to give the court no little trouble. Is an elecrrio
currentachattel ? And unless you catch a man
in tbe act of connecting the wire how can he
be convicttd of a crime? And is it
petty or grand larceny ? What is the market
value of a stream of harnessed lightnicg 1 The
whole matter, however, is already really even
now in the highest court of the United states
on an appeal from a deciuion made in Buffalo
that a current transmitted across tbe border
frcm Canada is dutiable. But, of course,
sooner or later the law will be amended eo that
it will ba a mere routine duty for a district
attorney to draw up an indictment agaiuet
John Doe and Richard Koe ' in that, on or
about such and such a day, he stol6 a current
of electricity of the value of lOdoL more or
less, &.C.. &.C. &c.'
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