How is the South, and, particularly, how are Southern farmers, benefited by the tariff?
S. W. Morehead.
Answer.—Just as other American farmers are. First, by escaping direct taxation for the support of the General Government, a form of taxation that always bears on farmers and the other industrial classes heavily, as illustrated in direct taxation for State and county purposes. The Southern politicians who framed the Constitution of the Southern Confederacy, a majority of them, ignored the protectionist policy of Washington, Madison, Clay, Lowndes, Bell, and other Southern statesmen of different political parties, and, as Jefferson Davis puts it, in his “Rise and Fall of the Confederacy,” “protective duties for the benefit of special branches of industry were altogether prohibited.” A tariff for revenue only, export duties, and direct taxation were relied on to supply the exchequer of the Confederacy. What does Mr. Davis say of the result as regards the last of these sources? On page 495 of Volume I. he writes: “Within six months after the passage of the war tax of Aug. 19, 1861, the popular aversion to internal taxation by the General Government had so influenced the legislation of the several States that only in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas were the taxes actually collected from the people. The quotas of the remaining States had been raised by the issue of bonds and State Treasury notes. The public debt of the country was thus actually increased instead of being diminished by the taxation imposed by Congress.” Where did most of the money come from that was raised by the Confederacy? Off the agricultural products of the South. As to the foreign loan, Davis says: “Each bond, at the option of the holder, was convertible at its nominal amount into cotton at the rate of sixpence sterling for each pound of cotton—say 4,000 pounds of cotton for each bond of a hundred pounds sterling.” The farmer was paid for the cotton in Confederate currency or bonds, as a rule, and any other cotton exported from the country was compelled to pay an export duty to help pay the interest on the foreign bonds. But not only does the policy of American protection tend to keep the amount raised by direct taxation down to a minimum (as now, when, except the internal revenue tax on whisky and tobacco, nearly the entire revenue of the Federal Government is collected off of imports), but it levies the tariff mainly on such articles as can be produced in this country, so compelling consumers of Southern cotton, sugar, rice, tobacco, etc., to pay better prices for these articles, or foreign competitors to reduce their profits when selling to American consumers; while it admits, coffee, tea, and other home necessities that we cannot produce, free of duty. It lays a duty on iron and other ores, and so encourages the Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama miner to delve for the wealth beneath his feet. It taxes cotton goods, and so holds out an extra inducement over all that nature has done to encourage the South to erect cotton factories. The same is true in a thousand other lines of manufacture. In general, it attracts capital into the South to engage in mining and manufacturing; it keeps money at home; it builds up home markets; it develops natural resources; it quickens the inventive genius of the nation, and it diversifies industries, and so provides occupations adapted to the various talents of different persons. This last is what the South needs more, in proportion, than any other section of the Union. Diversity of occupation, like diversity of crops, is essential to the realization of the best results. In many cases the most expert mechanics would make inferior farmers. The girl who “loves dearly to attend cotton-looms” (as a female operative in the weaving department of the Southern Exposition at Louisville lately exclaimed) would not stay on a farm. Diversity of industry affords opportunity for every worker to make the most of his abilities. It is the safety-valve of labor, which prevents any one occupation from being overgorged with laborers. It is the great equalizer of wages. The South is only beginning to realize the importance of home manufactures. Georgia is alive to this matter; so are some portions of Kentucky. Other Southern States are awakening to it. If it be true that in some parts of the North the manufacturers are strong enough to stand without protection, it is not yet true of the same industries in the South, and the latter should demand that the tariff be maintained until she has acquired like strength. She has the cotton, iron, sugar, cheaper labor, and on account of the climate it costs the laborers less to live there than in the North. Why should she not rival France, of similar climate, in manufactures? Capitalists are asking “why not;” and capital is pouring into the South faster than ever before. It would be suicidal to drive this capital back. The South will be stupid if she exerts herself to keep her children shut up to agricultural pursuits and continues to spend more than half the value of her surplus products in sending them to market and bringing them back in a manufactured condition (as she always has done) instead of manufacturing them at home.
I AM DYING, EGYPT, DYING.
Evanston, Ill.
Who was the author of the touching poem commencing, “I am dying, Egypt, dying?” It is said that he was an army officer.
J. H.
Answer.—It was William Haines Lytle, who was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1826. He belonged to a cluster of brilliant young writers whose early ambition was to build up a school of Western literature, but who were drawn into the whirl of more active life, which left little time for courting the muses. On the breaking out of the late war he went into the army, serving as a Colonel in Western Virginia in 1861. He was wounded at Perryville, Ky., in October, 1862, was promoted for gallant services, and, finally, was killed at the battle of Chickamauga, Sept. 20, 1863. He was greatly beloved by his fellow officers for his noble social qualities as well as for his martial bearing; and nothing could be more unjust, according to the testimony of those who knew him well, than the story recently started by a flippant penny-a-liner, that he wrote the poem above referred to, properly entitled “The Death of Mark Antony,” on the walls of a guard-house in St. Louis, in which he was held under arrest over night for disorderly conduct on his way home from the theater, where he had seen Booth in Shakespeare’s great drama of “Antony and Cleopatra.” That the poem was suggested to him by witnessing Booth’s representation of this play is probably true: and it is asserted by some that he had written it, in part at least, some time before the eve of his death, but the following version of the peculiar circumstances under which this greatly admired lyric was completed and transmitted to the world corresponds with the traditions of the army, and is probably true. John M. Balthes, of Clifton, Ill., who was once a fellow-townsman of General Lytle, at Zanesville, Ohio, writing to a fellow-soldier of that gallant officer, says:
“I send you the following beautiful lines, written by him in the middle of the night, just before the next day’s battle, in which he lost his life. The General being strongly impressed, or having a premonition that he should lose his life in the battle that was so soon to open, sat absorbed and alone in his tent, when an officer coming in admonished him that he needed rest before the serious business planned for the next day. Thereupon General Lytle handed him these verses, remarking that they would be the last he should ever write.” This poem was published in The Sunday Inter Ocean of Oct. 7, almost precisely as given by Mr. Balthes, and as it appears in “Famous Single and Fugitive Poems,” by Rossiter Johnson.