Chapter II · MATERIAL COMMODITIES. (continued 3)

While these paragraphs are being written, comes the intelligence of the formation of the "North American Salt Company," whose purpose is in their own language "to unify and systematize the salt interests of the United States and Canada," and to this end "arrangements have been completed for the purchase and control of nearly all the existing salt properties of the North American continent." As this is a fair instance out of some thousands, in which a tariff-tax has the designed effect to lift or lower values which deeply concern the people, let us look at it for a moment. On the average of the past twenty-five years the tariff-tax on salt has in general doubled the cost of that necessary of life to the whole people of the United States. When Canada had no such tax, American makers of it sold salt sometimes to the Canadians 40% less than they would sell it to their own countrymen. On the basis of this United States tariff-tax (it would never have been dreamed of without it) this new company comes forward with a scheme of international monopoly to control in their own interest the price of a prime necessity of life. They propose to issue stock and bonds to the amount of $15,000,000, with which to buy up "the existing salt properties"; and they frankly avow in the prospectus from which we are quoting, that profits of $2,000,000 a year on their capital are justified by the present outlook. Whence are these immense profits to come? Out of the pockets of the masses of the American people bound hand and foot in the meshes of a legal monopoly, which they themselves allow themselves to be ensnared in! In a similar but more outrageous way, are bound up at the present moment in the secret so-called "Trusts" about forty more of the necessaries of life; each one of which, unless it be the "Standard Oil Trust," has its footing in a so-called "protective" tariff-tax, and would collapse instantly on the repeal of that!

It was necessary in order to complete our study of the second class of material commodities, namely, those produced from valuable and rentful lands, to glance in passing at the frequently disturbing effect on these, aside from their cost of production, of sinister laws plausibly imposed upon an unsuspicious people in the interest and at the instance of a privileged few.

3. It only remains in this chapter, devoted to the discussion of material Commodities in their three economic classes, to conclude with a glance at the third class, namely, those material valuables that are obtained from free and unowned sources, such as masts cut in the wilds of America on both oceans two and three hundred years ago, and fish caught on the Banks of Newfoundland, and furs gathered to such profit in the north by the Hudson's Bay Company, and salt evaporated in the tropics by a free sun from old ocean's brine.

These, and all such things as these, have a cost of production determined only by the cost of present labor and capital, and consequently a grade of value determined only by present Demand and Supply, unentangled for the most part by questions of rent and prior claim and taxation and nationality. All these things, accordingly, are relatively cheap, except as the element of Scarcity, and on that account of strong Desire, may sometimes come in to enhance the value. No man can tell the time exactly when French fishermen from the coasts of Brittany ventured over to the Banks of Newfoundland in their frail barks for the abundant cod in those waters, and went back home again at the close of the season freighted with plenty of a free and cheap food for their families and countrymen; or when it was that rude men calling themselves English followed these in their western track for the same general purposes, to become thereby hardy seamen on deeper seas, such as those who gained long afterwards the naval victories of Nelson; and we have all read in the fascinating pages of Irving the ventures and adventures of John Jacob Astor, the attraction of free furs in the Northwest of America, the hazards and the history incident to obtaining them, and the immense profits gained by their sale in the markets of the old world.