North Carolina Newspapers

PAGE TWO \ p=====^= =!^^^= THE CHATHAM RECORD O. J. PETERSON Editor and Publisher SUBSCRIPTION PRICE: One Year $1.50 Six Months 75 THURSDAY, JUNE 20, 1929 TWO EDUCATORS PASS In the passing of W. J. Fer rell of Meredith College and D. D. Dougherty of the Appa lachian College at Boone, the gtate has lost two men who helped lay the foundation of educational progress in North Carolina. The work of the little community boarding schools was the leaven that raised educational enthusiasm in the state, and prepared a large group of men and women not only;to. appreciate their own slight opportunities, afforded by the zeal and en terprise of the sacrificing teachers of that day, but also to seek a means of extending the benefits of education to all the youth of the state. The teachers who supplied the schools when they were pro vided by the state, in hundreds of cases, can trace their in spiration and their prepara tion to the direct or indirect work of the pioneer school men of forty and fifty years ago, men who set up little boarding schools throughout the state and went out and made personal appeals to the young people to seek an edu cation. The work of Ferrell and Stringfield at Wakefield, now Zebulon, was of more far-telling effect than any work that Mr. Ferrell, who died after years of service at Meredith, has done in appar ently larger fields. * -£vi7G£IAL ILLUSTRATED £ The trouble at Gastonia inj which the chief of police, O. | J. Adderholt, was killed and others wounded, is certainly most deplorable. The day be fore that killing "one long edi torial in this paper was writ ten, in which it is stated that the difficulties at Gastonia and Elizabethton are symptomatic of more than local causes. The Gastonia tragedy should add interest to the discussion of economic affairs in the article referred to. 1 _ # The Record is publishing on another page an account of Bertie county’s economical plan of keeping the county home and the jail, and com mends it to the attention of the commissioners and people of £hath£m county. The plan reduces total cost per inmate of both institutions to $5.00 a month when investment cost is counted. The investment cost 1 of keeping the inmates of the Chatham county home is double that figure alone. Chat-! ham will, or does, need a new jail and if one can be built and operated in such way as to reduce the cost of the op-| eration of both institutions, the plan is worth considering. Well, if Sister Hoover likes colored guests at her tea parties, the Record will try to reconcile itself to the situ ation. Tastes differ, as the fellow said that kissed the calf. However,« we are sure that the incident is not setting well on the stomach of some of the Southern Hoover sup porters. But just suppose it had been Mrs. Smith instead of Mrs. Hoover, what would the anti-Smithites be saying just now?—Heflin, f’r in stance? — Bishop Hafey is reported as saying that a million-dollar school is no assurance that a pupil will get a million-dollar education. “The strength of the school,” says the bishop, depends on the strength of the teacher.” Correct; the bishop is simply saying in another way what Garfield said when he said that Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a boy on the other end would be an uni versity. — The administration has made a gesture at passing a farm relief measure. It is a law, but is only lacking the “relief” feature. GENERAL ABILITY TO BUY KEEPS EVERYBODY BUSY I &- It has been previously shown in this series of arti cles that the sources of wealth in this country are not only rapidly passing into the hands of a small percentage of the > people, but have already large » ly passed into their hands, and that this has happened be cause of the ability the capi talists have had, and still have, to fix profits without hazard above every conceiva ble item of cost and of de terioration. Thus the country ! is steadily being drained of its i surplus and even of part of i the capital belonging to in dividuals into the great streams i of finance and industry, with i the result that the masses of : the people are losing control ; of their means of livelihood, i and this is rapidly becoming , a nation composed of a few employer s and millions of i hirelings. In the last article , the protective tariff was as • cribed as one of the chief : causes of the amassing of the i sources of wealth of the whole • people into the hands of the few. Yet the difficulty of discon tinuing the protective system was recognized and it was argued that, in view of that difficulty, it is necessary, in order to restore the balance, to counterbalance the tribute being exacted from the agricul tural element and those whose .'prosperity is dependent upon | the prosperity of the farmers, by such a scheme as that of the debenture, killed by the house of representatives at the instance of President Hoover. It was conceded that the de benture is pure class legisla tion,Hbut it was contended that the protective tariff system is equally class legislation, and that the former is essential to correct the ills produced by the latter. Yet Congress re fuses to pass a debenture aid to agriculture, but is proceed ing to raise the tariff rates on manufactured goods, on the 'assumed grgunij that the pro tective tariff has been the cause of the unparalleled de velopments in this country. Such an assumption disre gards the existence in a virgin state of unparalleled natural resources for the exploitation of a people of robust strength and untrammeled by European conditions. And this develop ing people were confronted with these virgin resources just at the time that modern in dustrial methods had gained sway. The tariff had nothing to do with the existence of the great coal fields, the wa ter powers of New England which were first utilized for power for operation of fac tories, the cotton fields of the South, the great ore beds of the country, the vast grain lands of the west. Nor was the tariff in anywise responsi ble for the idea of laying pipe lines to convey oil, for the methods of converting iron in to steel, for the inventions of an Edison, the supremacy of a Ford. Given the resources i in excess, a population of initi -1 ative, and these ,at the oppor tune stage of development of industrial methods, and the country could not fail to de velop. Hence, it is only as sumption that attributes the prosperity, or rather the mar velous developments of re sources, in this country to the operation of the protective tariff system. It is as easy to assume that the country has developed de spite the protective tariff as because of it. And the form er assumption would be con firmed by the experience of England under a free trade policy. At the beginning of the Revolutionary war, Adam Smith published his “Wealth of Nations.” / Manufacturing had already attained consid jerable headway iff England, • but the developments which I were to make Great Britain the workshop of the world for | a considerable period may be | ascribed to the publication of ! that treatise and the adoption of its principles by William i Pitt, though the latter, as Green tells us, was handicap ped in the application of the principles of the “Wealth of Nations” to economic condi tions in Great Britain by the “ignorance and prejudice with which he had to contend”, and THE CHATHAM RECORD, PITTSBOROV N. C. by the conviction of the trad ing classes that “commerce was best furthered by jealous monopolies.” The economic doctrines of Adam Smith are thus author itatively summed up: “Labor, Smith contended, was the one source of wealth, and it was by freedom of labor, by suf fering the worker to pursue his own interest in his own way, that the public wealth would best be promoted. Any attempt to force labor into ar tificial channels, to shape by laws the course of commerce, to promote special branches of industry in particular coun tries, or to fix the character of the intercourse between one country and another, is not only a wrong to the worker or to the merchant,- but actually hurtful to the wealth of the state.” The development of the in dustries of England for a hun dred and twenty-five years was based upon these maxims. They are absolutely opposed to the principle of the protec tive tariff, and when the writer questions the assumption that the protective tariff is the foundation of American indus trial development, he is back ed by this father of political economy. However, inventions and the unbounded applica tion of power to industry have so modified conditions that la bor does not hold the para mount position ascribed to it by Adam Smith. Os course, so long as machinery is not ab solutely automatic, labor is as necessary as ever, but machin ery now does the most of the work that labor had to do in Adam Smith’s day, and the laborer’s task is only to direct the machine. And that fact has made a new political econ omy necessary. But the prin ciple of non-interference with the course of trade is unaf fected, and either Smith was wrong then or is still right. And the protective tariff sys tem has been diametrically opposed to Smith’s fundamen tal principles. « - • But granted that the pro tective tariff system did.enable American manufacturers to gain the American market ear lier than it otherwise would, the time has come when prac tically every industry has a surplus above the American demands, and the prosperity of the industry depends upon finding a profitable market for the surplus. Not to sell the surplus is to cut down produc tion and to throw labor out of employment. To sell it for less than cost is to further ex ploit the unrelated elements of the population for the safe ty and profit of the industrial ists and their employees—a further exploitation of the re sources of the agricultural ele ment and the elements of pop ulation so related to agricul ture as to rise or fall with the prosperity or impoverishment of the farmer. The proposed new tariff bill clearly seeks to increase do mestic prices of manufactured goods, not in order to shut out I imports, but to increase profits to such an extent that the plants may be operated on a smaller scale or the manufac turers be enabled to run at full tilt with the assurance that profits on domestic sales will enable them to sell their surplus in foreign markets in competition with the so-called pauper labor products of Eu rope. The South gained its indus trial momentum after the man ufacturing industries were firmly established in the North, and its competition with the established industries of the North was practically as in tense, with both under a pro tective tariff, as that of the whole country would have been with the established enterpris es of Great Britain, with both countries having free trade, or a tariff for revenue only. But ! granted that America as a 1 whole is richer through the operation of the tariff, the thing the people are concern r ed with is the average welfare. "Whether the tariff has made America the industrial coun try it is, is questionable, and even very doubtful; but even the proponents of the protec-, tive tariff theory would hardly deny that it has helped to bring about the great accum ulations of capital that have so far dispossessed the aver age man of the control of his own means of livelihood. The increased wealth of the coun try because of the tariff, if any, has been largely appro priated by the capitalists. The owners of the factories of the country, as a rule, have grown richer; but it has been a hand to-mouth process of living for the employees. A • strike in any factory will make the fam ilies of employees objects of charity within three months at the most, usually three weeks. Os course, the exceptional fail ure is to be taken for granted. Poor judgment in locating a factory, bad management, at tempts to popularize impossi ble articles, and many other things, including changing cus ; toms or fashions, have caused failure. But under normal cir cumstances, the protective tar iff has usually assured a profit that played its part in the de . velopment of the great for tunes, which in turn have i through interest or investment followed by other profits, pushed on the snow-ball pro cess which is accumulating the • wealth of the whole into the hands of the few. With world competition precluded and with actual or possible price fixing in accord, the profits have been both certain and ; large, as the transfer of the wealth from the many to the few is in itself evidence. The wealth has been cre ated, but it belongs to the few, and the many, however comfortably they are living, are living on a hand-to-mouth basis. But as suggested be fore, there has been the large unorganized agricultural class, with its related elements, to exploit. But that exploitation will early have run its course if the exploitation cannot be stopped. But if it shall be stopped, either the factory workers or the manufacturer themselves must lose the usual win nings from their former vic tims. Yet the advantage to industry will counterbalance the loss. The chief trouble right now is the lack of buying poWer throughout the world. The high prices charged the exploited groups under the tariff have curtailed consump tion on their part; while the disregard of the tariff system for the welfare of the peoples of other countries has helped to keep down production in the world as a whole, with the re sult that it is impossible to sell surpluses in other coun tries at a profit, if indeed for cost. The world still needs billions of dollars worth of American goods that it cannot buy, and in a measure because of the fact that American con sumption of the products of other countries is not what it should be for the physical well-being of Americans as well as for the encouragement of production in* those coun«r tries with its consequent . in crease of trade with America.* Even here in Chatham county there is need today for a mil lion dollars worth of new homes and furniture, textile and food, which our people are unable to buy. Suppose that the debenture , scheme were in effect and . $50,000 should as a conse ; quence be added to the in : comes of Chatham county ■ people. It is readily seen that • the most of it would be spent for goods, thus enlarging the demand and giving work to . people who are now not use fully employed, who them selves would then become larger consumers, j What is needed is for every body in the world to be use ! fully employed and able to ex ! change his product for what . he needs of the other man’s . product. In that case, poverty i would be banished. And cer- L tainly it is not an inconceivable . thing for everybody to be eiirir ployed. But so* long as free > exchange of goods is forbidden ; by tariffs, so long must many fail to produce what they might and as many fail to secure what they need for . their general welfare. If, as granted, the tariff under the circumstances can not be safely discontinued, and if it is one’ of the instruments which have helped to transfer the sources of wealth of the whole country to the hands of a small proportion of the people, while the masses have become hewers of wood and drawers of water, a policy T)f gradual reduction, accompa nied by a counterbalance, such as the debenture aid proposed for agriculture, should be adopted. On the contrary, we see the debenture plan killed by Mr. Hoover and his Congress, while preparations are being .made for a lift of tariff rates to a level never known before. The farmers have asked for a loaf and they are receiving a stone—biff! A strange idea our states men have—that the robber can steal more and by some process the robbed can become richer! * Self-restraint and self-con straint are two of the greatest qualities of character. Yet the educational processes of today 'seem to disregard them. Self expression (whatever the self) is sought as ah end. On the other hand, every task must be made pleasant. Self-expres sion unlimited in the child de stroys self-constraint; while the sweetening of every task be gets anything else than a will ingness to constrain one’s self to the distasteful or difficult. There would seem little rem edy for lack of self-constraint. It is too difficult a task to make folks do things; but in the case of lack of self-re straint, there is a possibility of applying other restraint. Maybe you cannot make the horse drink after you have led him to water, but you can keep him doing a lot of things he would like to do. And that seems to be the situation with society now. Family and state must lay heavy restraint upon those who have been so unfor tunate as to deem that their will and their whims are right because they are their will and whims. Every child should be taught to keep from doing some things even if there should be no harm in the things per se, and to be con strained to do some distaste ful, but useful, things. The old Puritan customs made' character, as foolish as were some of the blue laws, and the hard lines of the pioneer families helped. Self-constraint and self-restraint would solve the problems of this, or of any, country. Congressman George Pritch ard got in the neck—he wasn’t invited to Mr. DePriest’s musi cale, he and Vestal of Indiana being the only Republican con gressmen slighted. The latter’s* wife is alleged to be busying herself in an effort to have Mrs. DePriest blackballed by the congressional club. Mr. Pritchard, it Is remembered, wouldn’t have an office assign ed next door to that of the colored congressman. <e> Our friend and former school boy, Herbert Peele, pdi-, tor of the Elizabeth City Ad vance, seems to have made a most excellent host for the press association last week. Our chiefest regret at not go ing was because of the fact that the meeting was at Her bert’s home. By the way, he was elected vice president of the association and should be in line for the presidency next year. Eight “farmers” are to get theft “relief” by' appointment to the farm commission pro vided for by the law last week. The jobs carry a $12,000 sal ary. Those fellows will be tickled, but we haven’t seen any Chatham county farmers laughing their heads off about the passage of Mr. Hoover’s farm relief bill. $ If the Democratic party is to be sc close corporation, too good for Rascob or Smith, let it die—or rather bury it, for it is already dead. The South ern tail, likely to be trimmed of part of its electoral weight, need not expect to wag the national dog. <£ The recent White House tea party may go down in history with that of Boston. Necessity supplies courage to the most timid. 666 is a Prescription for Colds, Grippe, Flu, Dengue, Bilious Fever and Malaria It is the most speedy remedy known. THURSDAY. JUNE 20. iflgo i************* : WANT ADS • BUY THE BEST—A Goodyear Ti™ from R. J. Moore & Co. Ire R. J. MOORE & CO., Bynum, selling sugar cheap. YOU CAN BUY nice fresh fish TuJJT days and Saturdays at R j Moore’s, Bynum, for 7 cents a pound. LAKE WACCAMAW: tages rented by the week. For i n * formation, write Oscar Whiteville, N. C. gn> LARD, best compound, 1214 c- oatT $3.00 a bag; bag; sugar $5.25 a hundred. Other prices in accord. Poe and Moor* Pittsboro. * AUTO TIRES are cheaper at C. £ Durham’s. You can buy a Com mander tire, 30 X 3 % for $4.95 and tube to match for SI.OO. ’ FLOUR is real cheap. We can sell you self-rising flour for $6.40 and guarantee it. Gome and give us a trial. C. E. Durham, Bynum. USED CARS are always reasonable I m price at Weeks Motor Com nan v GUARANTEED FLOUR $7.00 a bar" rel, also Ship Stuff $2.25 a bag at C. E. Durham’s, Bynum. WHOLE JERSEY milk—ls quart delivered anywhere in boro early in the morning. Lexie Clark. DON’T GO ASTRAY with yow Model A. We keep mechanics who; absolutely know how to service the car. Weeks Motor Company. NEW GOODS being shown daily at Hall’s. You should see their shoes, dry goods, and ready-to-wear prices. SELL YOUR TIES and cedar logi to W. C. Johnson. FOR SALE: 41 acres land in Bald win township near Mt. Pleasant church. Will sell at a bargain and give terms to right party. Zeb H. Lynch, Rt. 3, Mebane, N. C, TIRES: 12 months’ unconditional guaranteed. New Ford sizes, tire and tube, $ll.OO. Weeks Motor Company. HIGHEST CASH PRICES paid for crossties and cedar posts. You may measure posts yourself and be sure you get right measures. R. M. Connell, Highway 93. MODERN SHOP equipment; time saving machinery enables us to render real service cheaper and better. Weeks Motor Company. TRAINED MECHANICS to care for your car at Weeks Motor Co. VALUES—YOU will find them at Hall’s. CHICKEN FEED, sweet feeds, oats, etc., wholesale or retail at lowest prices at Po© and Moore’s, Pitts boro. PROFESSIONAL nurse. I am lo cated- in Pittsboro and offer my services as a professional nurse to the people of Chatham county. Elsie Lucile Peterson, R. N., Tele-A phone No. 79. " THE NEW FORD CAR and its serv ice is what you need. Weeks Motor Company. VISIT HALL’S for anything wish. A complete line to outfit you from head to foot; at prices, too, that suit the shrewdest of value seekers. UVER SLUGGISH? HERE’S RELIEF Free Proof! Ordinary laxatives, oils, salts, etc., may clean you out. But when that’s done, you’re bad off as before. What you need; what every bilious, half sick, headachy person needs is some thing to start the liver and bowels; regulate them; make them act nor mally. That’s what Dodson’s Lever tone does. That’s why people wbo try it for constipation, biliousness, etc., will never use anything else. Make us prove it. Send for FREE bottle. Address: Sterling Products, Wheeling, W. Va. DODSON’S For Ladies pure Silk full fashioned Hosiery, only SI.OO a pair 'ij White and all light Summer colors For Men, good heavy full cut $1.50 Overalls, all sizes, only SI.OO a pair Lots of other Specials for all the family. Give us a call. STROUD & HUBBARD SANFORD, N. C. —* 4