At the present moment and for twenty-five years past, the public laws of the United States ostensibly relating to Taxes, have had an immense influence upon the value and rents of the agricultural lands of the country to depress them; because these laws have put up nearly or wholly impassable barriers to the coming in of those foreign goods, against which the farmers would naturally and profitably and inevitably have sold their surplus agricultural produce; by destroying the foreign market for farm products, these laws do in effect destroy a large part of the value of the farms of the country, and of what would otherwise be the rentals of a part of them; the Constitution of the country expressly forbids any taxation whatever of Exports, but these laws have precisely the same effect on the value of farm products if they were themselves forbidden to be exported, because those goods for which these would be otherwise exchanged for a profit are forbidden to be imported. _A market for products is products in market._ Thus these wretched laws lower the price of farm products, and consequently the value of farms and of their rents, and impoverish the farmers who are nearly one-half of the entire population of the country. 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