Virginia Free Press

The Duty on Rice.

A bill is now pending in the United States Senate, by the provisions of which, should it pass and become a law, the duty on rice, imported from the Hawaiian Islands, would be entirely removed. It might have been anticipated, the obnoxious measure is receiving the old treatment at the hands of the Southern press. Our sister States of the South represent very properly, and in an able manner, through their journals, the two-fold injury which will attend their sections, if this bill passes: one regards the rice planter, whose profit in its cultivation (which is small enough already) will be reduced to a merely nominal figure, by the rapid downpouring of a foreign article, and which its free entry will successfully invite. The other injury must, perforce, fall on the negro hands in the rice-fields, and negro cultivators of the staple, as well—whose occupation, along with their former masters, will most certainly be gone. Relinquishment of rice culture by the planter, (a sure consequent of the passage of the bill in question) means idleness for hundreds of hands, now employed, and the negro cultivator will, of course, have to follow the planter's example in a hunt for other fields of labor. Senator Robertson of South Carolina (an independent republican) writes the Charleston Chamber of Commerce, enclosing its action in publicly declaring against the proposed outrage, and following up the principal reasons mentioned above with one or two of his own. The Senator regards it as strange that while protection is the established policy of the country a total departure from that policy should be proposed to the article of rice, a product vital to a portion of the South, and that portion which is least able to bear any such experiment. He adverts with pardonable pride to the action of the last republican measure, in respecting the past position, which has now received the approval of a Democratic House chamber, and deduces from this fact, the more humiliating one that our Southern Democratic legislators are, perhaps, derelict in their attention to Northern interests. Were Free Trade the national policy of the country, the South, the Senator thinks, could not properly object to this repealing measure, but while the Protective policy is paramount, its protections cannot justly be withdrawn from any one section. We heartily pin to the crusade of our Southern sisters against this measure, and trust their efforts will meet with due success.