The most honest and persevering Mayors and other high officials have got stuck in New York street mud and were never heard of again.  Our aristocratic home mud has flourished without any protection, and the pauper mud of Europe or any other mud could never beat our home product.  Here our amiable and friendly Commissioners of the Pan-American Congress can see it demonstrated that our mud industry can flourish without protection.  I will now call the attention of our Pan-American friends to the windows in New York houses.  They are invariably of plate-glass, and there is not a city in the world that can beat New York in handsome windows.  Now, then, it is an actual fact that the tax or duty on plate-glass is as follows:  Plate-glass, 10 by 15 inches, 3 cents per foot, or 13.60 per cent; plate-glass, 16 by 24 inches, 5 cents per foot, or 19.78 per cent; plate-glass, 24 by 30 inches, 8 cents per foot, or 27.46 per cent.  Now, we must admit that this is a moderate tax.  The above glass goes into the houses of the rich.  Of course, it will not do to tax influential and rich citizens.  But now let me show how we tax that class of people who build three-hundred-dollar houses, or the hundreds of thousands of farmers who live in the far West.  Those houses are glazed by what is known as common green window glass.  Let me show to what extent we have taxed that class of people in 1888: 

IMPORTS OF COMMON WINDOW GLASS IN 1888.

Duty
Collected,     Per
Value.      Ad valorem.     Cent.

Sizes not exceeding 10x15 $288,927 $190,815 66
Sizes 16 x 24 265,919 305,357 114.83
Sizes 24 x 30 346,486 440,685 127.15
All above that 477,132 626,740 131.35
                                       ----------
Total $1,563,497

We have squeezed out of the neediest, most hard-working of our population $1,563,000 taxes on their “daylight” or window tax, which has gone into the Treasury; but we have squeezed at least $5,000,000 more and put it into the pockets of people who made similar glass.  Our Pan-American guests may reflect on the above statistics and come to the conclusion that having flourishing window-glass industries may, after all, not be the highest blessing.

I beg to assure Mr. Carnegie that I am “not” a grumbler, as I don’t want to run the risk of having the door of heaven shut in my face when he succeeds St. Peter in office.

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