CONGRESSMAN BURROWS ON PROTECTION.

JULIAS CAESER BURROWS is the name of a fine-looking gentlemen with a rich voice, an easy diction, and a courtly and attractive bearing, who made a blooming exhibition of himself last night at Market hall. His performance is to be partly accounted for by three things. In the first place, his audience was discouragingly small. Next, as he himself said at the outset, he was for the time being in a feeble physical state. And finally, he proposes to leave the city this morning. No man of good sense, as Mr. Burrows undoubtedly is, would have talked so presposterously in public if his audience had been of a size and character to command his respect. If his health had been in a fairly satisfactory condition, or if he expected to ever again face the men whose intelligence he insulted and who displayed rare self-restraint and courtesy in listening to him without interruption.

Mr. BURROWS' subject was, of course, the tariff, and by way of introduction he defined the different forms of taxation. He informed the citizens of St. Paul that by direct taxation was meant a system under which a per capita tax was laid on every man, woman and child in the country, equal in amount and entirely irrespective of their property holdings. If we had such a system, he said, even infants in arms would have to pay $8 apiece to the tax collector, and if they could not do it they would presumably be cut off as to their heads with a HEROD-like thoroughness. In this way he proved very easily that direct taxation was outrageously cruel and oppressive! He also informed the citizens of St. Paul that a protective tariff was one under which foreign producers paid an "admission fee" at our ports in order to get their commodities into our markets. These admission fees, paid entirely by foreigners, aggregate, according to his figures, about $250,000,000 a year, and enable the government to meet half its running expenses without asking its own people for a penny. It was quite unnecessary for him to say a word further in eulogy of protection after this showing.

He had to, however, because he had been engaged to fill the evening, and he therefore went on to explain how much benefit protection was to the laboring man. It is always very touching to notice the solicitude of Republican orators about the laboring man. Those well known philanthropists like W. D. WASHBURN for example, never take the stump without protesting that they would be free-traders were it not for the disastrous effect free trade would have on the class which works with its hands. Mr. BURROWS feels this way also. He said last night that he was for protection because without it our farmers would have to compete with the Australian agriculturists, who get the magnificent wages of eight cents a day. But how does protection save them from this appalling fate? Mr. BURROWS made this point very clear. It increases the prices of things, and enables the American producer to charge more for his goods. But if the American producer charges more, the American consumer must pay more. Mr. BURROWS would have been quite willing to admit this. But then, what about this "admission fee" business? What becomes of it? If the foreigner pays it out of his own pocket, protection ought to have no effect whatever on prices in this country, and therefore no effect on wages. If protection raises the price of commodities and the compensation of workingmen, it must be the American consumer who pays the "admission fee," and not the foreign producer.

Mr. BURROWS may be a first-rate logician when his audience is large, his health good, and when he does not intend to leave town in the morning. But judged by his last night's standard, he has mistaken his calling. He should go to Australia and make a fortune teaching the natives how to hire laborers at eight cents a day. There is a big profit in that for an enterprising man.