"Wonder worker in developing energy in the strongest individuals, and
massing wealth in masterful states; but, since competitive trading can
never be wholly beneficent, it should be strictly controlled, in the
interests of the toiling millions, who are too weak successfully to oppose
its attacks. The results of forcing on the naturally weak, by means of
competition, hard and unequal bargains which are evaded by the strong, are
appalling in their magnitude, dividing whole peoples permanently into
castes, rich and poor, injuring the former by excess, and the latter by
deprivation, making a nation strong in the trading instinct, and rich in
accumulated wealth, but weak and poor in all its other parts. This abuse
is saddest of all when, failing to be recognized as an evil, the doctrines
of free trade are wrought into the policy and social life of a people."
Protective remedies for this state of things are introduced as follows:
"Wherever the value of competition has been fully recognized, but
supplemented by wise control of its energies, the results are excellent.
This fact forms the foundation of our protective laws, whose very name
'protective' implies assailants; those hard bargains, to wit, driven on
the fighting side of trade, under the motto of 'let the fittest survive.'
When a small army is attacked by a large one, it covers itself by
earthworks. Similarly, where there are sheep, and wolves abound, the
farmer puts up fences which effectually protect his flock; and, in the
same way, tariffs are 'forts,' whence the artisan may hope successfully to
defend himself against the attacks of his powerful and unscrupulous enemy,
capital; or they may even be considered as a pistol, which a little fellow
points at a big bully who threatens him with a thrashing."
Such are the arguments which are urged with great fervor, and immense
effect, upon the American artisan, who fully and firmly believes that
protection is the only agent capable of lifting his lot above those,
dreaded levels at which the "pauper labor of Europe" is universally
believed to live.
The simple answer to all this rhetoric appears to be that, while it might
be valid as an indictment of the competitive system as a whole, it is
valueless when directed against a part of that system only. Advocates who
are not prepared to say that every bargain shall be controlled by
beneficence, and who distinctly admire the chief results of competition,
cannot logically demand that labor, alone of all salable commodities,
shall be bought and sold on altruistic principles.
In what immediately precedes, I have endeavored to indicate the character
of the pleadings which make American artisans universally supporters of
the tariff, and we must now return to the question, What, after all, is
really the effect of protection on wages in America? I answer that no
legislative schemes can add to, although they may injure, the material
resources of a state. Capital can only support the labor for which the
annual harvest of such resources pays, and all that legislation can do is
artificially to divert labor and capital from directions which they would
take under the influence of natural laws.
America is selling, at the present time, about £160,000,000 worth of food
and other raw products in Europe. These, together, represent her chief
branch of business, in which nearly fifty per cent. of her population is
engaged, and all this merchandise is sold in the free trade markets of the
world. Wages in America, therefore, cannot possibly be regulated by the
tariff, because, whatever wages can be earned by men engaged in the
production of agricultural products--the prices of which are fixed in
Liverpool--must be the rate of wages which will substantially be paid in
other branches of business. Wages, like water, seek a level; if
manufacture pays best, labor will quit agriculture; if agriculture pays
best, manufactures will decline, and agriculture progress.
A glance at the condition of industrial society in America vividly
illustrates this conclusion. Any man, with a few dollars and a strong pair
of arms, can win far greater rewards from the soil than he could possibly
obtain by the same effort in Europe. His wages are high, because the grade
of comfort to be obtained from the land by means of a little labor is
high, and the artisans' wages must follow suit, if men are to be tempted
from the field into the workshop. American politicians, however, would
have us believe that American labor owes its prosperity to taxation; in
other words, that what the immigrant seeks is not the rich prizes offered
him by a free and fertile soil, but the blessings which flow from a tariff
that adds an average 40 per cent. to the cost of everything he needs
except food.
One more illustration, and I have done. Upon the wall hangs a diagram
which shows the movements of American wages, of English wages, and of the
tariff from 1860 to 1883. I have already argued that a tariff cannot
determine wages, and the diagram affords positive proof that it has not
determined them in America, as between 1860 and the present time. On the
contrary, their movements are evidently due to the same causes as have
influenced wages here during this period, while it is certainly remarkable
that they have fallen sooner, fallen lower, and recovered less completely
in America, where industry is "protected," than in Great Britain, were it
is "unprotected."
Shortly to recapitulate all that has been advanced, I have endeavored to
show:
1st. That a great change has occurred in the social condition of labor in
the United States during the last forty years, and that, spite of all the
existing agencies of improvement, it is doubtful whether the working
classes of America are not, at the present moment, falling still further
from those high ideals of operative life which once so brilliantly
distinguished the United States from European countries.
2d. That, although wages are probably some 60 per cent. higher in the
chief manufacturing districts of America than in Great Britain, yet an
English artisan would find himself little richer there than at home, after
paying the enhanced prices for subsistence, and conforming to the higher
standard of life which prevails in the States. At the same time, his whole
social position and opportunities of advancement would be immensely
improved.
3d. I have tried to demonstrate that the tariff, to which the higher wages
of America are so confidently attributed, has really no influence whatever
upon them, and that it is not therefore an engine, such as it is glowingly
represented to the American artisan, constructed for the purpose of
raising his lot above that of the so-called "pauper labor of Europe." Any
inquiry into the character of the work really accomplished by the engine
in question would lead me into regions of controversy forbidden in this
room.
Finally, if I am asked why, in a review of American labor and wages, I
have said nothing of trade unionism on the one hand, and of co-operative
production on the other, I can only answer that to have introduced these
among so many other interesting, but subsidiary, subjects which crowd
around questions of labor and wages, would have doubled the volume of this
address, and more than halved the patience with which you have kindly
listened to it.
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A catalogue, containing brief notices of many important scientific papers
heretofore published in the SUPPLEMENT, may be had gratis at this office.
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