Speech #500053165

With good wages. you may hold your souls in patience. for the laboring man will neither starve himself nor allow his family to want as long as he is blessed with health and strength to work. Yes. you may prate about cheap imported goods manufactured in the noisome factories of Leeds. and Sheffield and Birmingham. You may talk about the cheap products of foreign paupers and of convict laborers. and how they will compensate for the reduced wages of honest American mechanics brought into competition in their production and thrown upon the American markets by a low tariff or no tariff at all. but you can not fool intelligent American workingmen by any such stuff. They understand just as well as you do that $500.000.000 or $1.000.000.000 worth of such goods thrown upon the American market takes the place of just that many million dollars worth of American fabrics and robs the American mechanic and artisan of the profit of just that amountof labor. And the million of American laborers standing idle today. waiting for employment. know that their chances are lessened just the amount of labor nAessary to make those goods in foreign countries.