With that man you can reason. and with him I propose to reason here and before the country. and I tell you that I have so much confidence in the sanity of the American intellect that I believe that that class of conservative and sensible Republicans are going to go back upon this outrageous Dingley scale of exploitation. With him you can reason this way. You say that he admits that the raison d6trethe cause for the existenceof protectionism is to make up the difference between what you call the pauper labor scale of Europe and your own great American scale (and the scale of wages. as I have more than once tried to demonstrate. does not come from the tariff. but from our grander industrial opportunities. and from the fact that there is more demand for labor in America. in proportion to the supply of labor. than in any other country in the world. except some parts of South Africa. where they had a higher scale. of wage than we had until they introduced Chinese labor and broke it down). This man. however. believes that the tariff can and does maintain this difference. If it be true that you want to make up by your tariff scale for the difference between what you call the "European pauper labor" wage and your own laborers wage. the height to which the tariff ought to go would be the height in dollars and cents. or in percentage of that exact difference. whatever it is. as a factor in tIe cost of the product. Now. then. the most expert statisticians say upon an average the labor cost of commodities is not 50 per cent of the entire price of the finished product. There are very few articles indeed concerning which it may be predicated in truth that the labor cost at the factory entering into the entire cost is as much as 50 per cent of the entire cost. but in order to be perfectly fair and that the American people may see that I have exposed this pretense.
Keywords matched
pauper labor