Speech #660343037

The day has come when America must cease the policy of isolation. so far as our trade and commerce are concerned. We must be prepared to compete with the world. we must be prepared and we are prepared to go into the markets of the world and meet foreign competition. We hear a reference to the old question of pauper labor. That is a.theory that has been exploded ii every Democratic platform. I feel this afternoon as though I were making a speech 15 years ago. then we had a party and a flag that we followed. and on that flag was branded. if not free trade. at least "tariff for revenue only." We heard then about pauper labor. It was a cry that was not raised by labor but by the capitalists who wanted to profit from labor. and who in those days ground the face of labor with a cruelty that was indescribable. Even while they were talking about pauper labor at the same time they were importing under contract the cheapest labor they could get in all the world and putting it in their mills to take the place of the higher class of labor that existed in this country. These were the men who raised the cry of pauper labor. Sir. we have all gone over the old beaten path of this argument until I hesitate to repeat it. but it seems that memories are short and it is being forgotten. The fact is that it is clearly demonstrable that with modern machinery. bacl*ed by the brains of intelligent labor. the cost of labor in any given article is less in the firstclass mills of the country than it is when the article is produced by the socalled pauper labor of foreign lands. The only real competitor the United States has today is not the pauper labor of the world. but is the labor of the most intelligent and highly civilized countries of the. world. Before we had our disagreement with Germany it was German competition and English competition and French competition and Norwegian and Swedish competition and Dutch competition that our merchants and manufacturers had to fear. we never had to fear the competition of India. The lazzaroni of the earth produced with their fingers in the dull way their ancestors had produced a thousand years ago.