October 6, 1888 Vol. IV, No. 14Whole No. 92

THE STANDARD FOR THE CAMPAIGN.

Subscriptions to THE STANDARD from now to the close of the campaign will be received at the following rates:

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Terms of subscription will be found on the fourth page.

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CONTENTS:

Some Democratic Congressional Nominations. Tom L. Johnson. Thomas G. Shearman’s Return and Plans. Protectionists Who Practice Free Trade on the Sly. A Protection Catechism. From E. Q. Norton of Alabama. Notes from Correspondence. Campaign Work. The Song of the G. O. P. (a poem.) Tom L. Johnson—an account of his nomination. Single Tax Men of Albany. It Would Have Hurt the Boom. A Catechism—The purposes and essential principles of the Knights of Labor simplified and arranged. Prohibitory Law and Personal Liberty—Notes by an^sic English Reader. Straws Which Show the Wind. Free Trade, Free Land, Free Men (a poem). To Help Single Tax Strangers. The Bedell and Forster Forgeries^sic. Prohibitory Law and Personal Liberty. Mr. Ketcham’s Goose. Men and Things. The Campaign “Standard” Fund. Society Notes. The Source of Wages. New Ideas, Methods and Inventions. Current Thought. The Beating of the Drums.

The democrats of the Fifth Pennsylvania district, which embraces the northern part of Philadelphia, have had the good sense to nominate for congress Mr. F. A. Herwig—an absolute free trader, who for years has been doing good work in battling with the protectionist superstition. The vote in the district in which Mr. Herwig is running is composed in large part of workmen in the highly protected textile industries. But the long strikes and lockouts that have occurred there during the last few years, ought to have convinced these men that whatever protection may do for the employer, it is to the employed but an adding of insult to injury. The election of an out-and-out free trader from a Philadelphia district seems as yet almost too good to be hoped for; but even the nomination of such a man by the Philadelphia democratic convention is a most cheering sign of the political regeneration that is surely going on in Pennsylvania.

Congressman Henry Smith of the Milwaukee district of Wisconsin, who had previously been renominated by the union labor party convention, was last week renominated by the democrats by a unanimous rising vote. Mr. Smith gave a stanch support to the Mills bill, and though he can hardly be called a free trader, is, like Mr. Mills and President Cleveland, he^sic is enough of a free trader for all practical purposes at the present time.

But it is in the Twenty-first district of Ohio^sic—the Cleveland district, now represented by Martin A. Foran, a Randall democrat who voted against the Mills bill—that the democrats have done best. There they have nominated, and that unanimously and by acclamation, the first free trader in the full, true and complete meaning of the words ever knowingly nominated by the democracy in the United States; a man who, instead of having any fear of being “branded” as a free trader, openly professes his faith in freedom; a man who if he could have his way, would not only abolish all protection, but abolish all tariffs; and not merely all tariffs, but all taxes of whatever kind upon labor or the products of labor; and raise all public revenues by taking for public purposes, through taxation, those values that attach to land with the growth and improvement of society—in short an avowed and thoroughgoing single tax man—Tom L. Johnson.

And strangely enough—as it will seem to those who think that men are governed only by their selfish interests—this avowed and thoroughgoing free trader, who would sweep away all protection and abolish all tariffs, is himself a Pennsylvania manufacturer of steel rails; this believer in the principle that all citizens should stand on an equal level of opportunity and that necessary monopolies should belong to the state, who would make the steel highway, like the street or road, the property of the community, is the owner of large railroad interests; this democrat of democrats, whose political creed is that of Jefferson, the natural equality and equal rights of all men, and who recognizes the complete emancipation of labor, the utter abolition of industrial slavery, as the true mission of

p. 1, col. 2 democracy, the real goal of the struggle that in this presidential campaign has boen^sic begun, is himself a large employer of labor, the descendant of men who in Virginia and Kentucky have for generations counted their chattel slaves.

Tom L. Johnson is the son of Colonel A. W. Johnson, now of Indianapolis, who at the beginning of the war was a Kentucky planter, and fought through the struggle on the southern side, while Tom, then a child, followed with his mother the slowly retreating line of the confederate armies. Utterly ruined by the war, Col. Johnson settled in Louisville at its conclusion, and Tom, as soon as he was able to earn a dollar, had to go to work. Developing rare abilities, he quickly made his way from one rung to another in the ladder of promotion, and ere he had reached legal age was a successful railroad man.

A man of the purest and highest character, and with those frank and engaging qualities that make him friends wherever he goes and bind men closer to him the better they know him, Tom L. Johnson possesses rare intellectual and executive abilities. Without any mechanical education or training except what he has been able to pick up for himself, he has been a most prolific and successful inventor; without ever having seen the inside of a college, or hardly even of a common school, he is a man of wide and varied information, and a clear and logical thinker; beginning life at the age of thirteen as a boy in the office of a Louisville street railroad, he has at the age of thirty-four, by the sheer force of inventive genius and business ability, made himself and all who have been connected with him comfortably rich, and is now engaged in large enterprises which bid fair to make him as rich as any man can become without deliberately robbing others. He has probably as yet never made a speech in his life, for he never took any personal interest in politics until I was nominated for mayor of New York, when, believing the principle for which I stood to be a matter of national interest, he supported me quietly but most efficiently. But he has in him all the qualities that go to make a speaker of the most effective kind; and if he goes to congress, even if he never rises in his seat to make a speech (but he surely will), he will prove, by force of personal qualities and his wonderful power of putting his views in personal conversation, one of the most influential members of the house.

It would be unfair to pretend that Mr. Johnson has been nominated because he is a single tax man. He has been nominated because the democracy were hard pressed for a candidate who could win the fight, and because the high position which he holds in the estimation of the people of Cleveland makes him the strongest cabdidate^sic. But he was nominated with the full knowledge that he was a single tax man.

Some account of Mr. Johnson’s nomination will be found in another column. Never has a nomination more clearly sought the man. Few men have sacrificed for principle more than Mr. Johnson, with his large business interests requiring close attention, will have to sacrifice if elected. But he has accepted from the same motives of public duty which he urged upon me when advising me accept^sic the nomination for mayor of this city two years ago.

He has never disguised his opinions, but on the contrary, has been for years one of the most active and successful propagators of single tax ideas, and in his frank and manly letter of acceptance clearly states his principles. His nomination, made by enthusiastic acclamation, shows at least how rapidly democrats are ceasing to be afraid of the essential principles of democracy. And how readily the masses of the democratic party respond to true democratic principle was strikingly shown by the ratification meeting held on the night after his nomination and before he had even accepted. So far from striving to apologize for their free trade candidate, the speakers denounced the very idea of protection, and laughed and jeered at it as an exploded superstition, an insult to the dignity of labor. In the Cleveland congressional district this year there will be no disguise or evasion. The struggle will be a fair, open, stand-up fight between protection and free trade. And I believe that fight means victory. There is every probability that to the Cleveland democrats, represented now by a protectionist, will belong the honor of sending to the national house of representatives the first avowed and thoroughgoing free trader who in this generation has taken his seat there.

Thomas G. Shearman returned from a two months’ vacation in Europe on Monday last, and during the remainder of the

p. 1, col. 3 campaign will devote himself to the effort to swell the majority for Cleveland and Thurman. Mr. Shearman will be a notable addition to the list of single tax speakers who are taking part in this contest. To a firm grasp of general principles, and a most lucid way of stating them, he unites an extraordinary knowledge of the details of tariff history and legislation. If protectionists want “facts and figures,” his marvelous memory for such matters can supply all they desire, and that of a quality that, unlike their own “facts and figures,” will bear the test of examination.

But there is no need of saying anything of Mr. Shearman’s ability to the readers of THE STANDARD. His “Single Tax,” his “Distribution of Wealth,” his “Objections to the Single Tax,” his “Short Tariff History,” and his other articles and speeches, which have been printed in THE STANDARD and circulated by the hundreds of thousands in tract form, have made them familiar with the force and clearness of his presentation of principles; and with his power of marshaling facts and figures. Those of them who may have the good fortune to hear him from the platform will find him no less interesting and convincing as a speaker than as a writer. Mr. Shearman will make his first speech since his return, at the Single tax Cleveland and Thurman meeting which is to be held in Cooper union on Friday night of this week. At this, and other meetings at which he may speak during the campaign, he will answer any questions that the audience may ask.

By the way, since the protectionists will not debate the issue before the people, can they not at least be induced to follow the example set by single tax speakers and answer questions from their audiences?

I some time ago printed in this column an extract from the Grand Rapids (Mich.) Workman, commenting very unfavorably upon the nomination for governor by the democrats of Michigan of W. R. Burt, president of the Salt association, or trust. I have since received several letters from friends in the west speaking of him in high terms, and from the reports of his speeches printed in the Michigan papers it is clear that he is in entire sympathy with the president’s tariff policy and is making a vigorous fight against the protectionist robbery and superstition. It is also only fair to Mr. Burt to say that the Workman has entirely reversed its position, and is now heartily supporting him. If Mr. Burt has been making money out of the tariff, the credit to him for now opposing it is all the greater.

Two United States special treasury agents (probably they were democrats, and possibly they were free traders) seized in Philadelphia last week a shipment of wool from Canada consigned to Thomas Lee & Co., wool merchants and high protectionists, the shipment being found to contain not only wool on which there is a duty of ten cents a pound, but some fine English blankets, on which there is a duty of twenty-four cents a pound and thirty-five per cent ad valorem. Mr. Thomas Lee, the head of the firm, is a protectionist of the highest kind (for the sake of American labor, of course), and has made himself extremely active in the agitation against the Mills bill, because it puts wool on the free list. He was a prominent figure in the wool growers’ convention held in Washington to protest against the bill, and made there a speech an hour in length, expatiating upon the beauties of protection and the danger to the American workingman if it should be abolished, or even reduced.

The seizing of bales of wool containing blankets, imported by this protectionist firm, indicates what is the real interest in keeping up many protective duties. I have been told, for instance, that one of the largest carpet manufacturing firms in this country, who are very active in their opposition to the Mills bill, although it abolishes the duty on wool without reducing the protective duty on carpets, really find a large part of their profits in the importation of the higher grades of wools and woolen yarns as low grade carpet wools. Managing to get on the blind side of a few customs inspectors, this is made very easy; and their profit is the difference between the duty levied by the tariff on the higher grade of wools that are really imported and the lower duty imposed on the cheaper wools that are entered at the custom house. Protection is in reality protection to smuggling, and to the fraud, perjury and corruption which under our system accompany smuggling.

If there were nothing else against tariffs than the demoralization inseparable from them, that alone would be sufficient to condemn them.

The Sun, whose dearest hope is to defeat Cleveland and elect Hill, is frantically calling on the president to write a letter

p. 1, col. 4

[in]dorsing the candidate who stands for [a]ll that is corrupt and degrading in our [po]litics, while petitions to the same effect [a]re being freely circulated. Threats of [”]knifing” Cleveland are openly made by [th]e partisans of Hill, and in the western [p]art of the state banners bearing the in[s]cription “Harrison and Hill” are being [hung?] out.

The president did a weak and foolish [th]ing in writing a letter indorsing Colonel [F]ellows in the last election. He is not [li]kely to make the same mistake again, [ev]en if the impudent demand did not come [fr]om men who are bent on his defeat. [T]o say nothing of the obvious impropriety [of] the president indorsing any candi[da]te, Cleveland and Hill belong to [th]e same party only in name. Cleveland [re]presents in this election all that is [g]ood in democracy; Hill represents [al]l that is bad and corrupt. The [ca]ndidate of the democratic machines, [w]ho owes his nomination to his veto of a [bi]ll that would have purified our politics [a]nd ended the rule of bosses and halls, [w]ill receive the support of all the worst ele[m]ents of the republican party, and of all [t]he protectionist democrats who will vote [fo]r Harrison. Hill not merely ought to be [def]eated for the same reason that Cleveland [ou]ght to be elected, but those who vote [fo]r Cleveland for principle and not because [h]e is merely a democratic nominee, ought [to] vote against Hill in order to defeat the [co]nspiracy to secure for him a larger vote [th]an that cast for Cleveland and thus des[tr]oy the significance of the result.

A copy of THE STANDARD of this week [i]s sent to every name on the enrolled list o[f] single tax Cleveland and Thurman [vo]ters, with the hope that they will place it where it may do good.

HENRY GEORGE.

A PROTECTION CATECHISM.

[I]s demand for goods demand for labor? If not, why not?

[W]hen we buy foreign goods do we set fo[re]igners at work? If not, why not?

[W]hen foreigners buy our goods do they se[t] us at work? If not, why not?

[W]ill foreigners send their goods into th[i]s country unless we send our goods [o]ut? If not, why not?

[D]oes the importation of goods reduce wa[g]es here? If so, how?

Listen to the Mail and Express:

If the British free trade system were adopted in this country the British system of direct taxation would be taken with it, and we should find the government compelling every one to pay an annual tax for the privilege of doing business and adding to the prosperity of the country. In England, a man who is an auctioneer is fined $50 a year; a banker is fined [$10?]; house agents are fined $10; peddlers are fined $1.25; refiners of gold or silver are fined $27.75. We call these taxes fines, because they are penalties for being enterprising. We would not like the system in this country.

We are delighted to hear the good Shepard thus proclaiming that he thinks it is notright to compel “every one to pay an annual tax for the privilege of doing business and adding to the prosperity of the country.” But we fear he will have some difficulty in persuading the orators of his party to express these ideas in extenso from the stump. The good Shepard, however, can do much in that direction through his paper. He can point out to the American people how foolish it is, when aman^sic builds a house, to fine him for doing it, or when he exchanges a bushel of grain for a few tin plates, to fine him for doing that. He can call these taxes fines because they are penalties for being enterprising. And if any inferior person presumes to dispute with him, and to say that taxes must be laid on something, he can explain to that ignoramus that a tax upon land values would provide in superabundance for all public needs, and would quicken industry and secure it its full reward, instead of checking and robbing it.

We print this week a catechism of “the purposes and essential principles of the Knights of Labor,” issued by District assembly 46 of Buffalo, N. Y. It is a document that everybody ought to read, and from which few can fail to derive both pleasure and profit. Knights of Labor who understand the true principles of their order will rejoice to see them stated so temperately and with such convincing clearness. And those whose acquaintance with the order has gone no farther than hearsay gossip and newspaper paragraphs, may be pleased to learn that it has purposes more noble than the breaking of ginger beer bottles and the shutting out of immigration—that it is in truth an educational order, teaching its members the true principles of freedom and the surest and safest methods of their advancement. It is to be hoped that the Journal of United Labor will follow our example in reprinting District assembly 46’s catechism, and that it may be officially adopted by the next general assembly of the order.

How would people who have armorial designs on their carriages ike^sic to pay an annual tax of $10.50 for the privilege? That is the

p. 1, col. 5 kind of tax that would take the place of a protective tariff.—[Mail and Express.

We might comment on this, but we refrain. Such a lily is best left unpainted.

The issue of the Christian Union for September 27 contains an interesting letter from Bronson C. Keeler on the subject of “The pulpit for to-day.” Mr. Keeler frankly criticises the attitude of the clergy with regard to the social questions now pressing for solution, and points out that it is largely the cause of the apathy with which young men are learning to regard Christian organizations. The letter and the Christian Union’s editorial answer are both worth reading.

Leland Stanford has been talking political economy. It is a good thing to study political economy before talking it; but no protectionist regards that as necessary, and Mr. Stanford is a protectionist. Mr. Stanford is much worried lest workingmen’s wages in the United States may decline, and he is sure they will decline if the tariff is lowered, because “a manufacturer will not continue to pay his men $2 a day, when, by moving his factory across the ocean he can get laborers for sixty cents.” It does not occur to Mr. Stanford—why should it, since such things were never done?—that the manufacturer might find it more profitable to import the sixty cent laborers than to export his factory!

But the danger of a general exportation of factories is not all, nor the worst, that the patriotic Mr. Stanford predicts. He finds that the same principle “applies as well to wheat growing as to manufactures,” from which we are to infer, apparently, that a wheat grower will not continue to pay his men $2 a day when by moving his wheat fields across the ocean he can get laborers for sixty cents. If our wheat fields and our factories were all exported to places of cheaper labor, it might pull hard at our heart strings, this swerving of old associations, but we should have the satisfaction of knowing that our exports exceeded our imports. Mr. Stanford has overlooked that phase of this dreadful migration. Truly, the darkest cloud has a silver lining!

But then Mr. Stanford goes on to say that “the element of wages has comparatively little to do with fixing the price of the products.” This was a very thoughtless remark for Mr. Stanford to make. If wages have but little to do with fixing the price of the product, higher or lower wages cannot be a serious factor in competition. Indeed, Mr. Stanford says as much. “Paying high wages,” he says, “does not in any way interfere with our competing with foreign producers in the markets of Europe.” But if we, while paying higher wages, are able to undersell foreign producers who pay low wages, how can our tariff keep our wages up?

The republican managers are not well up in their new role of “workingman’s friend.” Ludicrous as have been the efforts of the New York Tribune and the Philadelphia Press to make “protection to American industry” in the editorial columns dovetail with “scab” labor in the composing room, they sink into funereal solemnity compared with the blunder at the Polo ground mass meeting at which Mr. Blaine spoke. All the evening a torrent of protection eloquence flowed from the lips of Blaine and Foraker and Finnerty and Tenney, and its burden was the necessity of “protecting” the workingman. In rhetoric sweet as honey, and with logic slippery as quicksilver, the horny handed sons of toil were warned against the wiles of the free trader and urged to vote for protection against pauper labor. But lo! and behold! it has since transpired that the very platform on which the speakers stood was built by pauper labor. The republican club, instead of employing union carpenters to do the work, employed a notorious anti-unien^sic shop, and when the walking delegate of the carpenters went to the grounds to investigate, he was ordered away. The republican party wants “protection” for labor, but it wants the “protection” to pass through the hands of some monopolist. The trouble with that kind of “protection” is that it all sticks to the hands through which it is supposed to pass.

In connection with Hill’s candidacy for governor, organized workingmen will find it worth their while to consider another candidate on the Hill ticket—John Clinton Gray, the candidate for judge of the court of appeals. Mr. Gray was appointed by Governor Hill to the vacancy on the court of appeals bench caused by the death of Judge Rapallo. While occupying that place the case of John E. Gill of the shoemakers’ district of the Knights of Labor came before the court. It will be remembered that the court of appeals decided that case against Gill, holding in effect that an agreement of two or more workingmen to refuse to work in the same shop with an objectionable character is a conspiracy. Whether the decision itself was right or wrong, the manner in which it was rendered was in a marked degree suspicious, and altogether offensive and indefensible. The question involved was one that had never before come before the highest court; it affected the rights

p. 1, col. 6 of every member of a labor organization; and it required for the first time a construction of the conspiracy statute in its relations to labor organizations. An offhand decision, unaccompanied by the reasons on which it was based, was in such a case an insult to workingmen, and indicative of the contempt in which the judges held the class of citizens whose interests were at stake before it. Yet that is precisely the manner in which the decision was rendered and Judge Gray—Hill’s appointee and his associate on the state ticket—who sat in the case and united in the decision against Gill, is as much responsible for the offensive way in which the decision was rendered as any other judge who sat. It was not the duty of any particular judge to write an opinion; but it was the duty of all the judges to see to it that an opinion was written. Judge Gray is the only one of them whom workingmen can this year hold to his responsibility at the polls.

FROM E. Q. NORTON OF ALABAMA.

NOTES FROM CORRESPONDENCE.

W. T. Baden jr., Springfield, Mass.—I wish to do something (if only a little) for the cause of freedom. In the last presidential election I cast my vote for “Trusty Jim” and “protection.” It was an honest vote, though an ignorant one. But now I have come to see the light. I am a West Virginian, from that historic town of Harper’s Ferry, where one John Brown made an attempt to free another class of men. I want another blow to be given for freedom in my old home. So as a small step toward that end I inclose payment for some STANDARDS and tracts, which I wish to send to the accompanying addresses.

Phil. T. South, Chicago, Ill.—A trip, such as I recently made by wagon, from Dayton, Ohio, to Chicago, via Richmond and Lafayette, Ind., could set any one to thinking. We passed through mile after mile of rich lands without seeing a house or a human being, the lands being entirely uncultivated or used even for pasturage. An occasional inquiry from a lone tenant or farm hand brought out the fact that these lands were held at an average price of [$30?] an acre, and that the owners lived in other parts of the country. I learned, too, that these lands are taxed at a valuation only a little higher than the price of government lands. In this city I have driven to South park over the Grand boulevard, and of the lots I passed, not one in fifty is built upon, while all are held at exorbitant prices. It is extraordinary that people permit such a condition of things to exist.

J. F. Townes, Huntingdon, Tenn.—I wish to protest against what J. B. Carroll of Chicago says in a recent number of THE STANDARD, who says he is not willing to see this country ruled by the “solid south.” Because the south casts most of the democratic vote, and that party is at last on top after twenty-four years, are we southerners to be looked at as a lot of villainous usurpers? Furthermore, the country is not ruled by a solid south, and everybody knows it is not. Mr. Carroll says, too, that in the south the dominant class have no respect for labor, but despise it, and do all in their power to retard the education of the “poor white and colored trash.” To which I will say that nearly all men in the south labor in some capacity, and such uncalled for misrepresentations are only calculated to do harm.

GETTING DOWN TO THE REAL BUSINESS OF THE CANVASS.

Perfecting Organization and Holding Meetings—A Review of the Week’s Work—Announcements for Future Meetings—Extracts from Campaign Correspondence.

The work of the Single tax Cleveland and Thurman campaign committee has made good progress during the week ending Tuesday, October 2. The enrollment is steadily increasing, and the organization of districts in New York is beginning to have an excellent effect.

On Saturday, September 29, Henry George and others addressed a large meeting in Albany, and the work there has begun to make rapid progress, the enrollment having largely increased within the last week.

On Friday, September 28, the Tenth congressional district in New York was organized, and on Monday, October 1, the Twelfth congressional district had a business meeting to perfect its organization.

On Tuesday, October 2, Mr. Louis F. Post and W. B. Estell addressed a meeting at Port Jervis, where great interest has already been displayed. Mr. Estell has just returned from a trip through the southern tier, and he finds single tax men eager for meetings at Binghamton, Port Jervis, Owego and Elmira, and efforts will be made to satisfy these demands.

On Wednesday, October 3, the Seventh congressional district in New York met for organization at [194?] Third avenue, while the Tenth congressional district held its first public meeting at Grocers’ hall, Twenty-third street and Third avenue. Speeches were made by J. R. Abarbanelle and W. J. Gorsuch.

The following extracts will give an idea of^sic the tone of the letters which are pouring in upon the committee:

Announcements for meetings in the future are as follows:

In the Eighth congressional district, on Thursday, Oct. 4, in New Windser hall^sic, 412 Grand street. Speeches will be made by W. O. Eastlake, J. R. Abarbanelle, and others.

At Cooper union, New York, Friday, Oct. 5, speeches by Thomas G Shearman and W. J. Gorsuch; Henry George to preside.

On Saturday, Oct. 6, Temperance hall, Kent avenue, Brooklyn, speeches by Louis F. Post and W. O. Eastlake. Rev. S. W. Laidler will preside.

On the same evening, the Ninth congressional district branch of the New York free trade club will open headquarters at 105 Second avenue, and addresses will be made by W. J. Gorsuch, William McCabe and Michael J. Murray.

The Eighth congressional district will hold a meeting on the same evening at Goodfellows’ hall, 104 Essex street, between Broome and Delancey, which will be addressed by John H. Dougherty, Everett Glackin and J. R. Abarbanelle.

Monday, Oct. 8, Henry George will speak at Patterson, N. J^sic.

Tuesday, Oct. 9, Louis F. Post will speak at Elizabethport, N. J.

On the same night there will be held in the eastern district of Brooklyn a large meeting at Palace hall, Nos. 81 and 83 Grand street, and addresses will be delivered by Henry George and Thomas G. Shearman.

On Wednesday, October 10, a large meeting will be held in Wendell’s hall, on Forty-fourth street, between Eighth and Ninth avenues, New York, in the Eleventh congressional district, at which addresses will be delivered by Louis F. Post and W. J. Gorsuch.

On the same evening there will be held in Brooklyn, at New Turn hall, Sixteenth street and Fifth avenue, a meeting to be addressed by John J. Dougherty^sic and W. O. Eastlake.

James Begg, [154?] Seventh avenue, Brooklyn, is preaching single tax among the musicians, and is preparing to organize a single tax band.

John G. Hopkins, Middletown, Conn.—I have read “Progress and Poverty” and have become a single tax man, and will vote for Cleveland and Thurman. Hitherto I have always been a republican.

James Fitzgerald, Jeddo, N. Y.—I vote for Cleveland because I think it is for the interests of the farmers and laborer that he shall win. I am also a Hill man. Hill is very popular in Orleans and Niagara counties.

W. F. Bien, Cleveland, Ohio.—I am one of those favored individuals, a protected manufacturer. To secure a forty to fifty per cent duty on my manufactures (confectionery) I have to pay a seventy-two per cent duty on my material (sugar), or an equivalent in the shape of increased prices to the sugar trust. This year count me for Cleveland. I was for Blaine in 1884, but have since became^sic a land tax advocate and a free trader.

Isaac Broome, South Amboy, N. J.—I have always been a free trader, but since the first Lincoln campaign have not voted for milk and water democracy, and could not conscientiously vote for a tariff party. This year, however, Cleveland gets my vote.

A. Vinette, Los Angeles, Cal.—I inclosed a list of seventy-four single tax men who will vote for Cleveland and Thurman. They are all wage workers and badly in need of protection against imported Chinese labor, monopolies and landlordism, but they know that trade restrictions are a curse instead of a blessing. It looks as if Harrison would not carry the Pacific slope. In two days’ rustling I did not find one single tax man who is going to vote for protection.

Robert Richardson, Mahanoy City, Pa.—Five out of the eight men whose names I send were Blaine republicans. “Protection or Free Trade?” converted them.

Robert Scott, Brooklyn, N. Y.—Inclosed are nine names. All of us will vote against Hill. I was inclined at first to vote the state prohibition ticket, but to defeat Hill I shall vote for Miller.

William H. Ryan, Monroe, N. C.—Inclosed are some more names for enrollment. I hope our New York friends will down Hill and elect Cleveland. If we get ballot reform we will hold the balance of power.

Charles S. Prizer, Reading, Pa.—I have just returned from the west, where free trade is booming. Will send you a list of names shortly.

Frank Draine, Wilmington, Del.—Put me down as a former republican who will vote for Cleveland and the single tax.

W. L. M. Perkins, South Gaston, N. C.—Here are eight names of single tax Cleveland voters. We hope to form a club soon.

John Bennett, Philadelphia, Pa.—Here are the names of nine men working in the highly protected woolen industry who know by bitter experience whether this fetich of protection adds to their happiness or not. There is a great change among the workers here. They talk of little else than the tariff—in the very factory itself they get into hot discussions. And when any one says that the tariff regulates or enhances the wages of the workers he is met by such questions as: Why is it that a loom fixer in North Carolina receives only eighty cents for work for which in Pennsylvania he gets [$1.60?]? How is it that

p. 2, col. 2 wool sorters in New Jersey are paid eighty cents a day and in Pennsylvania $1.51 for the same work? How is it that in the great tile manufacturing state^sic of Massachusetts the average weekly earnings of weavers for last year was only [$5.64?]. How is it that the highly protected carpet weavers cf Philadelphia^sic average weekly $7 in wages? Is it not true that supply and demand of labor have something to do with the rate of wages? This is the kind of questions workingmen in this vicinity are asking the tariff mongers.

Louis Meyer, Albany.—Four years ago I voted for Cleveland, but was then a high protectionist. This year I vote for Cleveland for the radical stand he has taken on the tariff question, for I am no longer a protectionist.

B. Sims, Brooklyn.—Inclosed are the signatures of six single tax men in New York and Brooklyn who will support Cleveland and Thurman in the coming election. It is not much that I can do in this way, but I hope to send more.

Agnes C. Sims, Brooklyn.—Although I am a young girl, and not allowed to vote, I can preach single tax, and I take as much interest in it as my father. What encourages me is that, although we have the great barriers of ignorance and prejudice in the way, yet you cannot arouse a person’s interest enough to hunt for “the cat” without his going further and further in the search until he has found it. And such is “the cat’s” influence, that once having seen it himself, he has no peace until he has made somebody else see it.

William Hornung, Chicago, Ill.—I received my first copy of THE STANDARD this week, and I fully indorse the principles it advocates. I have always been a tariff reformer, and I shall cast my vote for Cleveland and Thurman.

Alfred Gould, Oakland, Cal.—Find inclosed single tax blank, signed by me. Tariff discussion is becoming rampant here. Judge Maguire is fighting a good and steady fight.

John H. Quinlan of Glens Falls, N. Y., formerly state committeeman Twenty-first congressional district, united labor party.—My efforts to convince workingmen here that the tariff does not raise wages are very successful. For the present I content myself with advocating absolute free trade, saying little about the land tax, but everybody I touch knows I am a single tax man. I find that one iron in the fire is enough. Cleveland would receive a much larger vote if a single tax free trader could be put in each assembly district to talk free trade; it would lessen any opposition to a reduction.

D. Munro, New Auburn, Sibley Co., Minn.—In signing the blank for single tax Cleveland voters I would remark that though late you must not think that I have been in any doubt as to what I should do. I have voted the republican ticket for the last twenty-four years previous to last presidential election, when their attitude on the tariff question drove me to vote for Cleveland. I am one of those who think that Mr. Cleveland to the best of his ability did his duty to the country, and therefore I have made up my mind to use what little influence I possess in his favor. I have been a reader of THE STANDARD from the first copy, and to say I like it but feebly expresses my admiration and approbation of the sentiments it promulgates. I am a farmer. I own 200 acres here, but can plainly see my way to bettering my condition by the single tax system and lose no opportunity of impressing upon the minds of those I come in contact with the advantage it would be to all but land speculators. Have read all of Henry George’s works and think, of all the criticisms I have seen upon your works in newspapers and books, not one of your arguments have been successfully refuted.

E. Stillman Doubleday, Brooklyn.—I was in my boyhood an unconditional abolitionist, and after [1859?]-61 a republican, because that party took “one step” in the direction of freedom, which began the irresistible, the inevitable conflict. I battled for liberty with tongue and pen, and in the field, with all the little strength I could command, following the republican party faithfully, devotedly, sometimes perhaps blindly, until it turned its back on freedom and closed its ears to the cry of the oppressed. I appealed to my old party in February 13, 1887, in a letter to a republican leader—Governor Foraker of Ohio—(published in THE STANDARD of February [26?], 1887) urging him to direct the attention of his party to the sad and threatening condition of the masses; to beg his party to again begin battle for the oppressed; to again come close to the hearts and sympathies of the people; to take anew the inspiration of liberty, and so, leading on in the fight for equal justice, save itself from ignominy and death. My hopes and pleadings were all in vain. Governer Foraker’s^sic lengthy reply to my letter was but a string of platitudes and a rehash of the subterfuges and evasions which so commonly make up the argument of the practical politician, and he avoided committal to any practical principle. Now, again, I may have the pleasure of voting with a party and for a man as president who has taken a step toward freedom and again brought on the inevitable conflict which I believe can have but one finale. The same purpose and the same principle that led me to cast my first vote for Abraham Lincoln in [1863?] requires me to vote for Grover Cleveland in 1888. Please to enroll my name. I have never before voted for a democratic national ticket. This vote Mr. Cleveland may credit to the account of his one “first step”—please to step ahead, Grover, they’re crowding behind. I may add that as Governor Hill has chosen to take his one step backward I shall not vote for him.

M. C. Monroe, Atlantic, Iowa.—I feel very much encouraged by the success which I have met in getting signatures to the single tax Cleveland and Thurman guarantee. Here are sixteen names to put down on your list.

C. M. Wyth, Cedar Falls, Iowa.—My first vote goes for Cleveland and Thurman. I’m a single tax man.

Arthur P. Davis, Santa Fe, N. M.—Inclosed find my enrollment as a single tax Cleveland voter. I was formerly a greenbacker, and afterward a union labor man. I cannot express how thankful I am for the circumstances that have saved the single tax cause from burying itself alive in a third party movement and has brought it into practical politics, where it can advocate the cause of freedom.

Edmund R. Otis, Superior, Wis.—I am a democrat, but will leave the party whenever it is not headed for free trade and the single tax.

C. E. Marks, Plymouth, Mass.—We have rooms here, where campaign literature is kept on hand for inquirers. We hope to win a good many converts.

E. Lacmann, Philadelphia, Pa.—You will find on the list accompanying twelve names, besides my own, to be put down as favoring the single tax Cleveland movement. I am one of those who have never voted anything else for the last twenty-four years than the straight republican ticket, and nothing else could ever change my political ideas but the Henry George doctrine.

J. W. Marsh, Parkersburg, W. Va.—I enclose the signatures of ten single tax men who will vote for Cleveland and Thurman. Eight years ago this month I read “Progress and Poverty,” and at once became a convert. It is often remarked that an old man never changes in his lines of thought. That I deny.

p. 2, col. 3 I am nearly sixty years of age and [until a?] few years ago I was a republican. [While I?] became a convert to the philosophy of [single?] tax I never expected to see another [convert?] in this town during my life time; [now we?] have fifty-three members and are getting [recruits?] every week. So let the good [work go?] on until labor is entirely freed from all [restrictions?], until the commerce of the [world is?] as free as the winds that blow over the [face?] of the earth.

W. E. Jackson, Auburn, Me.—About [two?] weeks ago I obtained fifteen or twenty [names?] and gave them to the secretary of our [club?], F. W. Beals, who obtained some more, [and?] forwarded them all, amounting to [thirty-?][illegible], for enrollment. They were credited to [Auburn?], N. Y., instead of Auburn, Me. I [send?] two more signatures with this.

W. S. Doy, Ithaca, Mich.—I have [always?] been a republican, the [son?] of an old abolitionist, Dr. John Doy, who went to Kansas [from?] Rochester, N. Y., with the first colony [from?] Boston in 1854, and was captured and [imprisoned?] for aiding some negro slaves to [escape?]. I am doing what little I can for the single [tax?], and shall continue until the end.

Ernest J. Paul, Geneseo, Ill.—Instead [of?] looking at what all can see and [comprehend?], the natural relations that exist between [the?] states, we are discussing the tariff of [our?] grandfathers—whether it will injure or [help?] England. A mass of statistics are [hurled at?] the people to prove pro or con, when a [half?] hour’s intelligent study or explanation [to an?] unlearned person will prove the natural [law?], free trade.

J. J. Quinn, Donaldson, Pa.—With this [I?] send you some addresses, to which you [may?] send literature with good effect. I live in [a?] locality where the majority of the [inhabitants?] are coal miners. I am a miner myself. I [am?] only too anxious to do anything for the [single?] tax cause. It grieves me that I cannot [do?] more, but it is very hard to collect any [money?]. We have not yet got over the effect of [the?] last strike.

Thomas Williamson, Lynchburg, Va.—I [send?] my name for enrollment. I shall “[Nicodemus?]” no more.

Chas. P. Johnston, Cramer Hill, N. J.—I was formerly a republican and voted [for?] Baine in 1884^sic. Was converted to the [single?] tax theory about two years ago and [have?] since been advocating it in and out of [season?], and, I think, to some purpose. I have [made?] several converts in this place. I intend [to?] vote for Cleveland and Thurman, and will [use?] my best endeavors to gain votes for them [in?] this locality.

G. V. Hely, Cœur, Cal.—I was an old [line?] republican but am now a single tax [free?] trader, and I will vote for Cleveland.

Wilbur Mosena, Burlington, Iowa.—I [send?] you my name and address as one who [will?] support Cleveland and Thurman and [the?] democratic candidate for congress in my [district?], not because they are free traders, [but?] because they are going that way. Until [two?] years ago I had been a radical [republican?]. At that time I read “Progress and [Poverty?],” and have since enlisted in the new cause [and?] am now ready to support any movement [tending?] toward free trade and free [production?].

The Song of the G. O. P.

We are friends of the toiler, down troden^sic, oppressed, In the finest of raiment we’d fain see [him?] dressed; We’ll rescue him surely from Poverty’s [brink?], And yet, entre nous, we, with Harrison, [think?] That a dollar a day Is very good pay For any poor laboring man.

His knives, forks and spoons, his sugar, shall be, Well taxed, but, remember, his whisky is free; We’ll keep up the price of his clothes and his coal, While with untaxed tobacco his wife he’ll console; For a dollar a day Is excellent pay For any poor laboring man.

Messrs. Blaine and Carnegie have [seen?] from their coach How cheap foreign goods on our fac’ries encroach; Pauper products we’ll keep from American shelves, While slyly importing the paupers themselves, Since a dollar a day Is munificent pay For any poor laboring man.

From Wall street and coal trusts ve draw^sic our resources, Yet sympathize deeply (between our rich courses) With the poor and the wretched of every section, And wish to afford them the fullest “protection;” Yet a dollar a day Is very good pay For any poor laboring man.

As for trusts and monopolies we lave no care^sic, They are “private” and something the people must bear; So to Cleveland, good workmen, your votes never pledge, For he wars upon “trusts,” and has dared to allege That a dollar a day Is beggarly pay For any brave laboring man.

CHARLES W. PHILLIPS.

Chicago, Ill., Sept. 19.

Single Tax Men on the Democratic Stump in Indiana.

In a private letter one of our good friends in St. Louis says:

H. Martin Williams leaves to-morrow for Indiana; with him goes W. H. Blake of St. Joseph, Mo., who presided over the deliberations of the united labor party convention at Sedalia. The boodle tendencies of some of the members of the executive committee appointed by that convention have proved too much for the honest bricklayer, and he has shaken himself loose and starts with Williams to preach the gospel of what the democrats are pleased to call tariff reform. We single tax men have another name for it, of course, but if the democrats want us to call it tariff reform what’s the difference? Williams hopes to get a crack at John Jarrett, and Blake’s handy tongue is eager to bandy words with ex-Secretary Litchman. You may advise our friends in Indiana of the coming of these men. Williams is by all odds the best stump speaker in Missouri, and Blake is, as I said before, awful handy with his tongue. I think that they have each a three weeks’ list of appointments. They are both loaded for bear, and John Jarrett will find in our Missouri jawsmith—H. Martin Williams—a foeman worthy of his steel, or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say, of his tin plate. Williams can hold an audience half a day, and his voice improves as the hours slide by. Blake will keep the flies off of Litchman if he gets a chance at him, and as he has kept posted on K. of L. affairs and has been himself a prominent Missouri knight, will be able to ask that gentleman some interesting questions. Of course these gentlemen are both for Cleveland because they are for the single tax.

p. 2, col. 4

HE IS NOMINATED TO SUCCEED FORAN IN CONGRESS.

His Name Received in the Democratic Convention with a Whirlwind of Applause—Nominated by Acclamation on a Genuine Democratic Platform.

The democratic convention of the Twenty-first congressional district of Ohio assembled in Cleveland Sept. 29 and nominated Tom L. Johnson to succeed Martin A. Foran in congress. No other name was presented to the convention, and the nomination was made by acclamation amid a tumult of applause.

The convention was called to order by Mr. Charles Missar, chairman of the district committee, and Mr. August Zetwing^sic was chosen permanent chairman. The usual officers and committees were selected and appointed, and the organization of the convention completed. Nominations being then in order, Dr. R. A Vance secured the floor.

HE NAMES A WINNER.

“I want,” said Dr. Vance, “to name a winner—a man who is favorably known to every man here and throughout the district, a man who will firmly stand by tpe president^sic and will well represent the district in congress. I nominate Tom L. Johnson.”

Then the cheers went up and drowned the speaker’s voice. Every delegate was on his feet, cheering, waving his hat and shouting for Tom Johnson. It was evident that Dr. Vance had realized his wish. He had “named a winner,” indeed.

SECONDED, “THIRDED” AND “FOURTHED.”

As soon as order was somewhat restored, City Clerk Salen rose to second the nomination. He spoke of Tom Johnson’s life in Cleveland, of what he had done for the city, of his strong common sense and good old-fashioned democratic ways. “Tom Johnson,” he said, “belongs to no class. He has the confidence of the business men and the love and esteem of every wage worker. I move that nominations close.”

“As Mr. Salen has seconded the nomination, I want to ‘third it,’” said Colonel Van Tassell^sic. “If the convention makes this nomination, the convention will make no mistake. If nominated, Tom Johnson (cheers) will go to congress a whooping. He’ll run the Brooklyn street railroad right into Washington.”

Mr. R. A. Jones, colored delegate, desired to “fourth” the nomination. He was proud of the choice the convention was about to make. No man, he said, would be stronger than Mr. Johnson, and he will go to congress sure and stand by Grover Cleveland when he gets there.

NOMINATED BY ACCLAMATION.

The question was then put, and the nomination was made by acclamation, the delegates rising to their feet and cheering again and again. The chairman’s announcement of the vote provoked another demonstration, after which a committee was appointed to wait on Mr. Johnson, and the convention proceeded to consider the report of the committee on resolutions.

A THOROUGHGOING PLATFORM.

The following resolutions were adopted:

Resolved, That the democracy of the Twenty-first congressional district of Ohio approves and indorses the administration of Grover Cleveland as the most courageous and truly democrat^sic the country has been blessed with since Andrew Jackson.

Resolved, That in principle we are in hearty accord with the president’s message and the national platform adopted at St. Louis.

Resolved, That we intend the Twenty-first district shall be first in Ohio in support of genuine tariff reform by reducing taxes on the necessaries and comforts of life.

The chair was then empowered to appoint a congressional committee of nine, after consultation with Mr. Johnson, and the convention adjourned.

Mr. Johnson was from home when the committee called to announce his nomination, and when finally informed of the honor done him declared it impossible for him to give an answer till he should have taken time to consider the matter and consult with those interested with him in business.

ENTHUSIASTICALLY RATIFIED.

A grand ratification meeting was held the same evening in the public square of Cleveland. The various democratic organizations marched in torchlight procession to the square, where a large crowd was assembled to greet them, notwithstanding a cold, drizzling rain that would have checked any less ardent enthusiasm. The speeches made indicated no wish to dodge the issue of the campaign, and every mention of Tom L. Johnson’s name was received with cheers that showed how warm a place he held in the hearts of his fellow townsmen.

“I believe,” said Chairman John F. Web^sic, “in protecting our workingmen against the unjust demands and extortions of the tax collector, demands that require them to pay two prices for a great part of their food and clothing. I believe in protecting them against the unjust distribution of the profits of labor. I believe in protecting them against the limited markets of our country, which causes overproduction, or underconsumption, and thereby produces stagnation in business, a stoppage of our mills and factories, and enforced idleness and want on the part of our workingmen. I believe in protecting our farmers against high priced farming implements, against high priced articles of wear and consumption, and against a high cost of transportation for their products, and, on the other hand, of encouraging friendly relations with the nations of the world, to whom we are compelled to sell our immense export farm products, amounting annually to over $500,000,000.”

Messrs. Albert H. Weed, David Rankin, R. A. Jones and David Athey also spoke, announcing their principles in equally plain language, and eliciting frequent bursts of applause. Speaking of Mr. Johnson, Mr. Rankin said:

It is a cold night to be out talking, but it is colder for the republicans. I’ll bet that when they heard Tom Johnson had been nominated a cold chill ran up and down the backs of every republican nominee in this county and district, because they know he is a man who will command a united democratic support and the support of respectable republicans. For all the decent republicans are coming over to our side, disgusted with a party so corrupt that it charges from $10,000 to $12,000 for a nomination.

A STRAIGHTFORWARD LETTER OF ACCEPTANCE.

On Tuesday, October 2, Mr. Johnson forwarded the following letter of acceptance to the committee:

CLEVELAND, O., Oct. 2, 1888.

Augustus Zehring, chairman; Colonel A. T. Van Tassel, C. P. Salen, L. A. Russell, committee, and delegates of the congressional convention of the Twenty-first district of Ohio—Gentlemen: The first member to reach me of your committee appointed to notify me of your nomination, found me a few minutes after I had heard of the action taken, and more than an hour after the convention had adjourned.

Before I left the city, about a week ago, my nomination had been suggested to me as possible by several gentlemen, and to each I emphatically declined to be a candidate, and

p. 2, col. 5 felt absolutely sure that if my name should be mentioned that some of these gentlemen, speaking for me, would convey to the convention my determination.

You can, therefore, imagine my surprise at hearing the result of the action of the convention, and especially at the unanimity of feeling expressed.

I am deeply sensible of the high honor conferred.

Every business interest I have urges me to decline any political office.

My relations with others, interested with me here and elsewhere, whom I felt in honor bound to consult before taking such a step, was the cause of the delay in deciding this question.

I have given this subject every consideration in my power.

Believing that if by accepting this nomination I can help the cause of the reduction of taxes on the necessities and comforts of life, which is the sole question now at issue, I am called upon to make whatever personal sacrifice shall be involved in it.

Standing as I do in the line of indorsing the St. Louis platform as interpreted by the president’s message, and as expressed in the resolutions adopted by your convention, and believing that unnecoessary taxation^sic is unjust taxation, and that this reduction is the first step in the direction of tax reform that must be taken before the ultimate objects of real freedom can be reached, I can heartily approve and support the administration.

I am, as you all know, in personal belief, a free trader, and advocate making as soon as it can lawfully be done, a radical change in the present system of taxation, by which change the burden shall be shifted from the products of labor, where it now bears heaviest, on to the monopoly of the natural opportunities to labor.

This, I am well aware, is for the future, and not yet in present issue.

However reluctant and personally diffident I have been, and am, to enter this campaign of principle as a candidate, I will do everything in my power to bring about a discussion that will demonstrate to the people that in freedom and not in restriction rests the true solution of the great problem of equal justice to all in bearing common burdens, and of special privilege to none at the expense of any others. I accept the nomination. I am, gentlemen, with sincere respect, truly yours,

TOM L. JOHNSON.

WHAT THE LEADING CLEVELAND PAPER SAYS.

The Cleveland Plaindealer, speaking of Mr. Johnson’s nomination, says:

Mr. Johnson was the first man in the city in his line of business who made short hours for his employes and has labored incessantly for the adoption of shorter hours for all men engaged in the same or other kinds of employment. There are thousands of poor who have realized by substantial gifts Mr. Johnson’s largeness of heart. There is not a man in his employ that wants to go out of it, or one that was ever in it but that wants to get back again. Mr. Johnson’s nomination will be immensely popular with all classes of citizens and the workingmen will see that his election is made certain.

Henry George’s Speech—Plans for the Future.

ALBANY, N. Y., Oct. 1—The single tax men of this city opened the campaign with a meeting at the Academy of Music Saturday evening, Sept. 29, when about 1,500 people, among whom were a fair sprinkling of ladies, listened to an address from Henry George. Mr. George’s declaration that he believed in the democracy of Jefferson called forth hearty applause, and every point made against the doctrine of protection immediately elicited a sympathetic cheer. After speaking for an hour and showing that no benefit could possibly result to the wage earner and wealth producer by restriction, and that only in the fullest freedom could labor reap its just reward, Mr. George announced himself ready to answer questions.

For three quarters of an hour he was kept busy doing so, the audience apparently being willing to continue to listen to the questions and answers indefinitely.

The audience was a very intelligent one, composed of men of all shades of political opinion.

The meeting was held under the auspices of the Single tax Cleveland and Thurman club. The committee of arrangements were Messrs. Maloney, Stevens, Zeilman, Noyes, Rose, Barrett, Rosbirt, Campbell, Norwalk, French, Andrews and Meyer. The club has at present a membership of nearly one hundred, but its sphere of usefulness can be considerably extended if all single tax men in and about Albany who intend to vote for Cleveland will join the club and send their names to the secretary, James J. Maloney, 25 Myrtle avenue. We desire to make the club permanent, dropping, of course, the names of Cleveland and Thurman after the election. Active work can be done during the winter if the single tax men will only put their shoulders to the wheel. We intend holding another meeting in a week or two, and hope to have Thomas G. Shearman to address it.

ROBT. BAKER.

The Tariff and Hat Manufacturers.

MIDDLETOWN, N. Y.—In his speech in Cooper union a short time since, Mr. Pentecost made an unfortunate selection in his allusion to hat manufacturers, from the fact that of all manufacturers they are the most unhappy. During the past ten years a majority have either gone into bankruptcy or have been involved in debt. In this case it should be argued that protection narrows the market for the manufacturer of goods, confines his products to a capricious market, which keeps the factories closed a very large part of the time. It is true that under free trade hats would be cheaper than they now are, but it would not be so because of no duty on hats, but because of a reduction in the cost of many articles used in the manufacture of hats. The hat manufacturers do not need protection. What they really need is free trade.

There is but one wealthy hat manufacturer in this country, and he has come out for free trade. He made his money during the war.

C. H. FULLER.

Now Then, Nat McKay, Step Up.

BROCKWAYVILLE, Pa., Oct. 1.—If the repnblican^sic high tariff apostles are averse to a debate on the tariff with Henry George, I would suggest that Nat McKay debate poverty with Helen Campbell, who wrote “Prisoners of Poverty” in a series of papers for the New York Tribune.

BION H. BUTLER.

No English Goods, but All the English Landlords You Please.

New York Press.

Two English syndicates own 7,500,000 acres of land in Texas. Another owns [1,800,000?]. Sir E. J. Reid, the famous English naval^sic constructor, has 2,000,000 acres in Florida. Two London firms own 3,050,000 acres. An English company has 700,000 acres in Mississippi, and another company has 750,000 acres.

p. 2, col. 6

So the News About the Outbreak of Small pox in East Buffalo Was Suppressed and the City Now Enjoys a Small [Sized?] Epidemic.

BUFFALO, N. Y., Sept. 30.—We have in this city a characteristic instance of the utter heartlessness into which men may be led by their greed for gain. Some three months ago a case of smallpox was developed in a crowded district, and before effective measures were taken for its suppression the disease was communicated to others. For a time it seemed as though the trouble would soon be under control, and the papers lent full assistance in reporting all cases which came to their notice. But the fear arising that Buffalo’s “boom” would be injured, and the incoming flow of people checked, the Buffalo business men’s association, alias Buffalo real estate speculators, took action as recorded in the following clipping from the Buffalo Courier of July 17:

The managers of the Business men’s association appeared last evening in a new role—as censors of the Buffalo press, and as such manifested a disposition to mark out a line of policy to be pursued by the newspapers with regard to news that shall or shall not be published. It was the regular monthly meeting, and about all that could be thought of as worthy of consideration was the attitude of the press in regard to the outbreak of smallpox at East Buffalo. In the discussion that took place the sentiment expressed was that it was unwise and detrimental to the best interests of the city to make any extended reference to the matter. It was thought that the promulgation of the news would act disastrously upon the present boom, especially as the time for the opening of the international exposition is only a few weeks distant. A committee was appointed to visit the newspapers this morning and request them in the interest of Buffalo to suppress the news.

The action of the committee was effectual, but little being heard of the trouble, and no vigorous measure taken to suppress it until after the exposition, which, by the way, acted as a medium to pass the plague into some surrounding towns.

On September 22, ’88, the authorities were surprised(?) to find an epidemic of smallpox raging in the city, thirteen cases being reported on that day, eleven in one house in the Polish district. The excuse given was that the trouble had been concealed, as men of families did not wish to lose work through quarantine.

On the 24th, nearly three months after the first case, the health officer secured permission to make a house to house search, and a few days later established free vaccination headquarters, which has reached a capacity of 4,500 operations in twelve hours.

Sixty-nine cases in all have been reported, of which seventeen have died, and the health physician expresses the opinion that he “fully believes that there have been fifty cases which the board has not heard of and never will.”

These facts furnish their own comments—the hole in the levee has assumed a dangerous size, and it will require heroic exertion to prevent the flood.

Better the failure of a dozen expositions and the setting back of Buffalo’s speculative prospects for ten years than the sacrifice of one innocent life in an effort for more than a natural increase in population and so-called prosperity.

AN INDIGNANT CITIZEN.

What They are Doing in Milwaukee.

MILWAUKEE, Wis.—This city has the distinction of having sent the only labor party candidate to congress, and Henry Smith, having voted for the Mills bill, will be supported by the democrats as well as the labor party, and by this united strength will doubtless be re-elected. But fusion does not extend to state or presidential electors; so Wisconsin will not help Mr. Cleveland.

The single tax men have no organization, but are quietly biding their time and hope when election matters quiet down to do some educational work. A reform like ours, involving a return to principles of justice and needing a higher moral feeling than is common to the ordinary citizen cannot be carried on with a shout and a hurrah, but must be slow to be sure.

At the Workingmen’s club rooms last Saturday evening Mr. Peter McGill, by invitation, read a paper on “Land reform and the single tax.” This was the first public exposition of the land reform doctrine since Mr. George’s address of two years ago and Dr. McGlynn’s two addresses last summer. It was listened to with attention and at its close, when opportunity was given to objectors, it was surprising that those who spoke avowed themselves believers, even when asking for more light.

Much money has been made in Milwaukee and vicinity the last few years by the advance in real estate, and it is not surprising [if?] the suggestion of a method to stop this way of making money should meet with opposition, just as the image makers claimed that their craft would be destroyed if Paul continued to preach a god not made with hands. But the few faithful George men will keep quietly at work nevertheless. Heartfelt conviction will force the communication of ideas to others. In the absence of great orators or men of note the work will be done noiselessly, but done it will be and our numbers will increase.

JAMES LEEDOM.

The Eighteenth Ward in Brooklyn.

BROOKLYN, Sept. 28.—A conference of single tax men was held at 253 Evergreen avenue, Brooklyn, last evening. Adolph Pettenkofer was elected chairman pro tem, and James Connell, secretary. After some discussion it was decided to organize a Cleveland and Thurman single tax club. The secretary was ordered to notify all the members of the disbanded Eighteenth ward united labor party association when and where the next meeting will be held. The following men were appointed as a committee on organization: A. Schalkenback, Geo. Turner, J. Connell, Mr. Falkner and A. Pettenkofer. After the conference adjourned the committee engaged Amity hall, 118 Myrtle street, between Evergreen and Central avenues. Meetings will be held every Thursday evening at 8 o’clock. Everybody cordially invited.

ADOLPH PETTENKOFER, chairman. JAMES CONNELL, secretary.

Personal.

Dr. Irving W. Smith of Charles City, Iowa, has opened the single tax crusade in Floyd county of that state, by introducing a discussion of our principles in the leading republican and democratic papers of that county. The comments on Mr. Smith’s articles by those papers show that they are opposed, not to the single tax, but to fiscal changes with which the taxation of land values has no relation. The editors should inform themselves as to what the economic effect of the single tax would be.

Woodford Shannon of Kingman, Kansas, is another single tax man who has been nominated for office by the democrats. He is the regular democratic nominee for district clerk.

Mr. Dana’s View of It.

New York Sun, Sept. 28.

A trust is simply a larger partnership, a more extended business organization than the public have been accustomed to. It belongs to a more advanced state of social development, but in itself it is just as legitimate as any other partnership.

PART I.

For what purpose was the K. of L. formed?

To organize and direct the power of the industrial masses.

In what way can we obtain our objects?

Only through legislation.

What, then, is the duty of all Knights?

To assist in nominating and supporting only those candidates who have pledged themselves to support our measures.

What right has a man to the soil?

He has a right to a share of it, for use.

Can he sell, or can any one purchase from him this right?

No. It is inalienable.

What rights have men to life?

They have equal rights—having been created equal.

If men have a right to life, have they a right to the means of living?

Yes.

If men have equal rights to life, have they, also, equal rights to the means of living?

Yes.

What is given to men to be their “means of living?”

The soil of the whole earth—that is, the land.

Have all the people in this country equal rights to the soil of this country?

Yes.

Has every person in the United States an equal and inalienable right to a share of the land of this country?

Yes.

Now, what is our first demand?

That the equal right of all men to the soil be legally recognized.

What do we demand shall be done with all lands held for speculative purposes?

That they be taxed to their full value.

By whom do we want our money to be issued?

By the government, direct to the people.

What debts should this money be legal tender for?

For all debts, public and private.

Should banks have the right to issue money?

No.

What should the government do with the railroads and telegraphs?

Purchase them.

Why should the government own and control the railroads?

Because they are public highways.

What right has the government to compel the railroad corporations to sell?

The right secured by every franchise given to railroad corporations.

What does the franchise say?

It says that the government shall have the right to purchase the railroads at any time, at their original cost, or their value at the time of purchase.

Has the government as good a right to purchase the telegraphs?

Yes! Because the statute authorizing their construction expressly declares that the government shall have the right to purchase them at any time.

Do you think that the employment of children under fifteen years of age in workshops, mines or factories is right?

No.

Should the law require that all men employed in mining, manufacturing and building be protected against accidents and injuries to their health?

Yes.

If those men be injured because proper safeguards are not provided, should the law procure for them indemnification?

Yes.

What subjects do our six demands cover?

Land, money, railroads, telegraphs, child labor and protection for employes.

Briefly, what are our six demands?

I. The equal rights of all men to the soil.

2. That lands held for speculative purposes should be taxed to their full value.

3. That money should be issued by the government and not through banks.

4. That the railroads and telegraphs be managed by the government.

V. That children under fifteen yəars^sic should not be employed in workshops, mines or factories.

6. That all workmen should be properly protected while at work.

What may we do among ourselves that will indirectly help us in securing our objects?

Help one another.

Is the local assembly founded to protect the workingmen in only one or two trades?

No, it should protect all.

What is a local assembly?

It is a school for the education of its members.

Should it teach them to strike?

No. It should teach that strikes should be avoided.

What should members be educated to depend upon?

Organization, co-operation and political action.

Should it teach men’s right to the soil?

Yes.

Since every Knight who has the right to vote is a part of the government, has he a duty to perform in establishing a just government?

Yes.

Should the local assembly teach its members how to vote intelligently, free from corrupting influences?

Yes. It is one of its highest duties.

PART II.

Do you believe that all men are created equal?

Yes.

Have they equal rights to life?

Yes.

Have they equal rights to the soil, the land—in other words, to the means of living?

Yes.

What right have the people to the land of the earth?

The right to the use of it.

Has one generation more right to the earth than another?

No.

What do we mean by the soil, or land?

The term land includes all natural materials in or on the earth.

What is wealth?

Wealth includes all those products of nature that have been made valuable by labor.

What is capital?

Capital is that portion of wealth used to procure more wealth.

What is rent?

Rent is the return received for the use of land.

What is interest?

Interest is the return received for the use of capital.

What is wages?

Wages is the return received for the exertion of labor.

Who are the laborers and producers?

All those who use their brain or muscle to make mankind richer, wiser or happier.

Now, if the land of any country belongs to the people of that country, to whom does the rent belong?

To all the people who have a right to the land.

If the land of the United States belongs to

p. 3, col. 2 all the people of the United States, have they not a right to the rent of it?

Yes.

If all have equal rights to the land, the means of living, have we not equal rights to rent of it?

Yes.

What is the government?

The agent, or representative of the people.

What are the duties of the government?

To secure to everyone his just rights, to protect him in his enjoyment of them, and to promote the general welfare.

Why should the government collect all rent?

Because it rightfully belongs to the people.

Who collect and keep it under the present system?

The monopolists of the gold, silver, iron, copper, coal and other valuable mines, speculators in rich agricultural and timber lands, and the owners of valuable city lots.

How could the government collect its rents?

By collecting from all land holders, as a tax, what their lands would rent for.

Would not such a tax oppress the workingmen and farmers?

No, because the valuable lands are held by the rich while the producers have the land of little value, and unless the workingmen had more than he has^sic now he would receive back, as his share of the rent, more than he would be compelled to pay as tax.

If a man occupied but his share of the valuable land, would you tax him?

Yes. But since he would receive back as much in rent as he paid in tax he would be paying nothing for his share.

If a man was using more than his share of valuable land, how much tax would he pay?

All that his land would rent for.

How much rent would he receive back?

No more than anybody else—an equal share.

Who would receive the difference between what he paid as tax and what he received as rent?

The persons whose shares he was using.

If a man was not holding land would he have to pay tax?

No.

Would he receive any rent?

Yes. For since somebody else is using his share, he has a right to the rent of it.

Would anybody be wronged by this system of taxation?

No.

Would there be any land speculators under this system of taxation?

No. For since the government would collect all the land value as tax, there would be no inducement in holding land for a rise in value.

Would valuable land then be held out of use?

No. No one would hold land he was not using.

What effect would it have on the monopolists of the timber and mineral lands?

They would have to employ labor to cut their timber and work their mines, because, if they did not they would not be able to pay as tax what those lands would rent for.

How would it effect capital?

Capital being but the child of labor, helping its parent to produce more wealth, would gain by having its proportionate share of the increase of wealth that would be produced.

What effect would it have on labor?

It would compel capitalists to invest all their capital in productive industries instead of using it to restrict production by cornering the necessaries for labor; it would open to labor all the agricultural timber and mineral lands now held out of use; it would make the workingman his own landlord; and if the government supplied the means of exchange, transportation and travel at cost, thereby increasing enormously the facilities for production, it would compel every man to work in order to earn an honest living; and it would secure to the producer the whole product of labor.

After the rent was collected as tax, in what form could it most advantageously be distributed?

In the form of public benefits in which all would share alike.

What benefits should be first supplied?

It should be used to pay the legitimate expenses of government, thus relieving the people of all taxation; and to establish free schools, colleges, and institutions for the blind, the sick and feeble, to furnish light, heat, streets, parks, telegraphs and railroads.

Why is it to the advantage of each individual to have his rent returned to him in the shape of public benefits?

Because he would receive a greater benefit from his share of the rent in that form than he would if he received his rent in money and had to pay for those things as he does now.

With all agricultural, timber and mineral lands thrown open for use, would we be crowding each other out of work in a country that is large enough and rich enough to supply the population of the whole world?

No. There could be no want of employment where there were so many opportunities for labor.

With all monopolies managed by the government, and all men sharing alike the benefits arising from the ownership of land, would the workingmen’s condition be improved?

Yes. He would find himself in a paradise, where it would be a pleasure to labor.

Why is it that now men have to work in dangerous places, and have to depend upon the assistance of their children in order to get but a bare living?

It is because they get only a small portion of what they produce, and in addition are taxed heavily on everything they eat, drink and wear.

In what way can we secure justice to all?

By procuring the passage of just laws.

In the nomination and election of government officials, for whom will you vote?

Only such candidates as will pledge themselves to support our measures.

Do you solemnly promise to perform this duty on all occasions?

I do.

Notes by an English Reader.

After a calm reading of the article in Mr. George’s STANDARD, headed as above (date of New York, Sept. 1, ’88), I desire to make the following observations:

1. All social law is a command, or prohibition, addressed to intelligence and sustained by power, more or less complete or adequate. Personal liberty, therefore, cannot object to intelligent or wise law, and to put them in opposition is a mere trick of words addressed to passion, prejudice or purse. The only questions are. Whether the fruits of any institution or practice is good or evil on the whole, and whether it ought to or can be suppressed or regulated?

2. Even when the form of social law is positive, its reason is negative, and hence its limit in government. Law cannot say you shall “love,” or not “hate;” but it can and does say you shall not do evil or neglect obligations either to family or neighbor. If society cannot enforce this principle the more’s the pity; but that only proves that Schopenhauer is right in logic, and that the devil is the strongest power. It does not prove, however, that we ought not to fight the devil of appetite and interest as Mr. George is fighting the landlords. Success is no proof of right, failure no evidence of wrong.

3. The writers in the North American Review criticised may or may not have dealt with the gist of the question, or they may have simply contributed auxiliary illustrations of the subject; it is hardly worth while to inquire into the logical weaknesses of reviewers, whether they be those of Gladstone, Ingersoll or George. Clearly, to me, however, some of the objections are very questionable and very “queer.” Take as specimens the following:

1. “The end in view is, indisputably, a righteous one.” “That certain things must be true because they make for righteousness—is reckless [assumption?].” What have we here but intellectual pessimism and moral anarchy? If the moral imperative—the ought of thought—be an assumption, the basis of sociology itself vanishes; “right” and “reason” and “duty,” and faith and truth, become unmeaning terms. The moral world has no tortoise to stand upon. Even Matthew Arnold’s god—“the power that tends to righteousness”—disappears, and nothing is left but the evil will of Schopenhauer. We cannot reason without faith in some first principle of either good or evil. We are left in the grasp of the devil of Blind Power! The Irish Clauricarde^sic, the English Balfour, are on the same level of right as the oppressed peasant or the helpless artisan.

2. “We are men who want to build the edifice from the foundations up, not from the roof tree down.” This is inconsistent with the previous objection, which rejects right as a foundation. To reject either logical or moral rightness as a basis is to build on sand. If you build on the rock the edifice may stand, and if the world is based on truth—or in other words, if God rules—the “success” is finally sure. Indeed, how can we prove the right from the success that is not yet in existence? Success follows trial, not precedes it. The moral theory is like the mathematical—it must go before the practice.

3. It is surely strange, in this age of evolution, to find any intelligent person denying that laws which produce either good or evil have no educative power; for it is a denial of the influence of circumstances, by which, of necessity, all morals are taught, both for the young and old. The only difference between the seer and the thinker is, that the latter person is confirmed in his impressions by thinking. He adds the philosophy to the fact. If brothels and gambling houses were not prohibited, does anyone think that they would be less numerous? Or really believe that their prohibition makes no difference? Or that the pressure of opportunity or multiplication of temptation is not followed by proportionate failure to the same people? In the case of Ireland, the teaching of bad laws does all the more make the people contend for good laws; but in truth it is the want of law in Ireland that is the evil, and the people seek for protective laws against the unchecked power of circumstance. They naturally argue, that as law, after all, does protect most men in most things, it should be made to protect all round—especially against the “personal liberty” of rack renting landlords.

4. When laws like the old serf laws of Britain, or the late slave laws of America, or the present land laws of Ireland, inflict palpable wrong on large classes, they cannot but see the wrong; but we cannot shut our eyes to the equally certain fact that just law does secure respect, and does educate, also. If not, let us be consistent and give up all force. Then the question of land laws will be speedily settled.

5. Slave breeding and slave selling were very wicked transactions—crimes against man and God, even when legal; nevertheless I have known kind and pious slaveholders. All the same the business, as Lord Brougham said, was infernal. So is saloon keeping, and I fail to see any “fanaticism” or “exaggeration” in the statement of fact.

4. “Will prohibition prohibit?” asks the writer. The question is ridiculous. It should be, “Can the people, or a large majority of them, prohibit whatever they find injurious to their progress or civilization? If they can’t, let us abandon our absurd and vain agitations, since mobility, in that case, is no better than nobility. What society can do always depends on what society is. If the people are so dull as to be led by interested political bosses in America or by patronizing and pillaging nobles in England, or by mouthing, empty headed socialists, or by cunning brewers and pious distillers anywhere, they cannot prohibit; and even if they did, the administrators of the law would not enforce prohibition. It would only be the name, destitute of the power. What then? This does not even touch the fringe of the true problem,”Ought they to prohibit?”

5. That depends on the peoples knowing^sic the facts that make the philosophy. If they are wise, and when they are wise in their own interest, they will prohibit—and a wise society must certainly be able to make its laws respected by the minority of fools and rogues. Until hereditary evils are worn out under better social arrangements, that is all we can expect, but it is much.

6. The writer is plainly ignorant of the prime and necessary causes of intemperance, which are the moderate and general use of intoxicants, and the temptations to their use. Doubtless, the miserable and weak drink to drown their misery, but it is also true that much misery comes from drinking. When men and women here become abstainers they become industrious, richer, seek better food, better clothing, better homes, and thus increase wonderfully the demand for labor and for goods of all kinds. The law of narcotics, whether as to opium, alcohol, hasheesh or tobacco, is the explanation of the causation of drinking: the little begets the liking for more—and no society can have the one permanently without the other. Not seeing this, the reviewer misunderstands Professor Bascom’s remark concerning appetite, which is an effect of the use, not the primary cause.

7. The political economy of the reviewer is of the strangest kind! He says: (a) “The men who live by the traffic could not

p. 3, col. 4 turn miners, artisans,” etc. Certainly not, without learning; but in the increased commerce of the country consequent on producing wealth instead of destroying food and wasting time, they could do work of a like kind, but innocent. Waiters, carters, servants would be all in greater demand, not less; and surely, if backs are clothed, cupboards filled, and better houses taken and furnished, there must be more demand for work. (b) The discharged men “simply yield their places to others in the work army who must otherwise have stood idle.” The writer can hardly have understood himself or worked out this problem. A man who produces goods consequent on greater demand, shares in the production as wages, and in the more plentiful supply as buyer. He does not displace some one else. The iron horses did not do as predicted, displace the animated; they increased the demand for them by increasing the general wealth of the community. Nobody is benefited by idleness; all are benefited by industry and sobriety, because the resources of society are increased. And protest as the reviewer may, it remains true that the retail rum and beer trades are demoralizing to all concerned—remotely, even, to the souls of the opulent makers quite as much as slave holding or landlordism.

8. When Mr. Blair said that “science has proven alcohol to be a poison as indisputably as strychnine is one,” he said what was true, but he probably did not say it as an argument for prohibition, but as an answer to those who claim alcohol as food, and put it on the same level in law. Why should it be called “a queer argument?” We in England have long prohibited the common sale of strychnine. It is sold only to medical men, or under their authority, and the seller has to register the buyer; and if a fiftieth part of the accidents followed its limited and guarded sale which follow the common sale of rum and beer we should still further prohibit and guard. But the difference in properties between the two things makes all the difference as to absolute prohibition, and all the difference as to the reasons. The alcohol originates an appetite which “grows with what it feeds upon” without killing the drinker quickly, and this appetite is the fountain of that train of personal, social and mental sequences which absolutely defeat all our efforts to realize anything like tolerable civilization.

9. The reviewer strays widely from the fact and history when he calls the proposal to deal with the liquor traffic “a sumptuary law.” It has no one of the characteristics of such a law any more than a license law. It is advocated for no reasons of luxury or class distinction. It lays a specific charge against a specific traffic—viz: That the ends of society are frustrated by its existence, as the source of demoralization, poverty, wrong to wives and children, of disease, lunacy, crime and heavy costs and consequences thrown upon the rest of society. If this be true, it is worse than pestilence, war, slavery or famine, and ought to be destroyed. That is all. This and more was seen by Dr. Channing, one of the most eminent thinkers and most graceful writers the United States has ever produced, from whose noble address “On the Elevation of the Working Classes,” written forty-eight years ago, I reproduce the following: “First, how much of the depression of laborers is to be traced to intemperance? What a great amount of time and strength and money might multitudes gain for self improvement by strict sobriety? That cheap remedy, pure water, would cure the chief evils in very many families of the ignorant and poor. Were the money still lavished on ardent spirits appropriated wisely to the elevation of the people, what a new world we should live in! Intemperance not only wastes the earnings, but the health and the minds of men. How many, were they to exchange what they call moderate drinking for water, would be surprised to learn that they had been living under a cloud, in half stupefaction, and would become conscious of an intellectual energy of which they had not before dreamed; their labors would exhaust them less, and less labor would be needed for their support: and that their inability to cultivate their higher nature would be in a great measure removed. The working classes, above all men, have an interest in the cause of temperance, and they ought to look on the individual who lives by scattering the means and excitements of drunkenness not only as the general enemy of his race, but as their own worst foe.”

How important this question is to the social reformer, fifty years of public life has deeply impressed me. We have to appeal to clear brains and the unclouded moral feelings of humanity, which alone can give a quick and perfect response. A sober people only can have the true perception of the wrong and the remedy, and the destruction of the traffic in drink would hasten, beyond all other conditions, the triumph of reform.

The growing power of the traffic, on the other hand, is the great danger which is looming in the future, both here and in the States, because in darkening and dulling the brain strong drink intensifies the corrupt passions of human nature, to which all vile interests of the world appeal.

F. R. LEES.

[We print Mr. Lees’s communication because we think that courtesy and justice alike entitle him to present his side of the question. The reply of the author of the article Mr. Lees attacks will be found elsewhere.—ED. STANDARD.]

ADAM SMITH’S MISTAKE.

Adam Smith, who gave the direction to economic thought that has resulted in the current elaborate theories of the relation between wages and capital, recognized the fact that in such simple cases as I have instanced, wages as the produce of labor, and thus begins his chapter upon the wages of labor (Chapter VIII):

The produce of labor constitutes the natural recompense or wages of labor. In that original state of things which precedes both the appropriation of land and the accumulation of stock, the whole produce of labor belongs to the laborer. He has neither landlord nor master to share with him.

Had the great Scotchmen^sic taken this as the initial point of his reasoning, and continued to regard the produce of labor as the natural wages of labor, and the landlord and master but as sharers, his conclusions would have been very different and political economy to-day would not embrace such a mass of contradictions and absurdities; but instead of following the truth obvious in the simple modes of production as a clue through the perplexities of the more complicated forms, he momentarily recognizes it, only to immediately abandon it, and stating that, “in every part of Europe twenty workmen serve under a master for one that is independent,” he recommences the inquiry from a point of view in which the master is considered as providing from his capital the wages of his workmen.

It is evident that in thus placing the proportion of self employing workmen as but one in twenty, Adam Smith had in mind but the mechanic arts, and that, including all laborers, the proportion who take their earnings directly without the intervention of an employer, must, even in Europe a hundred years ago, have been much greater than this. For, besides the independent laborers who in every community exist in considerable numbers, the agriculture of large districts of Europe has, since the time of the Roman empire, been carried on by the metayer system, under which the capitalist receives his return from the laborer instead of the laborer from the capitalist. At any rate, in the United States, where any general law of wages must apply as fully as in Europe, and where in spite of the advance of manufactures, a very large part of the people are yet self-employing farmers, the proportion of laborers who get their wages through an employer must be comparatively small.

But it is not necessary to discuss the ratio in which self-employing laborers anywhere stand to hired laborers, nor is it necessary to multiply illustrations of the truism that where the laborer takes directly his wages they are the product of his labor, for as soon as it is realized that the term wages includes all the earnings of labor, as well when taken directly by the laborer in the results of his labor as when received from an employer, it is evident that the assumption that wages are drawn from capital, on which as a universal truth such a vast superstructure is in standard politico-economic treatises so unhesitatingly built, is at least in large part untrue, and the utmost that can with any plausibility be affirmed, is that some wages (i. e., wages received by the laborer from the employer) are drawn from capital. This restriction of the major premiss at once invalidates all the deductions that are made from it; but without resting here, let us see whether even in this restricted sense it accords with the facts. Let us pick up the clue where Adam Smith dropped it, and advancing step by step, see whether the relation of facts which is obvious in the simplest forms of production does not run through the most complex.

THE CASE OF WAGES PAID IN KIND.

Next in simplicity to “that original state of things,” of which many examples may be found, where the whole produce of labor belongs to the laborer. is the arrangement^sic in which the laborer, though working for another person, or with the capital of another person, receives his wages in kind—that is to say, in the things his labor produces. In this case it is as clear as in the case of the self-employing laborer that the wages are really drawn from the produce of the labor, and not at all from capital. If I hire a man to gather eggs, to pick berries, or to make shoes, paying him from the eggs, the berries, or the shoes, that his labor secures, there can be no question that the source of the wages is the labor for which they are paid. Of this form of hiring is the saer and daer stock tenancy, treated of with such perspicuity by Sir Henry Maine in his “Early History of Institutions,” and which so clearly involved the relation of employer and employed as to render the accepter of cattle the man or vassel^sic of the capitalist who thus employed him. It was on such terms as these that Jacob worked for Laban, and to this day, even in civilized countries, it is not an infrequent mode of employing labor. The farming of land on shares, which prevails to a considerable extent in the southern states of the Union and in California, the metayer system

p. 6, col. 2 of Europe, as well as the many cases in which superintendents, salesmen, etc., are paid by a percentage of profits, what are they but the employment of labor for wages which consist of part of its produce?

WAGES ESTIMATED IN KIND, BUT PAID IN MONEY.

The next step in the advance from simplicity to complexity is where the wages, though estimated in kind, are paid in an equivalent of something else. For instance, on American whaling ships the custom is not to pay fixed wages, but a “lay,” or proportion of the catch, which varies from a sixteenth to a twelfth to the captain down to a three-hundredth to tne cabin boy^sic. Thus, when a whaleship comes into New Bedford or San Francisco after a successful cruise, she carries in her hold the wages of her crew, as well as the profits of her owners, and an equivalent which will reimburse them for all the stores used up during the voyage. Can anything be clearer than that these wages—this oil and bone which the crew of the whaler have taken—have not been drawn from capital, but are really a part of the produce of their labor? Nor is this fact changed or obscured in the slightest degree where, as a matter of convenience, instead of dividing up between the crew their proportion of the oil and bone, the value of each man’s share is estimated at the market price, and he is paid for it in money. The money is but the equivalent of the real wages, the oil and bone. In no way is there any advance of capital in this payment. The obligation to pay wages does not accrue until the value from which they are to be paid is brought into port. At the moment when the owner takes from his capital money to pay the crew he adds to his capital oil and bone.

WAGES PROVIDED BY THE SALE OF PRODUCT.

So far there can be no dispute. Let us now take another step, which will bring us to the usual method of employing labor and paying wages.

The Farallone islands, off the bay of San Francisco, are a hatching ground of sea fowl, and a company who claim these islands employ men in the proper season to collect the eggs. They might employ these men for a proportion of the eggs they gather, as is done in the whale fishery, and probably would do so if there were much uncertainty attending the business: but as the fowl are plentiful and tame, and about so many eggs can be gathered by so much labor, they find it more convenient to pay their men fixed wages. The men go out and remain on the islands, gathering the eggs and bringing them to a landing, whence, at intervals of a few days, they are taken in a small vessel to San Francisco and sold. When the season is over the men return and are paid their stipulated wages in coin. Does not this transaction amount to the same thing as if, instead of being paid in coin, the stipulated wages were paid in an equivalent of the eggs gathered? Does not the coin represent the eggs, by the sale of which it was obtained, and are not these wages as much the product of the labor for which they are paid as the eggs would be in the possession of a man who gathered them for himself without the interven- tion of any employer?

To take another [example?], which shows by reversion the ide[ntity?] of wages in money with wages in kind. In [San?] Buenaven[tu?]ra lives a man who makes a[n e?]xcellent living by shooting for their oil an[d?] skins the common hair seals which freque[nt?] the islands forming the Santa Barbara cha[nnel?]. When on these sealing expeditions [he t?]akes two or three Chinamen along to hel[p h?]im, whom at first he paid wholly in coin. [B?]u[t i?]t seems that the Chinese highly value some [of?] the organs of the seal, which they dry and pulverize for medicine, as well as the long hairs in the whiskers of the male seal, which, over a certain length, they greatly esteem for some purpose that to outside barbarians is not very clear. And this man soon found that the Chinamen were very willing to take instead of money these parts of the seal killed, so that now, in large part, he thus pays them their wages.

PRODUCTION ALWAYS THE MOTHER OF WAGES.

Now, is not what may be seen in all these cases—the identity of wages in money with wages in kind, true of all cases in which wages are paid for productive labor? Is not the fund created by the labor really the fund from which the wages are paid?

It may, perhaps, be said: “There is this difference—where a man works for himself, or where, when working for an employer, he takes his wages in kind, his wages depend upon the result of his labor. Should that, from any misadventure, prove futile, he gets nothing. When he works for an employer. however^sic, he gets his wages anyhow—they depend upon the performance of the labor, not upon the result of the labor.” But this is evidently not a real distinction. For on the average, the labor that is rendered for fixed wages not only yields the amount of the wages, but more; else employers could make no profit. When wages are fixed, the employer takes the whole risk, and is compensated for this assurance, for wages when fixed are always somewhat less than wages contingent. But though when fixed wages are stipulated, the laborer who has performed his part of the contract has usually a legal claim upon the employer, it is frequently, if not generally, the case that the disaster which prevents the employer from reaping benefit from the labor prevents him from paying the wages. And in one important department of industry the employer is legal- ly exempt in case of disaster, although the contract be for wages certain and not contingent. For the maxim of admiralty law is, that “freight is the mother of wages,” and though the seaman may have performed his pert^sic, the disaster which prevents the ship from earning freight deprives him of claim for his wages.

In this legal maxim is embodied the truth for which I am contending. Production is always the mother of wages. Without production, wages would not and could not be. It is from the produce of labor, not from the advances of capital that wages come.

Whenever we analyze the facts this will be found to be true. For labor always precedes wages. This is as universally true of wages received by the laborer from an employer as it is of wages taken directly by the laborer who is his own employer. In the one class of cases, as in the other, reward is conditioned upon exertion. Paid sometimes by the day, oftener by the week or month, occasionally by the year, and in many branches of production by the piece, the payment of wages by an employer to an employe always implies the previous rendering of labor by an em- ploye for the benefit of the employer, for the few cases in which advance payments are made for personal services are evidently referable either to charity or to guarantee and purchase. The name “retainer,” given to advance payments to lawyers, shows the true character of the transaction, as does the name “blood money” given in ’longshore vernacular to a payment which is nominally wages advanced to sailors, but which in reality is purchase money—both English and American law considering a sailor as much a chattel as a pig.

THE SOURCE OF CURRENT FALLACIES.

I dwell on this obvious fact that labor always precedes wages, because it is all important to an understanding of the more complicated phenomena of wages that it should be kept in mind. And obvious as it is, as I

p. 6, col. 3 have put it, the plausibility of the proposition that wages are drawn frem capital^sic—a proposition that is made the basis for such important and far reaching deductions—comes in the first instance from a statement that ignores and leads the attention away from this truth. The statement is that labor cannot exert its productive power unless supplied by capital with maintenance.(1) The unwary reader at once recognizes the fact that the laborer must have food, clothing, etc., in order to enable him to perform the work, and having been told that the food, clothing, etc., used by productive laborers are capital, he assents to the conclusion that the consumption of capital is necessary to the application of labor, and from this it is but an obvious deduction that industry is limited by capital—that the demand for labor depends upon the supply of capital, and hence that wages depend upon the ratio between the number of laborers looking for employment and the amount of capital devoted to hiring them.

But I think the discussion in the provious chapter^sic will enable any one to see wherein lies the fallacy of this reasoning—a fallacy which has entangled some of the most acute minds in a web of their own spinning. It is in the use of the term capital in two senses. In the primary proposition that capital is necessary to the exertion of productive labor, the term “capital” is understood as including all food, clothing, shelter, etc.; whereas, in the deductions finally drawn from it, the term is used in its common and legitimate meaning of wealth devoted, not to the immediate gratification of desire, but to the procurement of more wealth—of wealth in the hands of employers as distinguished from laborers. The conclusion is no more valid than it would be from the acceptance of the proposition that a laborer cannot go to work without his breakfast and some clothes, to infer that no more laborers can go to work than employers first furnish with breakfasts and clothes. Now, the fact is, that the laborers generally furnish their own breakfasts and the clothes in which they go to work; and the further fact is, that capital (in the sense in which the word is used in distinction to labor) in exceptional cases sometimes may, but is never compelled to make advances to labor before the work begins. Of all the vast number of unemployed laborers in the civilized world to-day, there is probably not a single one willing to work who could not be employed without any advance of wages. A great proportion would doubtless gladly go to work on terms which did not require the payment of wages before the end of the month; it is doubtful if there are enough to be called a class who would not go to work and wait for their wages until the end of the week, as most laborers habitually do; while there are certainly none who would not wait for their wages until the end of the day, or if you please, until the next meal hour. The precise time of the payment of wages is immaterial; the essential point—the point I lay stress on—is that it is after the performance of work.

The payment of wages, therefore, always implies the previous rendering of labor. Now, what does the rendering of labor in produc- tion imply? Evidently the production of wealth, which, if it is to be exchanged or used in production, is capital. Therefore, the payment of capital in wages presupposes a production of capital by the labor for which the wages are paid. And as the employer generally makes a profit, the payment of wages is, so far as he is concerned, but the return to the laborer of a portion of the capital he has received from the labor. So far as the employe is concerned, it is but the receipt of a portion of the capital his labor has previously produced. As the value paid in the wages is thus exchanged for a value brought into being by the labor, how can it be said that wages are drawn from capital or advanced by capital? As in the exchange of labor for wages the employer always gets the capital created by the labor before he pays out capital in the wages, at what point is his capital lessened, even temporarily?(2)

THE TEST OF FACTS.

Bring the question to the test of facts. Take, for instance, an employing manufacturer who is engaged in turning raw material into finished products—cotton into cloth, iron into hardware, leather into boots, or so on, as may be, and who pays his hands, as is generally the case, once a week. Make an exact inventory of his capital on Monday morning before the beginning of the work, and it will consist of his buildings, machinery, raw materials, money on hand and finished product in stock. Suppose, for the sake of simplicity, that he neither buys nor sells during the week, and after work has stopped and he has paid his hands on Saturday night, take a new inventory of his capital. The item of money will be less, for it has been paid out in wages; there will be less raw material, less coal, etc., and a proper deduction must be made from the value of buildings and machinery for the week’s wear and tear. But if he is doing a remunerative business, which must on the average be the case, the item of finished products will be so much greater as to compensate for all these deficiencies and show in the summing up an increase of capital. Manifestly, then, the value he paid his hands in wages was not drawn from his capital, or from any one else’s capital. It came, not from capital, but from the value created by the labor itself. There was no more advance of capital than if he had hired his hands to dig clams and paid them with a part of the clams they dug. Their wages were as truly the produce of their labor as were the wages of the primitive man, when, long “before the appropriation of land and the accumulation of stock,” he obtained an oyster by knocking it with a stone from the rocks.

As the laborer who works for an employer does not get his wages until he has performed the work, his case is similar to that of the depositor in a bank who cannot draw money out until he has put money in. And as by draw-

[Footnotes, small type, at foot of column 3:]

1. Industry is limited by capital. . . There can be no more industry than is supplied with materials to work up and food to eat. Self-evident as the thing is, it is often forgotten that the people of a country are maintained and have their wants supplied not by the produce of present labor, but of past. They consume what has been produced, not what is about to be produced. Now, of what has been produced a part only is allotted to the support of productive labor, and there will not and cannot be more of that labor than the portion so allotted (which is the capital of the country) can feed and provide with the materials and instruments of production.—[John Stuart Mill, “Principles of Political Economy,” Book I., Chap. V., Sec. I.

2. I speak of labor producing capital for the sake of greater clearness. What labor always procures is either wealth (which may or may not be capital) or services, the cases in which nothing is obtained being merely exceptional cases of misadventure. Where the object of the labor is simply the gratification of the employer, as where I hire a man to black my boots, I do not pay the wages from capital, but from the wealth which I have devoted, not to reproductive uses, but to consumption for my own satisfaction. Even if wages thus paid be considered as drawn from capital, then by that act they pass from the category of capital to that of wealth devoted to the gratification of the possessor, as when a cigar dealer takes a dozen cigars from the stock he has for sale and puts them in his pocket for his own use.

p. 6, col. 4 ing out what he has previously put in, the bank depositor does not lessen the capital of the bank, neither can laborers by receiving wages lessen even temporarily either the capital of the employer or the aggregate capital of the community. Their wages no more come from capital than the checks of depositors are drawn against bank capital. It is true that laborers in receiving wages do not generally receive back wealth in the same form in which they have rendered it, any more than bank depositors receive back the identical coins or bank notes they have deposited. but they receive it^sic in equivalent form; and as we are justified in saying that the depositor receives from the bank the money he paid in, so we are justified in saying that the laborer receives in wages the wealth he has rendered in labor.

A FRUITFUL SOURCE OF ERROR.

That this universal truth is so often obscured, is largely due to that fruitful source of economic obscurities, the confounding of wealth with money; and it is remarkable to see so many of those who, since Dr. Adam Smith made the egg stand on its end, have copiously demonstrated the fallacies of the mercantile system, fall into delusions of the very same kind in treating of the relations of capital and labor. Money being the general medium of exchanges, the common flux through which all transmutations of wealth from one form to another take place, whatever difficulties may exist to an exchange will generally show themselves on the side of reduction to money, and thus it is sometimes easier to exchange money for any other form of wealth than it is to exchange wealth in a particular form into money, for the reason that there are more holders of wealth who desire to make some exchange than there are who desire to make any particular exchange. And so a producing employer who has paid out his money in wages may sometimes find it difficult to turn quickly back into money the increased value for which his money has really been exchanged, and is spoken of as having exhausted or advanced his capital in the payment of wages. Yet, unless the new value created by the labor is less than the wages paid (which can be only an exceptional case), the capital which he had before in money he now has in goods—it has been changed in form. but not lessened^sic.

THE WAGES OF THE GOLD MINER.

There is one branch of production in regard to which the confusions of thought which arise from the habit of estimating capital in money are least likely to occur, inasmuch as its product is the general material and standard of money. And it so happens that this business furnishes us, almost side by side, with illustrations of production passing from the simplest to most complex forms.

In the early days of California, as afterward in Australia, the placer miner, who found in river bed or surface deposit the glittering particles which the slow processes of nature had been for ages accumulating, picked up or washed out his “wages” (so, too, he called them) in actual money, for coin being scarce, gold dust passed as currency by weight, and at the end of the day had his wages in money in a buckskin bag in his pocket. There can be no dispute as to whether these wages came from capital or not. They were manifestly the produce of his labor. Nor could there be any dispute when the holder of a specially rich claim hired men to work for him, and paid them off in the identical money which their labor had taken from gulch or bar. As coin became more abundant, its greater convenience in saving the trouble and loss of weighing, assigned gold dust to the place of a commodity, and with coin obtained the sale of the dust^sic their labor had procured, the employing miner paid off his hands. Where he had coin enough to do so, instead of selling his gold dust at the nearest store and paying a dealer’s profit, he retained it until he got enough to take a trip, or send by express to San Francisco, where at the mint he could have it turned into coin without charge. While thus accumulating gold dust he was lessening his stock of coin; just as the manufacturer, while accumulating a stock of goods, lessens his stock of money. Yet no one would be obtuse enough to imagine that, in thus taking in gold dust and paying out coin, the miner was lessening his capital.

COMPLICATIONS CONSIDERED.

But the deposits that could be worked without preliminary labor were soon exhausted, and gold mining rapidly took a more elaborate character. Before claims could be opened so as to yield any return deep shafts had to be sunk, great dams constructed, long tunnels cut through the hardest rock, water brought for miles over mountain ridges and across deep valleys, and expensive machinery put up. These works could not be constructed without capital. Sometimes their construction required years, during which no return could be hoped for, while the men employed had to be paid their wages every week or every month. Surely, it will be said, in such cases, even if in no others, wages do actually come from capital, are actually advanced by capital, and must necessarily lessen capital in their payment. Surely here, at least, industry is limited by capital, for without capital such works could not be carried on. Let us see:

It is cases of this class that are always instanced as showing that wages are advanced from capital. For where wages are paid before the object of the labor is obtained, or is finished—as in agriculture, where plowing and sowing must precede by several months the harvesting of the crop; as in the erection of buildings, the construction of ships, railroads, canals, etc.—it is clear that the owners of the capital paid in wages cannot expect an immediate return, but, as the phrase is, must “outlay it,” or “lie out of it” for a time, which sometimes amounts to many years. And hence, if first principles are not kept in mind, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that wages are advanced by capital.

But such cases will not embarrass the reader to whom in what has preceded I have made myself clearly understood. An easy analysis will show that these instances where wages are paid before the product is finished or even produced, do not afford any exception to the rule apparent where the product is finished before wages are paid.

If I go to a broker to exchange silver for gold, I lay down my silver, which he counts and puts away, and then hands me the equivalent in gold, minus his commission. Does the broker advance me any capital? Manifestly not. What he had before in gold he now has in silver, plus his profit. And as he got the silver before he paid out the gold there is on his part not even momentarily an advance of capital.

Now, this operation of the broker is precisely analogous to what the capitalist does when, in such cases as we are now considering, he pays out capital in wages. As the rendering of labor precedes the payment of wages, and as the rendering of labor in production implies the creation of value, the employer receives value before he pays out value—he but exchanges capital of one form for capital of another form. For the creation of value does not depend upon the finishing of the product; it takes place at every stage of the process of production, as the immediate result of the application of labor, and hence, no matter how long the process in which it is engaged, labor always adds to capital by its exertion before it takes from capital in its wages.

Here is a blacksmith at his forge making

p. 6, col. 5 picks. Clearly he is making capital—adding picks to his employer’s capital before he draws money from it in wages. Here is a machinist or boilermaker working on the keel plates of a Great Eastern. Is not he also just as clearly creating value—making capital? The giant steamship, as the pick, is an article of wealth, an instrument of production; and though the one may not be completed for years, while the other is completed in a few minutes, each day’s work, in the one case as in the other, is as clearly a production of wealth—an addition to capital. In the case of the steamship, as in the case of the pick, it is not the last blow, any more than the first blow, that creates the value of the finished product—the creation of value is continuous, it immediately results from the exertion of labor.

PRODUCTION TO WHICH DIFFERENT SETS OF PRODUCERS CONTRIBUTE.

We see this very clearly wherever the division of labor has made it customary for different parts of the full process of production to be carried on by different sets of producers—that is to say, wherever we are in the habit of estimating the amount of value which the labor expended in any preparatory stage of production has created. And a moment’s reflection will show that this is the case as to the vast majority of products. Take a ship, a building, a jack knife, a book, a lady’s thimble, or a loaf of bread. They [are?] finished products. But they were not produced at one operation or by one set of producers. And this being the case, we readily distinguish different points or stages in the creation of the value which as completed articles they represent. When we do not distinguish different parts in the final process of production we do distinguish the value of the materials. The value of these materials may often be again decomposed many times, exhibiting as many clearly defined steps in the creation of the final value. At each of these steps we habitually estimate a creation of value, an addition to capital. The batch of bread which the baker is taking from the oven has a certain value. But this is composed in part of the value of the flour from which the dough was made. And this again is composed of the value of the wheat, the value given by milling, etc. Iron in the form of pigs is very far from being a completed product. It must yet pass through several, or, perhaps, through many, stages of production before it results in the finished articles that were the ultimate objects for which the iron ore was extracted from the mine. Yet, is not pig iron capital? And so the process of production is not really completed when a crop of cotton is gathered, nor yet when it is ginned and pressed; nor yet when it arrives at Lowell or Manchester; nor yet when it is converted into yarn; nor yet when it becomes cloth; but only when it is finally placed in the hands of the consumer. Yet at each step in this progress there is clearly enough a creation of value—an addition to capital. Why, therefore, although we do not so habitually distinguish and estimate it, is there not a creation of value—an addition to capital—when the ground is plowed for the crop? Is it because it may possibly be a bad season and the crop may fail? Evidently not; for a like possibility of misadventure attends every one of the many steps in the production of the finished article. On the average a crop is sure to come up, and so much plowing and sowing will on the average result in so much cotton in the boll, as surely as so much spinning of cotton yarn will result in so much cloth.

PAYMENT OF WAGES NEVER LESSENS CAPITAL.

In short, as the payment of wages is always conditioned upon the rendering of labor, the payment of wages in production, no matter how long the process, never involves any advance of capital, or even temporarily lessens capital. It may take a year, or even years, to build a ship, but the creation of value of which the finished ship will be the sum, goes on day by day, and hour by hour, from the time the keel is laid or even the ground is cleared. Nor by the payment of wages before the ship is completed does the master builder lessen either his capital or the capital of the community, for the value of the partially completed ship stands in place of the value paid out in wages. There is no advance of capital in this payment of wages, for the labor of the workmen during the week or month creates and renders to the builder more capital than is paid back to them at the end of the week or month, as is shown by the fact that if the builder were at any stage of the construction asked to sell a partially completed ship he would expect a profit.

And so, when a Sutro or a St. Gothard tunnel or a Suez canal is cut, there is no advance of capital. The tunnel or canal, as it is cut, becomes capital as much as the money spent in cutting it—or, if you please, the powder, drills, etc., used in the work, and the food, clothes, etc., used by the workmen—as is shown by the fact that the value of the capital stock of the company is not lessened, as capital in these forms is gradually changed into capital in the form of tunnel or canal. On the contrary, it probably, and on the average, increases as the work progresses, just as the capital invested in a speedier mode of production would on the average increase.

And this is obvious in agriculture also. That the creation of value does not take place all at once when the crop is gathered, but step by step during the whole process which the gathering of the crop includes, and that no payment of wages in the interim lessens the farmer’s capital, is tangible enough when land is sold or rented during the process of production, as a plowed field will bring more than an unplowed field, or a field that has been sown more than one merely plowed. It is tangible enough when growing crops are sold, as is sometimes done, or where the farmer does not himself harvest, but lets a contract to the owner of harvesting machinery. It is tangible in the case of orchards and vineyards which, though not yet in bearing, brings^sic prices proportionate to their age. It is tangible in the case of horses, cattle and sheep, which increase in value as they grow toward maturity. And if not always tangible between what may be called the usual exchange points in production, this increase of value as surely takes place with every exertion of labor. Hence, where labor is rendered before wages are paid, the advance of capital is really made by labor, and is from the employed to the employer, not from the employer to the employed.

THE TRUE FUNCTIONS OF CAPITAL.

“Yet,” it may be said, “in such cases as we have been considering capital is required?” Certainly; I do not dispute that. But it is not required in order to make advances to labor. It is required for quite another purpose. What that purpose is we may readily see.

When wages are paid in kind—that is to say, in wealth of the same species as the labor produces; as, for instance, if I hire men to cut wood, agreeing to give them as wages a portion of the wood they cut (a method sometimes adopted by the owners or lessees of woodland), it is evident that no capital is required for the payment of wages. Nor yet when, for the sake of mutual convenience, arising from the fact that a large quantity of wood can be more readily and more advantageously exchanged than a number of small quantities, I agree to pay wages in money, instead of wood, shall I need any capital, provided I can make the exchange of the

p. 6, col. 6 wood for money before the wages are due. It is only when I cannot make such an exchange, or such an advantageous exchange as I desire, until I accumulate a large quantity of wood, that I shall need capital. Nor even then shall I need capital if I can make a partial or tentative exchange by borrowing on my wood. If I cannot, or do not choose, either to sell the wood or to borrow upon it, and yet wish to go ahead accumulating a large stock of wood, I shall need capital. But manifestly, I need this capital, not for the payment of wages, but for the accumulation of a stock of wood. Likewise in cutting a tunnel. If the workmen were paid in tunnel (which, if convenient, might easily be done by paying them in stock of the company), no capital for the payment of wages would be required. It is only when the undertakers wish to accumulate capital in the shape of a tunnel that they will need capital. To recur to our first illustration: The broker to whom I sell my silver cannot carry on his business without capital. But he does not need this capital because he makes any advance of capital to me when he receives my silver and hands me gold. He needs it because the nature of the business requires the keeping of a certain amount of capital on hand, in order that when a customer comes he may be prepared to make the exchange the customer desires.

And so we shall find it in every branch of production. Capital has never to be set aside for the payment of wages when the produce of the labor for which the wages are paid is exchanged as soon as produced; it is only required when this produce is stored up, or what is to the individual the same thing, placed in the general current of exchanges without being at once drawn against—that is, sold on credit. But the capital thus required is not required for the payment of wages, nor for advances to labor, as it is always represented in the produce of the labor. It is never as an employer of labor that any producer needs capital; when he does need capital it is because he is not only an employer of labor, but a merchant or speculator in, or an accumulator of, the products of labor. This is generally the case with employers.

A RECAPITULATION.

To recapitulate: The man who works for himself gets his wages in the things he produces, as he produces them, and exchanges this value into another form whenever he sells the produce. The man who works for another for stipulated wages in money, works under a contract of exchange. He also creates his wages as he renders his labor, but he does not get them except at stated times, in stated amounts and in a different form. In performing the labor he is advancing in exchange; when he gets his wages the exchange is completed. During the time he is earning the wages he is advancing capital to his employer, but at no time, unless wages are paid before work is done, is the employer advancing capital to him. Whether the employer who receives this produce in exchange for the wages, immediately re-exchanges it, or keeps it for awhile, no more alters the character of the transaction than does the final disposition of the product made by the ultimate receiver, who may, perhaps, be in another quarter of the globe and at the end of a series of exchanges numbering hundreds.

WAGES NOT DRAWN FROM CAPITAL, BUT PRODUCED BY LABOR.

But a stumbling block may yet remain, or may recur, in the mind of the reader.

As the plowman cannot eat the furrow, nor a partially completed steam engine aid in any way in producing the clothes the machinist wears, have I not, in the words of John Stuart Mill, “forgotten that the people of a country are maintained and have their wants supplied, not by the produce of present labor but of past?” Or, to use the language of a popular elementary work—that of Mrs. Fawcett—have I not “forgotten that many months must elapse between the sowing of the seed and the time when the produce of that seed is converted into a loaf of bread,” and that “it is, therefore, evident that laborers cannot live upon that which their labor is assisting to produce, but are maintained by that wealth which their labor, or the labor of others, has previously produced, which wealth is cap- ital?” (1)

The assumption made in these passages—the assumption that it is so self-evident that labor must be subsisted from capital that the proposition has but to be stated to compel recognition—runs through the whole fabric of current political economy. And so confidently is it held that the maintenance of labor is drawn from capital that the proposition that “population regulates itself by the funds which are to employ it, and therefore always increases or diminishes with the increase or diminution of capital,” (2) is regarded as equally axiomatic, and in its turn made the basis of important reasoning.

THE ABSURDITY OF THE ASSUMPTION—WHAT IT SPRINGS FROM.

Yet being resolved, these propositions are seen to be, not self-evident, but absurd, for they involve the idea that labor cannot be exerted until the products of labor are saved—thus putting the product before the producer.

And being examined, they will be seen to derive their apparent plausibility from a confusion of thought.

I have already pointed out the fallacy, concealed by an erroneous definition, which un- derlies the proposition, that because food, raiment and shelter are necessary to productive labor, therefore industry is limited by capital. To say that a man must have his breakfast before going to work is not to say that he cannot go to work unless a capitalist furnishes him with a breakfast, for this breakfast may, and in point of fact in any country where there is not actual famine will come, not from wealth set apart for the assistance of production, but from wealth set apart for subsistence. And, as has been previously shown, food, clothing, etc.—in short, all articles of wealth—are only capital so long as they remain in the possession of those who propose, not to consume, but to exchange them for other commodities, or for productive services, and cease to be capital when they pass into the possession of those who will consume them; for in that transaction they pass from the stock of wealth held for the purpose of procuring other wealth, and pass into the stock of wealth held for purposes of gratification, irrespective of whether their consumption will aid in the production of wealth or not. Unless this distinction is preserved it is impossible to draw the line between the wealth that is capital and the wealth that is not capital, even by remitting the distinction to the “mind of the possessor,” as does John Stuart Mill. For men do not eat or abstain, wear clothes or go naked, as they propose to engage in productive labor or not. They eat because they are hungry, and wear clothes because they would be uncomfortable without them. Take the food on the breakfast table of a laborer who will work or not that day, as he gets the opportunity. If the distinction between capital and non-capital be the support of productive labor, is this food capital or not? It is as impossible for the continued on p. 7 →

[continued on page 7]

[Footnotes, small type, at foot of column 6:]

1. Political Economy for Beginners, by Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Chap. III. p. 25.

2. The words quoted are Ricardo’s (Chap. II), but the idea is common in standard work^sic.

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No. 1. “First Principles.” By Henry George. 4 pages. No. 2. “Land and Taxation.” A conversation between David Dudley Field and Henry George. 4 pages. No. 3. “The Right to the Use of the Earth.” By Herbert Spencer. 4 pages. No. 4. “A Christian Minister on the Remedy for Poverty.” A sermon by the Rev. Hugh O. Pentecost of Newark, N. J. 2 pages. No. 5. “A Sum in Proportion.” By T. L. McCready. 2 pages. No. 6. “The Settler’s Nightmare.” By Louis F. Post. 4 pages. No. 7. “New York’s Docks. The True Mode of Raising Revenue.” By J. W. Sullivan. 4 pages. No. 8. “Unemployed Labor.” By Henry George. 4 pages. No. 9. “Voices for Reform.” 2 pages. No. 10. “A Mysterious Disappearance.” By Lewis Freeland. [8?] pages. No. 11. “How to Increase Profits.” By A. J. Steers. 2 pages. No. 12. “The American Farmer.” By Henry George. 4 pages. No. 13. “Sailors’ Snug Harbor and the Randall Farm.” By W. T. Croasdale. 12 pages. No. 14. “The Collegiate Church and the Shoemaker’s Field.” By W. T. Croasdale. 12 pages. No. 15. “Only a Dream.” By Abner C. Thomas. 4 pages. No. 16. “The Anti-Poverty Society.” Dr. McGlynn’s address at the first meeting. 8 pages. No. 17. “The Cross of the New Crusade.” A poem. By David Rorty. 2 pages. No. 18. “It is the Law of Christ.” By Rev. S. H. Spencer of Henry, Ill. 4 pages. No. 19. “My Landlord. By John Jones^sic. 4 pages. No. 20.”Thou Shalt Not Steal.” An address by Henry George before the Anti-Poverty Society. [8?] pages. No. 21. “Christianity and Poverty.” An address by Father Huntington before the Anti-poverty society. 4 pages. No. 22. “Poverty and Christianity.” An address by Rev. Hugh O. Pentecost before the Anti-poverty society. 8 pages. No. 23. “The Single Tax.” By Thomas G. Shearman. 8 pages. No. 24. “Hymns of the New Crusade”—No. 1. 4 pages. No. 25. “Hymns of the New Crusade”—No. 2. 4 pages. No. 26. “Religion vs. Robbery.” Address by Rev. Dr. McGlynn before the New York Anti-poverty society June 12, 1887. 8 pages. No. 27. “Back to the Land.” Bishop Nulty’s letter to the clergy and laity of his diocese. 16 pages. Price, 5 cents. No. 28. “Anti-Slavery and Anti-Poverty.” An address by the Rev. Hugh O. Pentecost before the New York Anti-Poverty Society, June 19. 8 pages. No. 29. “Tenement House Morality.” Rev. J. O. S. Huntington in the Forum. 4 pages. No. 30. “The Case Plainly Stated.” A speech by H. F. Ring before the Knights of Labor at Houston, Texas. 8 pages. No. 31. “Questions and Answers.” Questions by Rev. Howard Henderson of the Sixty-first street M. E. church of New York; with answers by Henry George. 2 pages. No. 32. “Objections to the Land Tax.” By Thomas G. Shearman. 4 pages. No. 33. “Socialism—Its Truth and Its Error.” Henry George. 4 pages. No. 34. “Horse Sense.” W. C. Woods. 2 pages. No. 35. The Syracuse Platform. 2 pages. No. 36. “Citycus and Rusticus.” Tudor S. Jenks. 4 pages. No. 37. “Taxing Land Values.” Henry George. 8 pp. No. 38. “God Wills It.” Henry George. 4 pages. No. 39. “What We Want.” Everett Glackin, president Typographical Union No. 6. 2 pages. No. 40. “Protection or Free Trade.” Henry George. Price, 35 cents. No. 41. The Syracuse Platform. (German.) 2 pages. No. 42. “First Principles.” (German.) Henry George 4 pages. No. 43. “Socialism—Its Truth and Its Error^sic. (German.) Henry George. 4 pages. No. 44.”How John’s Father Saw the Light.” W. C. Woods, M. D. 2 pages. 45. Platform of the United Labor Party^sic. 2 pages. No. 46. “Taxing Land Values.” (German.) Henry George. 8 pages. No. 47. “It is the Law of Christ.” (German.) Rev. S. H. Spencer. 4 pages. No. 48. “The Case Plainly Stated.” (German.) H. F. Ring. 8 pages. No. 49. “The Distribution of Wealth.” Thomas G. Shearman. 16 pages. No. 50. “Progress and Poverty.” (German.) Henry George. No. 51. “Ten Thoughts for Christian Thinkers.” Rev. John W. Kramer. 4 pages. No. 52. “The Case Plainly Stated.” (Swedish). H. F. Ring. 8 pages. No. 53. “Sailors’ Snug Harbor.” (German.) Wm. T. Croasdale. 12 pages. No. 54. “What the United Labor Party Want.” Henry George. 2 pages. No. 55. “Stories for Farmers.” 4 pages. No. 56. “Electoral Reform.” A. T. Rice. 4 pages. No. 57. “Protection as a Universal Need.” Henry George. 4 pages. No. 58. “To a College Professor.” Bartholomew Appleby. 4 pages. No. 59. “Before a Royal Commission.” W. A. Douglass. 4 pages. No. 60^sic. “The Tariff Question.” Henry George. [4?] pages. No. 61. “A Practical Illustration.” Hugh B. Brown. 2 pages. No. 62. “Progress and Poverty.” Henry George. Price, 35 cents. No. 63. “American Protection and British Free Trade.” Henry George. 4 pages. No. 64. “Hints as to What You Can Do.” Henry George. 4 pages. No. 65. “To a Bookkeeper.” Bartholomew Appleby. 2 pages. No. 66. “A Lawyer’s Reply to Criticisms.” Samuel B. Clarke. 16 pages. No. 67. “A Piece of Land” By the late Francis G. Shaw. 2 pages. No. 68. “The Tax on Buildings.” William T. Croasdale. [8?] pages. No. 69. “Protection and Wages.” Henry George. 8 pages. No. 70. “The Common Sense of the Tariff Question.” Thomas G. Shearman. 8 pages. No. 71. “My Butcher Woman and My Grocery^sic Man. William McCabe. 4 pages. No. 72.”Protection the Friend of Labor?” Thomas G. Shearman. 8 pages. No. 73. “Property in Land.” Henry George. Price, 15 cents. No. 74. “Social Problems.” Henry George. Price, 35 cents. No. 75. “A Short Tariff History.” Thomas G. Shearman. 2 pages. No. 76. “Plain Talk to Protectionists.” Thomas G. Shearman. 4 pages. No. 77. An Address to Workingmen on the Tariff Question. Henry George. 4 pages. No. 78. “Election Reform.” Louis F. Post. 10 pages. No. 79. “A Republican’s Reasons for Supporting Cleveland.” Judge Frank T. Reid. 2 pages.

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THE PROTECTIVE TARIFF: WHAT IT DOES FOR US.

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THE PRESS UNANIMOUS IN ITS PRAISE.

This book shows the practical effect of the protective system upon the country. Perhaps the most conspicuous feature of the book is its exact alignment with the message of President Cleveland. But for the fact that the General’s work was in print before the message was made public, it might be supposed he had written it to defend the president’s position on the tariff.

The position of Mr. Blaine’s “Twenty Years in Congress” is taken up, his assertions upon the tariff are analyzed, criticised and made to furnish their own refutation.

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OLD MAN GILBERT.

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WHAT DREAMS MAY COME.

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A book, which although undoubtedly unconventional, yet is in no wise dependent upon that quality for its success. Its interest lies in its absorbing plot, in its strong dramatic treatment, and in the bold yet logical handling of one of the most difficult and least used subjects in literature.

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MARIE, A SEASIDE EPISODE.

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In this poem the author tells an interesting love story in an exceedingly bright, clever and amusing fashion that reminds one a good deal of Byron’s “Beppo.” Incidentally, he satirizes society in a light vein of humor, and in a style that is graceful and epigrammatic. The volume contains over forty illustrations, and is an admirable specimen of the book maker’s art.

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In this novel Mr. Saltus describes an episode in a honeymoon. The plot is dramatic, the action nervous, and the scene Fifth avenue. As a picture of contemporaneous life it will be condemned by every lover of the commonplace.

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HENRY GEORGE’S WORKS.

PROGRESS AND POVERTY.

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Problems in American Politics.

In Scribner’s Magazine for October ex-Secretary of the Treasury McCullough^sic discourses of the social and political problems which seem to him to be most urgently pressing for solution. He considers in succession the questions of our mercantile marine, of the tariff, of private land ownership, of trusts and similar monopolies, viewing each in the light of the experience of a long life, and speaking honestly what he thinks—or at all events what he thinks he thinks.

Mr. McCullough’s views as to the tariff and American shipping are best expressed in his own language:

MR. M’CULLOUGH ON THE TARIFF.

I am proud of my country, but I cannot help being humiliated by the consideration that our merchants must establish credits in London, in order to pay for their purchases abroad; and that our government is compelled to maintain an agency in that city for the payment of its representatives in foreign lands, and the expenses of its ships of war in foreign ports.

What has made Great Britain the nation she is—the nation upon whose domain the sun never sets? Why is her flag seen upon every sea? By what means has her supremacy as a commercial and maritime power been secured and maintained? Is it not mainly because her statesmen have understood the simple fact that trade is barter, and have freed it from all restrictions?

What is now needed in the United States, and needed more than anything else, to promote general prosperity, is such a modification of our tariff as will facilitate exchanges with other countries. The protective policy must be abandoned. A revenue tariff we must have. Absolute free trade will be among the things hoped for, but not to be gained until the people are prepared to support the government by excise duties, or by direct taxation.

MR. M’CULLOUGH ON AMERICAN SHIP BUILDING.

The decline in its shipping is the great humiliation of the United States. Less than half a century ago it was second only to Great Britain, with strong indications that it would soon be her superior as a maritime power. The best ships in the world were then built in the United States, chiefly in New England, and our ship yards not only supplied the home demand, which was very large, but to a considerable extent the foreign demand also. Now, except for the home trade, the building of ships has substantially ceased.

The decline of American shipping commenced with the substitution of iron for wooden ships, and the finishing blow was given to it by a tariff which, by taxing the materials that are used in the construction of ships, made them too costly to invite capital in that direction and forced it into manufactures.

On one point there should be accord between men of all political parties; if by reason of the tariff, or any other cause, we cannot profitably build ships, we should not be prohibited from buying and putting them under our own flag. In no other country of the world, except this great, free country of ours, does such a barbarous prohibition exist. It is urged, I know, that the building of ships could not be a profitable industry in the United States, even if the duty on all articles which are used in their construction and outfit were taken off, by reason of the cheaper labor on the other side of the Atlantic. If this were a fact, which I do not believe, what justification can there be for keeping on the statute book the law that prohibits citizens of the United States from buying foreign built ships and putting them under our own flag?

All efforts to induce investments of capital in ships will be unavailing unless foreign markets are secured for what we have to sell. Trade is essentially barter, and there can be no barter so long as trade is fettered with unequal duties on articles to be exchanged.

Mr. McCullough has managed to reach sufficiently sound conclusions as regards the protective tariff and the mercantile marine. But to those who will take the trouble to read his article in Scribner’s, some of the stages of his reasoning will be sufficiently amusing. He reminds us of a drunken man going home, who gets safely to his destination at last, but only after frequent staggerings and stumblings. Thus he tells us in one place that Great Britain had more capital than continental European nations, more skill in the use of machinery, more ships and greater natural advantages; and that “to make the most of these advantages she adopted the principle of free trade.” Elsewhere he informs us, in one paragraph, that “in all natural advantages the United States are greatly superior to Great Britain;” in another, that “greater progress has been made in labor saving machinery on this side than on the other side of the Atlantic;” and in a third, that before the protective system was fastened on the country less than a generation ago, our mercantile marine was second only to Great Britain. Yet, after thus giving the best of all possible reasons, on his own showing, why the United States should have adopted free trade, he goes on to tell us that “without government protection against the competition of British manufacturers, capitalists in the United States would not have engaged in manufacturing.” In another place he advances the curious notion that protection to everybody would be about as good a thing as free trade:

The party of the future will be that party which, comprehending the interests of the whole country, fosters all alike, or relieves the people altogether from the burdens which a partial policy now imposes. If protection is to be the continued policy of the government, ship building should be encouraged and maritime interests protected, as well as manufactures.

Here we have, indistinctly expressed, the queer idea that to take from every man alike half the earnings of his labor, would be a rather commendable plan, provided only a quarter of each man’s earnings were returned to him. For that is p. 8, col. 2 precisely what “equal protection to all” would amount to. However, since the ex-secretary reaches a sound conclusion at last, it would be uncharitable to say too much about the deviousness of his mental processes.

But when he gets upon the subject of private ownership of land, Mr. McCullough makes a pitiable exhibition of himself indeed. He seems somehow to have imbibed the idea that there is a set of men somewhere who want to confiscate everybody’s land, to turn farmers into the highways, to seize every mine and city lot, and generally put everybody out of doors. What he thinks this extraordinary set of fanatics are going do with the land^sic after everybody, themselves included, has been deprived of the privilege of using it, he does not say, but he declaims against their doctrine with a vigor, which, considering that nobody but he has ever heard of them, is a little superfluous. Even here, however, he cannot help wobbling in his argument. He states some things as facts which are not facts; he observes facts without in the least seeing the obvious conclusion to which they point. He wanders round, in a sort of mental haze, until at last, seeing no way out of the logical labyrinth in which he has involved himself, he summons common sense to his aid, and fairly breaks his way through the flimsy walls of his own making:

That in some countries land is held in too large quantities by a comparitively^sic few people, whose ownership is perpetuated by legislative or sovereign power, is undoubted true^sic. In such countries there is little trade in land, and the ownership of a house, no matter how humble, is beyond the reach of the great mass of the people. Nothing of this kind exists in the United States.

In most of the European states, especially in Great Britain, lands are heavily taxed—so heavily that they can be held only by the rich.

For them [those who are able and willing to work] there is rarely lack of employment at remunerative wages, and the way to rise in the world is open before them.

Nine-tenths of the rich and prominent people of the United States have made their upward way in the world without help from others. Of the wealthy men, or the men of large social or political influence, whom I have known personally, or with whose history I am familiar, I call to mind very few who have not made themselves what they are by their own exertions.

Mr. McCullough gravely states these things as facts. We would like to see some specimens of his fancies. They would be fairy tales indeed.

Turn next to the actual facts that he observes, and see how far he is from learning the lessons they convey.

No one who has known anything about the hardships endured by the first settlers in the timbered lands of the United States—their unceasing toil, their actual want—not of the comforts, but of the necessaries of life when in health, to say nothing of what they needed, and could not be supplied with, in sickness, during the long and wearisome years which came and went before they had cleared enough of their lands [to?] enable them to begin to enjoy the fruits of their sacrifices and labors—no one who has known anything about all this will be found among those who speak of land as being God’s gift, and therefore property of which there should not be absolute ownership. In traveling from Fort Wayne to Indianapolis, in the early days of the west, over or rather through roads that for a good part of the year could only be traveled by men on foot or well mounted horsemen, and in noticing the slow progress which was being made in the opening up of the country, the question naturally presented itself, Would men who could support themselves in any other way, or in any other place, make their homes in this wilderness and undergo the privations they are subject to, and labor as they must for a good part of their lives, before they can make a comfortable living? These settlers were invariably poor men; two or three hundred dollars would cover the entire outfit of a majority of them—their lands, their teams, their cows, their farming implements, their axes and rifles. It was chiefly by such men that the timbered lands of Ohio and Indiana were settled. I have seen hundreds of such beginnings, and have admired the endurance, the patience, the persevering industry, by which forest lands have been converted into productive farms; I do not say profitable farms, because few farms are profitable. Men who, like the late Dr. [Gwinn?] of California, have bought at low prices extensive tracts of land which were ready for the plow, and which for a time needed no fertilization, and cultivated them by machinery for wheat, have undoubtedly made money out of them; but as the wheat producing qualities of the soil becomes exhausted, and restoratives become necessary, profits will decline, and may soon disappear altogether. Lands naturally adapted to grazing may yield indefinitely good returns, because they do not become exhausted by being grazed, but they are exceptions. The alluvial lands on the lower Mississippi, and on some of its tributaries, might also be excepted, for so deep is the soil that they may be regarded as being practically inexhaustible; but they are subject to overflows and droughts, and good crops on even these lands are by no means certain.

On the whole, farming is not a profitable business in the United States. It is a healthful employment, productive of strong and vigorous men, but it is not attractive, and it is not attractive because it is not profitable. Seldom do the sons of well-to-do farmers become farmers. As soon as they are old enough to strike out for themselves they will be found in the towns, not upon the farms. Nor are lands in the old states, which are not near enough to populous cities to be profitably used for market gardens, increasing in value. So far is this from being the case that very few farms in those states could be sold to-day for prices which they readily commanded twenty years ago. Investments in lands which are valuable for agriculture only are not now regarded with favor by capitalists. Better use for their money is found elsewhere.

And all Mr. McCullough can see in these unquestionable facts is an argument against confiscation! These men, he thinks, ought not to be forced to pay any more taxes than they do now! We should

Regarding That Report of Secretary Blaine’s—[Donn?] Piatt Lets Some Daylight in on the Ways of Mr. Facing-Both-Ways.

New York Herald.

Some time, not a long while after the Hon. Jas. G. Blaine ended his eminent services as secretary of state, I met him in New York at the Fifth avenue hotel. I was weather bound, for an unusually severe winter had blocked with snow the western roads. The personal relations between Mr. Blaine and myself had always been pleasant, and meeting at the same table we had some entertaining talk on politics. It is not my purpose to recall, even if I could, any of the conversation, and I refer to the fact merely to note a circumstance that to-day has a strange significance. It was during one of these talks that Mr. Blaine informed me that he had issued from the state department a document “that ought to be in the hands of every free trader in the United States.” I asked, knowing that he was a protectionist, if this document would prove so fatal to us, why he wished it circulated. “It is a powerful array of facts,” he replied, “in your favor, and I abide by facts.”

I asked him to please mail it me, and some days after I reached home I received this valuable contribution to our free trade literature. It proved to be a report made up at the state department from reports of our consuls in Europe. I did not place much value on the document, for it is devoted to a showing of wages abroad and the value of the work, and proving beyond question that our so-called protective tariff is a burden instead of a benefit to us, and that all the supposed prosperity it is claimed we enjoy has been won in spite of the tariff, that has, in fact, been an obstacle instead of an aid to our progress.

I have taken little stock in this view of the question. I care nothing about results after being satisfied that the origin and base of the whole system is iniquitous. It is admitted on all hands that this is a process of taxation through which the government is to be sustained by one class and so taxed as to benefit another class. Were this done directly and uniform taxes levied on the entire country, out of which bounties were paid to certain interests, it would not be so bad. But the way in which the thing is done is actually for the government to farm out its fiscal agency to certain favored classes and leave them to fix the amount to be collected. This is the meaning of the so-called protection as recognized in Europe and practiced here. Now, without stopping to discuss the results, good or bad, of the measure, it is enough to know that no such power exists in our government, and if it did we would cease to be a republic. It may suit a monarchical form of government, when the sovereignty rests in a family and all property gets its title from the sovereign. But with us the sovereignty is in the people, and the government is only the process through which it finds expression. To retain this in all its purity the constitution provides that the burden of its maintenance shall be equally distributed.

Our representatives have, therefore, no right—no power under the constitution—to favor any class or any interest, let the pretext be what it may. To assert otherwise is to claim the right to destroy the very fabric the taxing power was called in to sustain and that through legislation created solely to protect.

Getting at this conclusion, it is no waste of time to discuss the results. Be the system good or bad, there is no place for it in a self government such as the fathers erected. To illustrate what I mean, let us suppose a party were organized for the sole purpose of knocking millionaires in the head and distributing their wealth. It could be shown that great good would come of this, that wages would augment, money be abundant and a great prosperity follow. I hardly think the thugs of this organization would have other time to orate on the beautiful results of their system save under the gallows with ropes about their protective necks.

This is protection in my eyes. It is theft under color of the law; and although we have constitutionally a good deal of legalized fraud, this process through which one dollar is paid the government and three, four or five given to the pockets of certain favored persons, has as little right to exist here as would the party of thugs organized to kill millionaires for the public good.

Under this state of mind I paid little heed to Mr. Blaine’s report in favor of free trade. Nor do I turn to it now with any thought of use in that direction. But this public document gets a strange significance from the stand lately taken in this canvass by its author. From a report of his speech made at Boston, and published in the New York Tribune, we learn:

If we have free trade the factories will not be closed, but if kept open they will be run at half the present wages. That is the issue which should be pressed home on the democratic party. They should be arraigned, as I arraign them, as conspirators against the welfare of the laboring man. Let that be the issue and the watchword of the republicans, and defeat is impossible.

Now I quote from the free trade document “that ought to be in the hands of every free trader in the United States” (to use the author’s words) the following from pages 98 and 99:

Owing to the different arrangements of the English and American tables of wages, it is difficult to give comparative analysis thereof which would show at a glance the difference in the wages of the operatives of both countries.

The wages of spinners and weavers in Lancashire and in Massachusetts, according to the foregoing statements, were as follows, per week: Spinners—Eng [lab.?], $7.20 to [$8.40?] (master spinners ranging as high as $12); American, $7.07 to [$10.80?].

Weavers—English, [$3.84?] to [$8.64?], subject at the date on which those rates were given to a reduction of ten per cent; American, [$4.53?] to [$8.73?].

The average wages of employes in the Massachusetts mills are as follows, according to the official returns: Men, [$8.88?]; women, [$6.62?]; male children, [$3.11?]; female children, [$3.08?]. According to Consul [Shaw’s?] report the average wages of the men employed in the Lancashire mills on the first of January, [1883?], were about [$8?] per week, subject to a reduction of 10 per cent; women from [$3.41?] to [$4.80?] subject to a reduction of 10 per cent.

The hours of labor in the Lancashire mills are fifty-six, in the Massachusetts sixty per week. The hours of labor in the mills in the other New England states, where the wages are generally less than in Massachusetts, are usually sixty-six to sixty-nine per week. Undoubtedly the inequalities in the wages of English and American operatives are more than equalized by the greater efficiency of the latter and their longer hours of labor. If this should prove to be a fact in practice, as it seems to be proven from official statistics, it would be a very important element in the establishment of our ability to compete with England for our share of the cotton goods trade of the world.

In the two prime factors which may be said to form the basis of the cotton manufacturing industry—namely, raw material and labor—we hold the advantage over England in the first and stand upon an equality with her in the second.

Having the raw material at our doors, it follows that we should be able to convert it into manufactures, all things being equal, with more economy and facility than can be done by England, which imports our cotton and then manufactures it in in her mills^sic. The expense of handling, transportation and commission must be an important item in this regard, as compared with our turning in the fiber from the cotton fields to our mills and shipping it in the advanced form of manufactured goods. Add to this the secondary fact that it costs us no more to handle and manufacture the same than it costs in England, and we stand on an undoubted equality thus far in the race of competition.

Not only this, but by the same state paper that has Mr. Blaine’s signature at the end, we learn that all laborers of the United States favored by higher wages than those given in Europe are unprotected laborers, while the class getting the same, or less than the same “pauper labor” in Europe, are our protected workmen.

I know since this paper was prepared and published by Mr. Blaine, then secretary of state, he has visited Europe and given the industries there a personal inspection. He may have learned from such that the facts promulgated by himself as secretary of state were erroneous, but he owes it to himself to say this and give us the details of such conversion on his part. I recognize the difficulty of this. The able state paper referred to was