In this connection a few figures may prove instructive:
| The total value of gloves manufactured during the census year was | $5,718,539 |
| For making which, labor received as wages | 1,245,013 or 22% |
| And the raw material cost | 3,404,937 |
| Leaving a surplus to the manufacturers of | 1,068,589 or 23% |
| Yet their capital invested was only | 2,690,048 |
The tariff of fifty per cent is sufficient therefore to enable the manufacturer to pay, not the difference in wages between European labor and American, but all the wages and twenty-eight cents on the dollar's worth of finished product besides; while—there being no tariff on labor—foreign labor comes to compete with home labor just so fast as the difference in wages will warrant the making of the journey from the old country to the new.
The tariff on gloves in an unfinished state is, however, but twenty per cent, and at that rate many gloves are imported so nearly finished as to require but little labor to fit them for the market: and here the large dealer who imports is able to obtain another serious advantage over the small dealer, and at the same time, while pretending to protect labor, defraud it.
The closing of the small shops, and the consequent driving of our people into large factories, hurts the best skilled workman in that it lessens the number of employers competing for his services. I have been a protectionist in the past, for I was taught to believe that protection raised wages; but the results of a careful inquiry as to cause and effect have shown me pretty conclusively that it does not and can not.
I have talked with many workingmen who are beginning to perceive that the tendency of wages to fall a little from time to time is due to the competition of the "pauper labor of Europe," which coming to this country, underbids them at the shop door, takes away their work, and turns them out to shift for themselves; while the employer, who is protected by a duty of fifty per cent, gets his labor in the lowest market and sells his goods in the highest.
Said a glove-cutter to me the other day: "Doctor, if all the workingmen born and brought up here and all that have come from the old country had remained here, wages would not be fifty cents a day. I understand very well what keeps wages up in America: it's the great West, with its free land acting as a safety valve; and the worst is that so much of it has been given to railroads or sold to cattle syndicates for a mere song. When the remaining free land is appropriated, God help the workingman!
"Yes, we're protected in all that we have to buy: food, clothing, and shelter, in a way that increases the cost to us; but in what we have to sell, our labor, we have no protection at all. They give us good wages, for if they did not we would emigrate to the West and leave them, and by reason of this confounded tariff they put up the price of all we need so high that wages, measured by their purchasing power, are not so large after all. If the difference in real wages was so great as the protectionists claim, there would be more immigrants coming from Europe in one day than do now in a year."
The workingmen have been educating themselves in the last four years, and are no longer to be deceived by superficial comparisons of the differences in wages between countries; they will also examine into the differences in conditions, productive power, and the like, which the protectionist statistician omits to do.
William C. Wood, M. D.