Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1882-10-28
PROTECTION AND WAGES.

from the present indications this will occur
before the next Presidential election.
PROTECTION AND WAGES.
Professor Sumner, OF Yale, read paper
before the Tariff Commission recently, show
ing that Protection does not make wages
high. This very clear and able exposition
OF prevalent fallacy ought TO be printed
by the Free Trade League in such form
that it may be put in the hand of every
producer and workingman in the country,
for it is a most seasonable and important
argument. The Protectionists have relied
mainly upon this pretense, for through it
they secured the votes of the working
classes. Without such pretense they
would have had little or no hold upon the
masses, and when the fallacy of this is
shown, as Professor Sumner has shown it,
the effect must be very great. In the first
place he pointed out that the argument of
the Protectionists embraced an absurdity (;
for they hold ~ that protective taxes make
wages high, and ~ that high wages make
protective taxes necessary. Now it is
perfectly evident that these PROPOSE.
tions are mutually destructive, but it
is only necessary to deal with the
first. Protective taxes, then, do not
make wages high. On the contrary their
tendency is to lower wages. AS Professor
Sumner put it, 8" 1t is impossible to raise
wages by opposing cheapness and abund-
lance. The protective system lessons
"wealth and enhances the cost of all art-
cles of clothing, furniture, cooking, tools
and machinery. How then can it in
:" crease wages or the average amount of
those goods that can be obtained by
{" each laborer % Again he observed fore
IDLY that I" He who believed that the way
6" tc raise wages was to hinder people from
getting things easily or cheaply, or to
refrain from the most profitable modes
'of obtaining goods, must believe that
workmen raised wages when they stopped
working and went on strikes, or lowered
"wsges when they went to work again.
Professor Sumner further referred to the
case of England, which is, of course, an
utterly unmsnageable case to the Protec-
tionists. In England wages are higher
than anywhere else in Europe. And
yet, under Free Trade, she is able to
beat all her neighbors in manufacture
ing. "How could this be done"
asks the Professor, "if the criterion of
"possible competition was the compare
tive rate of wages ?" Again he says ::
''The nearest approach to pauper labor in
Europe is in agricultural labor; and yet
American farmers. paying high wages
"and transportation, beat this pauper
"labor in their own markets" OF course
all these instances are hard and crooked
sayings to the Protectionists, who have
never put any intelligence to their posi-.
tions, and who have always relied upon
fallacies and false pretenses. The wages
question, however, ought to be fully ex-
plotted by this time. The truth lie that
protective taxes do not raise but lower
wages. Whenever wages are higher in the
United States than in Europe the fact is
due to the general resources of the coun-
try, to the fact that there is still praoti-
cally indefinite quantity of public land
available, but not at all to the imposition
OF taxes whose only possible effect
can be to diminish the purchasing
power of the workingman's wages.
But wages, even when high here,
would always be higher were it not for
Protection. In fact, as Professor Sumner
said, "There is only one thing that could
"reduce American wages to European
standards, and that was protective taxes
"applied long enough and with sufficient
weight" II will not be long until the
American workingman will understand
this. The American farmer already under
stands it pretty clearly in the great West,
and he has given indications that he is not
going to stand it much longer When the
Protectionists are driven from their old
position on the wages question, they will
retain no adequate defense of any kind, for
it has already been demonstrated that
the Infancy of manufactures argument
has no force or validity. In fact the masses
of the American people, who for so many
years have been taxed to support small
number of privileged manufacturers, desire
to have their turn at exemption. They
begin to understand that no country can
benefit itself by obstructing commerce, and
that it is not the business of governments
to interfere with the free play of natural
economic forces.