Great Falls tribune. [volume] (Great Falls, Mont.) 1921-current, 1922-05-17
with $47o, 600, 900 during 1914, the

ing that our loss In balance OF trace
during the first year Of the Payne
Aldrich bill was 10 per cent, as com
pared with four per cent during the
first year of the present law.
Surely if a loss of four per cen,
in balance of trade during the first
year Of the present law meant
impending disaster the fourfolc
greater loss during the first year OF
the Payne-Aldrich act was fraugh,
with portents of still greater dis
aster.
1.-THE restrictions and emborgoes
to which the majority report refers
freed the trust-controlled industries
from the restraint Of foreign COM
petition and gave them a free hand
to arbitrarily advance their prices
and profits, while war-made pros
perity made their customers able to
pay those prices, extortionate as
they might be. The result was that
the sky was the only limit to the
advances they made in these prices
and profits. Industries which had
in normal times been making only
from from 10 per cent to IS per
cent profits, freed from outside
competition as a result of these en-
bargoes, advanced them 100 per
cent 200 per cent, 800 per cent. 400
per cent, 500 per cent, and ever in
instances to 1000 per cent. Ma
turally the representatives of these
industries long for a return to these
halcyon days and conditions. They
believe that embargoes and pro-
hibitions upon foreign imports will
do for them now what embargoes
and prohibitions did for them dur
ing the war. Greed is always blind.
Avarice has no conscience. In
making these demands the interests
were, Of course, only thinking about
themselves, and, as usual, with no
thought for the people who would
have to pay the penalty of giving
them the full measure of their
seeking"
In relation to wages and the
maintenance of the American stan
dard of living, the report says:
"The majority seeks to justify
the high rates they propose upon
the ground that they are necessary
to permit American protected in
dustries to pay wages sufficient to
enable u American workingmen
to maintain the American standard
of living.
This statement sounds rather
strange, in view of the fact that
these selfsame industries are today
engaged in an intensive drive to
reduce present wage standards, just
as the manufacturers Of competing
countries are engaged in a drive to
reduce the equally high, relatively
speaking, standard Of wages in those
countries.
This statement sounds strange
when you consider the fact known
to everybody that the range of
profits of protected products in
this country are today far in ex-
cess Of what is justified by the
labor costs of those products and,
indeed, bear little or no relation to
production cost.
This declaration seems strange
in connection with the fact that
the standard of wages in foreign
competing countries Is today moro
nearly equal the American standard
than ever before and that in these
foreign counties labor, by the same
devices and expedients it is en-
ploying here, is offering equally as
successful resistance to the lower
ing of those standards, making it
apparent that under the inspiration
and impetus of a better understand
ing which came to labor during the
of its rights to a greater par
ticipation in the profits of their
labor and their power to maintain
those rights has made it reasonably
certain that in the future the STAN
dard of wages and of living condi-
tons throughout the world will re-
main as they were during the war
that is, upon a basis of relative in
ternational equality-and that to
this end the labor organizations in
the world are and will continue to
cooperate, and that that co-opera-
ton will likely continue to be sue
cessful in maintaining these STAN
dards upon a basis of approximate
equality.