16 
setshire, $2; in Durham and Northumberland, $3 75, with house and garden, 
coal, potatoes, and wheat. It may not be very wide of the truth to estimate 
the present wages of the English farm laborer at $3 50 per week. Allow- 
ing four weeks for holidays and absence from other causes, the year’s earnings 
would be $168. Wade’s History of the Middle and Working Classes placed the 
average of husbandry wages at $3, which was believed to be high at that time. 
Mr. Senior made the average of all kinds of labor $168 per year in Britain, and - 
$224 in the United States. Farm labor then averaged less. This is not given 
as the actual average, but is probably quite as favorable to the laborer as it can 
truthfully be made. p 
The American farm laborer, as has been shown, gets $28 dollars per month, 
or, counting eleven months’ work each year, $308 per annum. Although the 
pay is in cwrency, each dollar will buy more breadstuffs and vegetables in the 
great western agricultural sections than will a gold dollar in England. 
Wages have materially increased of late. Mr. Levi estimates that one-half 
the laborers of the United Kingdom, from increase of wages, are able to consume 
one pound more meat each per week than formerly. 
Our farm labor proper (meaning hired farm labor) is a small item compared 
with the labor of farmers and their sons. There are about 900,000 farm laborers, 
exclusive of the freedmen, and 2,500,000 farm proprietors, yet the labor of these 
900,000 is no insignificant item. At $308 each per annum it amounts to an 
aggregate of $277,200,000, $2,200,000 more than Mr Levi’s estimate of agri- 
cultural labor in Great Britain. And this is but little more than one-fourth of 
the actual farm labor done by white laborers. The freedmen, of whom a large 
portion of the adults, male and female, are farm laborers, will swell the total 
estimate of agricultural labor to a magnificent figure. 
It is believed that such an’xhibition of the facts of this great department of . 
human industry will furnish profitable food for reflection and information tend- 
ing to promote the profits of industry and the welfare of the human race. 
WOOL CONSUMPTION, 
The strangest misconceptions of the actual amount of wool annually con- 
sumed in the United States are common in newspapers and in statements of 
individuals. But the wildest of the statements yet made by intelligent parties 
is that of the Special Commissioner of Revenue, in his recent report upon the 
revenue system. 
The first point taken is, that wool growers, in demanding a minimum of ten 
cents per pound specific and ten per cent ad valorem, desire to raise the price 
of wools to that extent, and it is attempted to be shown that such a rate would 
operate as a ruinous tax upon the resources of the country. ‘To fortify such an 
assumption the astounding estimate is seriously made of a present average , 
annual consumption of 150,000,000 pounds of manufactured woollens, and 
upon this extraordinary blunder, which in this case is certainly worse than the 
crime of intentional misrepresentation, is based an estimate of increased cost 
of such goods to the extent of $71,250,000. 
The estimate is as follows : 
«The number of sets of woollen machinery or series of cards employed in the 
United States, reported to the Wool Manufacturers’ Association in October, 
1865, was four thousand one hundred,|| consuming 2,252,545 pounds of scoured 
wool, and substitutes for wool, per week; but these returns, it was stated, did 
not probably indicate more than three-fourths to four-fifths of the sets then in 
actual operation. Suppose, however, the balance to consume wool equal to the 
