290 JOHN FOSTER FRASER 



those industries which are most fully protected by tariff, 

 Americans do not at all show that adaptiveness remarkable 

 in all other industries where there is fierce competition — the 

 iron trade and shoe industry are random instances — chiefly 

 because there are no circumstances of competition to which 

 they are called upon to adapt themselves. 



The line of progress in adaptability has been in those 

 trades that have had to grapple with European competition. 

 On one side of the Atlantic there have been low wages, on 

 the other side high wages. But manufacturers who have 

 paid and are paying high wages are frequently wresting trade 

 from those who pay low by producing a similar article at a 

 lesser price. Labor saving machinery has given them the 

 power. 



Cause and effect are at work in all things, and labor 

 saving machinery has been brought into existence in America, 

 not because the American happens to have the inventive 

 faculty more largely developed than has the European — in- 

 deed, all who have considered this matter scientifically know 

 that the American mind is not creative; it is adaptive, appre- 

 ciative of the value of invention — but because that stumbling 

 block of high wages, which stood in the way of competition 

 with cheaply produced European goods met in the open 

 market, had to be overcome. 



If you are in New York, take a walk along Broadway — 

 or, indeed, any of the main streets — and glance at the names 

 of the shopkeepers. It is rather the exception to see a name 

 with a British flavor. Go, however, to the patent office at 

 Washington, and run your eye along the lists of inventors, 

 and you are amazed at the vast majority of names being 

 British. Not by any means are they all of Americans who 

 come from a British stock; but a great many of them are of 

 men with a British domicile who have patented their inven- 

 tions in the United States because the American patent office 

 is infinitely superior to our own, and because the American 

 manufacturer is keen after anything and everything that is 

 novel and an improvement. In England, when a man thinks 

 he has invented something, and has patented it, and has 

 possibly leased it to a manufacturing firm, there is the likeli- 



