FOREIGN TRADE NO REMEDY. 207 



because of the cheapness of the manufactures exported, 

 has been at the cost of at least eighty dollars of home 

 traffic. Or, if because of the cheapness of the whole 

 export, raw and manufactured, it has been at the cost 

 of more than thirteen dollars of our home trade, with 

 the incalculable poverty and misery brought upon our 

 people by idleness and low wages, whilst in the pur- 

 suit of this maddest of all follies, foreign markets for 

 the consumption of our manufactures. In this mad 

 pursuit we have found a foreign consumption for those 

 products which, only because of their cheapness of 

 the manufactures of cotton, wool and its manufac- 

 tures, iron and steel and their manufactures, and boots 

 and shoes can be sold to the amount of $33,129,391 

 per annum. This is substantially our only offset for 

 the loss, in and through cheap production, of fully 

 $8,000,000,000 per annum of the home trade of our 

 own people an amount equal to nearly twice the 

 whole cost to the nation of the war of the rebellion 

 for no doubt our food products and raw cotton, our 

 petroleum, our agricultural and other machinery, with 

 most of our smaller products, would find a foreign 

 market even if the most liberal wages were paid in 

 their production. 



The millions of little streams that flowed from the 

 labor and wages of the masses who were employed six- 

 teen and eighteen years ago, created the great flood 

 that filled the reservoir from which were drawn all 

 the fortunes, all the wealth, all the comfort, all the 

 material progress that so signally marked the decade 

 of 1862 to 1872. But the sudden throwing of three 

 millions of the great industrial class out of their ab- 



