the cost of manufacture is decreasing all the time, 
the latest available statistics, those for 1905, show 
that the average market value of the country’s 
entire pig iron product was $11.64 per ton. Such 
a contrast mocks the idea of competition. In no 
year of the last ten has any such average price 
been known in the United States. Again the ex- 
perience of Great Britain is instructive. She is 
obliged today to import one-half as much iron 
ore as she produces. She exports practically 
none; she obtained in round numbers 6,000,000 
tons from Spain in 1906. The changes in her in- 
dustrial condition have at this moment reduced 
Glasgow to treat with a besieging army of the 
unemployed, have brought 4,000 men in London 
to answer in person an advertisement for a por- 
ter at $4.50 a week, and have practically given 
the government over to a growing socialism. We 
are not in that plight yet; but we are already 
where we cannot, without changing our wage scale 
and revolutionizing our industrial system, pro- 
duce pig iron cheaply enough to compete with 
Europe. And forty or fifty years hence, with our 
enormously increased demand for the metal that 
has made progress possible, and our depletion of 
its supply, we shall be in no position to meet the 
foreigner in trade or to furnish from this source a 
fund to purchase food. 
It is sufficient to state conditions thus broadly. 
They enforce their own conclusions. All the im- 
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