National Prosperity and High Wages. 139 



to the labor of 113,000,000 able-bodied men. How insig- 

 nificant in contrast appears the contribution to industrial 

 wealth of the 5,316,802 men, women and children, the 

 actual average number of persons employed in the cen- 

 sus year to direct and supplement this tremendous 

 power." 



The following statement is found in Mr. Carroll D. 

 Wright's '' Industrial Evolution of the United States": 

 ^'Looking at this question without any desire to be 

 mathematically accurate, it is fair to say, perhaps, that it 

 would require from fifty to one hundred million persons 

 in this country, working under the old system, to produce 

 the goods made and do the work performed by the work- 

 ers of to-day with the aid of machinery." Number of 

 workers 5,316,802. 



The people of the United States have been frightened 

 for many years by a vision of the dire effect of losing a 

 little work to the foreigner under free trade conditions. 

 We have given an idea of the value of products of agri- 

 culture and manufacture; we add something in regard to 

 the value of the free-trade exchanges that take place 

 inside the United States. Senator George F. Hoar at 

 Concord, Mass., in 1900, put it thus: ''In internal com- 

 merce that thrusts into insignificance all the foreign com- 

 merce of the world. ' ' 



In Mr. James Gr. Blaine's book^ a more definite state- 

 ment is made: ''Fifty-five millions of people carry on 

 their exchanges by ocean, by lake, by river, by railroad, 

 without the exactions of the tax-gatherer, without the 

 detention of the custom-house, without even the recogni- 

 tion of state lines. In these great channels the domestic 



1 (< 



Twenty Years in Congress." 



