Exhibition Addresses. 165 



of it on purely theoretic grounds, and apart from fact?, is worse than 

 idle, for it tends to mislead. 



Production being the source, and the only source, of national 

 wealth, can it be doubted that our tariif legislation should aim at 

 imparting to the labor of the country the highest degree of productive 

 efficiency ? For this we need a largely diversified industry, giving 

 employment to persons of every class and condition, and calling into 

 use all the additional power that machinery and science can bring to 

 its aid. To adopt and enforce the system of those who are now 

 clamoring for free trade, would be the very reverse of this. It would 

 result in a tame surrender to other nations of all that we have 

 accomplished in the way of manufacturing industry and improvement, 

 and would remand us to those ruder descriptions of labor in which 

 mechanical skill and science have, comparatively, but a limited appli- 

 cation. 



We ask protection for American manufactures, not certainly 

 because our countrymen are less capable tlian their European rivals ; 

 for in intelligence, ingenuity, and aptness to learn they have no 

 superiors. It is not because our natural advantages are less, nor 

 from inability to acquire the requisite skill; for we have carried 

 some manufactures to a perfection nowhere else attained. There are 

 however, certain conditions which effect, directly or indirectly, the 

 cost of production, in respect to which the other manufacturing 

 nations have a decided advantage over us. I refer to the rate of 

 wages paid for labor, the rates of local taxation, and the rates of inter- 

 est on capital. That these are things beyond the control of our 

 manufacturers, no one will deny. That the necessity of paying, in 

 all these respects, much higher rates than their rivals have to pay, 

 puts them at a serious disadvantage, seems equally certain. That 

 there is one way, and only one, by which this damaging disparity 

 can be counterbalanced, I think you will also allow to be perfectly 

 clear. 



Let us see now how this case stands. Mr. David A. Wells, Special 

 Commissioner of Revenue, who has investigated tliis subject at home 

 and abroad, thus states the difference between the rates of wages 

 paid in the United States, and the rates which obtain in several 

 other countries (gold being taken as the standard in all cases). 



In the cotton manufacture, the excess of wages paid in the United 

 States over the wages paid in great Britain is 27 T-10 per cent ; over 

 Belgium, the excess is forty-eight per cent. 



