OTHER BRANCHES OF INDUSTRY. 805 
and our forests are so extensive and convenient to the market, 
that we can make cur lumber as cheap as that made elsewhere. 
We have extensive fisheries and they must be developed. We 
must build our own houses, and construct our own roads, rail- 
ways, mining-ditches, and flames. We now import all our 
hardware, glassware, porcelain, stationery, silks, cottons, fine 
woollen goods, and nearly all our clothing, boots, shoes, and 
fine furniture, and many of our agricultural implements, me- 
chanical tools, wagons, and carriages. 
There has been a gradual fall in the wages of labor since 
1849. For instance, in that year the wages of good carpen- 
ters were sixteen dollars per day; in 1851, ten dollars; in 
1858, seven dollars; in 1856, five dollars; and now four dol- 
lars; and there has been a similar decrease of wages in all 
those branches of labor much indemand. Tailors, shoemakers, 
and cabinet-makers have never received high wages, because 
little is done in their trades. Millers, calkers, and ship-wrights 
now get from four to six dollars per day; bricklayers, stone 
masons and plasterers from four to five dollars ; boiler-makers, 
machinists, and pattern-makers four dollars; carpenters, black- 
smiths, and carriage-makers from three to four dollars ; house- 
painters, paperhangers, and stevedores three dollars; hod- 
men and washerwomen two dollars; common laborers one dol- 
lar and seventy-five cents. Of such persons as are hired by 
the month and boarded, gardeners get thirty-five dollars; farm- 
ers, teamsters, waiters, sailors, chambermaids, and seamstresses 
twenty-five dollars. Clerks in stores get from thirty to sixty 
dollars with boarding ; from fifty to one hundred dollars with- 
out boarding. The best miners, of the class called “ drifters,” 
who cut and blast tunnels and dig shafts, get four dollars per 
day ; common miners get fifty dollars a month and boarding. 
The wages of labor in California are now higher than in any 
other pait of the world. 
§ 228. Lumbering.—Lumbering, or the preparation of forest 
timber for industrial purposes, is an important branch of the 
industry, and the sale cf .waiber is an important branch of the 
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