nd might, within a limited area, be
made periodically, say once in ten years, and if this were
done it would give a series of static standards of wages. Now
these standards become higher as time advances. The static
rate of pay for labor is, as a rule, higher at any one date
than was the standard for a date ten years earlier, and lower
than will be that for a date ten years later. The normal rate
of pay about which actual wages fluctuate is a rising one.

Now, if we introduce in imagination an absolutely static
state for the world at large, we shall have to assume that
growth of the general population and increase of the
aggregate capital both cease, and that inventions and new
cooerdinations are no longer made. We must then wait long
enough to allow static distribution of industries to be made
over the whole world and to let each industry find its
absolute habitat. This would involve causing methods of
producing any commodity to be unified the world over. Hand
labor in the Orient would have to give way to machine
production, as it has done in Western lands. For a strictly
static adjustment indeed even the density of population in
the different sections would have to be brought to a virtual
equality. While this nearly interminable process was going
on, it would be needful that such dynamic changes as
inventions and discoveries bring in their train should be
absolutely precluded. Stop making new kinds of machinery and
wait for centuries to allow a static adjustment to be made
over the whole earth--such would be the order.

Now, such a test as this would show falling wages in the more
favored parts of the earth, whereas the facts show rising
wages. The influx of population from the East, unrelieved by
a corresponding influx of new capital and by more fruitful
methods of production, would cause the earnings of an
American laborer to fall, and we should, on the basis of such
a test, conclude that his wages in the long run are destined
to become lower in consequence of the movement of the vast
populations that now congest great Asiatic countries. We
should have vitiated the problem by holding the growth of
capital and the progress of invention in abeyance. This may
be done within a limited area without giving a false result,
because there adjustments are more rapid, a