uding even the intensive farming near the cities,
the reduction of annual income is a few cents over $6 per acre. Thus
something like $1,800,000,000 has been taken from the farmers' annual
income, and the farmer being just like any other man, in that he cannot
spend money that he does not get, this withdraws $1,800,000,000 from the
manufacturers' and general market. In view of these figures--and if
anything I have understated them--what conceivable good would a raise in
the tariff do the manufacturers so long as our farmers must sell on a gold
basis and be subject at the same time to the rapidly increasing
competition of silver basis countries? I have said nothing of fixed
charges which do not decline, or of the cost of the federal government,
which steadily and rapidly increases. Have you heard of any decline in
official salaries, taxes, debts, bonds, or mortgages?

=That is plausible at first view, but it cannot be true as to the country
generally, because wages have risen; or at least they had risen
continuously till 1892, as is clearly shown in the Aldrich Report.=

The Aldrich Report is a miserable fraud. It does not so much as mention
farmers and planters or any of the laboring classes immediately dependent
on farmers. It gives only the wages of the highest class of skilled
laborers and in those trades only where the men are organized in ironbound
trades unions which force up the wages of their members. Take the lists
and census and add the numbers employed in every trade mentioned in that
report, and you will find that all together they only amount to one fourth
the number of farmers, or about 12 per cent. of the labor of the country.
Furthermore, it takes no account whatever of the immense percentage of men
in each trade who are out of employment. One who didn't know better would
conclude from it that our coal miners worked 300 days in the year, and
that stone masons, plasterers, and the like worked all the year in the
latitude of New York and Chicago. And these are but a few of the tricks
and absurdities of the report.

Wages are labor's share of its own product. The claim that wages generally
can rise on a declining market involves a flat contradiction of
arithmetic; it assumes that the separate factors can increase while the
sum total is decreasing, and that the operator can pay more while he is
every day getting less. The whole philosophy of the subject was admirably
summed up by a Southern negro with who