stem only. Advocates who
are not prepared to say that every bargain shall be controlled by
beneficence, and who distinctly admire the chief results of competition,
cannot logically demand that labor, alone of all salable commodities,
shall be bought and sold on altruistic principles.

In what immediately precedes, I have endeavored to indicate the character
of the pleadings which make American artisans universally supporters of
the tariff, and we must now return to the question, What, after all, is
really the effect of protection on wages in America? I answer that no
legislative schemes can add to, although they may injure, the material
resources of a state. Capital can only support the labor for which the
annual harvest of such resources pays, and all that legislation can do is
artificially to divert labor and capital from directions which they would
take under the influence of natural laws.

America is selling, at the present time, about L160,000,000 worth of food
and other raw products in Europe. These, together, represent her chief
branch of business, in which nearly fifty per cent. of her population is
engaged, and all this merchandise is sold in the free trade markets of the
world. Wages in America, therefore, cannot possibly be regulated by the
tariff, because, whatever wages can be earned by men engaged in the
production of agricultural products--the prices of which are fixed in
Liverpool--must be the rate of wages which will substantially be paid in
other branches of business. Wages, like water, seek a level; if
manufacture pays best, labor will quit agriculture; if agriculture pays
best, manufactures will decline, and agriculture progress.

A glance at the condition of industrial society in America vividly
illustrates this conclusion. Any man, with a few dollars and a strong pair
of arms, can win far greater rewards from the soil than he could possibly
obtain by the same effort in Europe. His wages are high, because the grade
of comfort to be obtained from the land by means of a little labor is
high, and the artisans' wages must follow suit, if men are to be tempted
from the field into the workshop. American politicians, however, would
have us believe that American labor owes its prosperity to taxation; in
other words, that what the immigrant seeks is not the rich prizes offered
him by a free and fertile soil, but the blessings which flow from a tariff
that adds an average 40 per cent. to the cost of everythi