ng he needs
except food.

One more illustration, and I have done. Upon the wall hangs a diagram
which shows the movements of American wages, of English wages, and of the
tariff from 1860 to 1883. I have already argued that a tariff cannot
determine wages, and the diagram affords positive proof that it has not
determined them in America, as between 1860 and the present time. On the
contrary, their movements are evidently due to the same causes as have
influenced wages here during this period, while it is certainly remarkable
that they have fallen sooner, fallen lower, and recovered less completely
in America, where industry is "protected," than in Great Britain, were it
is "unprotected."

Shortly to recapitulate all that has been advanced, I have endeavored to
show:

1st. That a great change has occurred in the social condition of labor in
the United States during the last forty years, and that, spite of all the
existing agencies of improvement, it is doubtful whether the working
classes of America are not, at the present moment, falling still further
from those high ideals of operative life which once so brilliantly
distinguished the United States from European countries.

2d. That, although wages are probably some 60 per cent. higher in the
chief manufacturing districts of America than in Great Britain, yet an
English artisan would find himself little richer there than at home, after
paying the enhanced prices for subsistence, and conforming to the higher
standard of life which prevails in the States. At the same time, his whole
social position and opportunities of advancement would be immensely
improved.

3d. I have tried to demonstrate that the tariff, to which the higher wages
of America are so confidently attributed, has really no influence whatever
upon them, and that it is not therefore an engine, such as it is glowingly
represented to the American artisan, constructed for the purpose of
raising his lot above that of the so-called "pauper labor of Europe." Any
inquiry into the character of the work really accomplished by the engine
in question would lead me into regions of controversy forbidden in this
room.

Finally, if I am asked why, in a review of American labor and wages, I
have said nothing of trade unionism on the one hand, and of co-operative
production on the other, I can only answer that to have introduced these
among so many other interesting, but subsidiary, subjects which crowd
around questio