How Protection Raises The Wages

Our high tariff friends profess great love for the toiling workingmen. And none can exceed in the intensity of expression of this love, che millionaires engaged in the protected industries. The tariff they say is to protect the workingman( to give him higher wages, take off the tanfF and American workingmen will have to accept the pauper wages of Europe. Unfortunately for these philanthrophic millionaires the American workingman is every year becoming more intelligent. He finds that free trade England pays nearly doublé the wages of high tariff Germany. He reads further and finds that wages in England are much higher today than they were before England discarded the protection policy. May he not well look with suspicion upon the millionaires honeyed phrases which seek to delude him into being willingly bied for the benefit of other millionaires. The census of 18S0, the last national census taken, shows that protection does not have the effect of increasing the wages of workingmen in the protected industries. lts figures are well worthy of study. Here are the figures showing the average wages in the highty protected industries and in those not protected at all or only slightly protected. 1. HIGHLY PROTECTED INDUSTRIES. Number Average of hands. wages. Machine making 140,351 H55 Iron and steel KS Agricultural implements... 3ö,.80 3S8 SiTk goods, etc 31,337 392 Menïclot hing 160,813 Cottongoods 185,473 245 Saw milis 147,956 21o Average wages Ï321 2. UNPEOTECTED, OR SLIGHTLY PROTECTED. Printing and publishing 58,478 f522 Marbleand stonework 21,471 4ii Carpenters 54,1: 4o4 Bakers 22,488 419 Carriages and wagons 45,34 8 Slaughtering and meat pack.2i,29i -o Blacksmithiug 34,526 323 Averaíre wages S428 In other words the average wages in the unprotected industries are $100 a year larger than in the protected industries. The millionaries who tax the people that they may count their gains by large figures, do not, it seems, pay their hands any more than they can help and wages are fixed by the demand for labor and the supply of labor and not by the atnount of money finding its way mto the hands ot the employer.