Shucks! Well, of course, I hated to give it up. So I chanced another flyer:
“Let us suppose a case. Suppose one of your journeymen goes out and buys the following articles:
“One pound of salt; one dozen eggs; one dozen pints of beer; one bushel of wheat; one tow-linen suit; five pounds of beef; five pounds of mutton.
“The lot will cost him thirty-two cents. It takes him thirty-two working days to earn the money—five weeks and two days. Let him come to us and work thirty-two days at half the wages; he can buy all those things for a shade under fourteen and a half cents; they will cost him a shade under twenty-nine days’ work, and he will have about half a week’s wages over. Carry it through the year; he would save nearly a week’s wages every two months, your man nothing; thus saving five or six weeks’ wages in a year, your man not a cent. Now I reckon you understand that ‘high wages’ and ‘low wages’ are phrases that don’t mean anything in the world until you find out which of them will buy the most!”
It was a crusher.
But, alas! it didn’t crush. No, I had to give it up. What those people valued was high wages ; it didn’t seem to be a matter of any consequence to them whether the high wages would buy anything or not. They stood for “protection,” and swore by it, which was reasonable enough, because interested parties had gulled them into the notion that it was protection which had created their high wages. I proved to them that in a quarter of a century their wages had advanced but thirty percent, while the cost of living had gone up 100; and that with us, in a shorter time, wages had advanced forty percent, while the cost of living had gone steadily down. But it didn’t do any good. Nothing could unseat their strange beliefs.