of New England or the iron-masters of Pennsylvania! A criterion which leads to such results must, I think, be regarded as sufficiently condemned. The fallacy is, in truth, ... that all [pg 616] industries are not in each country equally favored or disfavored by nature, and have not, therefore, equal need of this protecting care. If American protectionists are not prepared to demand protective duties in favor of the Illinois farmer against the competition of his English rival, they are bound to admit either that a high cost of production is not incompatible with effective competition, or else that a high rate of wages does not prove a high cost of production; and if this is not so in Illinois, then I wish to know why the case should be different in Pennsylvania or in New England. If a high rate of wages in the first of these States be consistent with a low cost of production, why may not a high rate of wages in Pennsylvania be consistent with a low cost of producing coal and iron?
“The rate of wages, whether measured in money or in the real remuneration of the laborer, affords an approximate criterion of the cost of production,365 either of money, or of the commodities that enter into the laborer's real remuneration, but in a sense the inverse of that in which it is understood in the argument under consideration: in other words, a high rate of wages indicates not a high but a low cost of production.366 ... Thus in the United States the rate of wages is high, whether measured in gold or in the most important articles of the laborer's consumption—a fact which proves that the cost of producing gold, as well as that of producing those other commodities, is low in the United States.... I would ask [objectors] to consider what are the true causes of the high remuneration of American industry. It will surely be