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Page 7
Now let us see what this farm family has lost, counting only the price of
the surplus it sells and taking our average from the official reports. On
500 bushels of wheat, at least $250; on 600 bushels of corn, $120; on ten
tons of hay, $30; on rye, oats, potatoes, and so forth, $50; on three
horses and mules sold per year, $100. Total, $550, being more than ten
times the net gain over taxes.
The Agricultural Department figures indicate that, taking the United
States as a whole, including even the intensive farming near the cities,
the reduction of annual income is a few cents over $6 per acre. Thus
something like $1,800,000,000 has been taken from the farmers' annual
income, and the farmer being just like any other man, in that he cannot
spend money that he does not get, this withdraws $1,800,000,000 from the
manufacturers' and general market. In view of these figures--and if
anything I have understated them--what conceivable good would a raise in
the tariff do the manufacturers so long as our farmers must sell on a gold
basis and be subject at the same time to the rapidly increasing
competition of silver basis countries? I have said nothing of fixed
charges which do not decline, or of the cost of the federal government,
which steadily and rapidly increases. Have you heard of any decline in
official salaries, taxes, debts, bonds, or mortgages?
=That is plausible at first view, but it cannot be true as to the country
generally, because wages have risen; or at least they had risen
continuously till 1892, as is clearly shown in the Aldrich Report.=
The Aldrich Report is a miserable fraud. It does not so much as mention
farmers and planters or any of the laboring classes immediately dependent
on farmers. It gives only the wages of the highest class of skilled
laborers and in those trades only where the men are organized in ironbound
trades unions which force up the wages of their members. Take the lists
and census and add the numbers employed in every trade mentioned in that
report, and you will find that all together they only amount to one fourth
the number of farmers, or about 12 per cent. of the labor of the country.
Furthermore, it takes no account whatever of the immense percentage of men
in each trade who are out of employment. One who didn't know better would
conclude from it that our coal miners worked 300 days in the year, and
that stone masons, plasterers, and the like worked all the year in the
latitude of New York and Chicago. And these are but a few of the tricks
and absurdities of the report.
Wages are labor's share of its own product. The claim that wages generally
can rise on a declining market involves a flat contradiction of
arithmetic; it assumes that the separate factors can increase while the
sum total is decreasing, and that the operator can pay more while he is
every day getting less. The whole philosophy of the subject was admirably
summed up by a Southern negro with whom I recently talked. "If wages be
up, how come 'em up? We all's gittin' but half what we useter git for our
cotton, and how kin five cents a pound pay me like ten cents a pound, and
me a pickin' out no mo' cotton?" His philosophy applies to 60 per cent. of
all the working people in the United States, for that proportion do not
work for money wages. They produce, and what they sell the product for is
their wages. Viewed in this, the only true light, the wages of 60 per
cent. of our laborers have declined nearly one half, making the average
decline for all laborers nearly a third. How, indeed, could it be
otherwise? Will any sensible man believe that a farmer could pay men as
much to produce wheat at $.50 as at $1.50? Or take the case of the cotton
grower. It takes a talented negro to make and save 3,000 pounds of lint
cotton; when he sold it at $.10 he got $300, and when he sells it at $.05
he gets $150, and all the tricks of all the goldbugs in the world cannot
make it otherwise. To tell such men that their wages have increased, in
the face of what they know to be the facts, is arrogant and insulting
nonsense.
=This nation should have the best money in the world.=
Very true. And the question of what is the best can only be determined by
science and experience. It is certain that gold standing alone is not; for
its fluctuations in purchasing power have been so tremendous as again and
again to throw the commercial world into jimjams. History shows that it
has varied 100 per cent. in a century, and we have seen in this country
that its value declined about 25 per cent. from 1848 to 1857, and that it
has increased something like 60 per cent. since 1873. Without desiring to
be ill-natured, I must say it seems to me that a man has a queerly
constituted mind who insists that that is the only "honest money."
=But we don't want 50-cent dollars.=
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