And yet how often hundreds of thousands of persons, who spend thousands of dollars every year on luxuries, really wonder why the laboring people should complain. They are astonished when a car driver objects to working fourteen hours a day. Men give millions of dollars to carry the gospel to the heathen, and leave their own neighbors without bread; and these same people insist on closing libraries and museums of art on Sunday, and yet Sunday is the only day that these institutions can be visited by the poor.
They even want to stop the street cars so that these workers, these men and women, cannot go to the parks or the fields on Sunday. They want stages stopped on fashionable avenues so that the rich may not be disturbed in their prayers and devotions.
The condition of the workingman, even in America, is bad enough. If free trade will not reduce wages what will? If manufactured articles become cheaper the skilled laborers of America must work cheaper or stop producing the articles. Every one knows that most of the value of a manufactured article comes from labor. Think of the difference between the value of a pound of cotton and a pound of the finest cotton cloth; between a pound of flax and enough point lace to weigh a pound; between a few ounces of paint, two or three yards of canvas and a great picture; between a block of stone and a statue! Labor is the principal factor in price; when the price falls wages must go down.
I do not claim that protection is for the benefit of any particular class, but that it is for the benefit not only of that particular class, but of the entire country. In England the common laborer expects to spend his old age in some workhouse. He is cheered through all his days of toil, through all his years of weariness, by the prospect of dying a respectable pauper. The women work as hard as the men. They toil in the iron mills. They make nails, they dig coal, they toil in the fields.
In Europe they carry the hod, they work like beasts and with beasts, until they lose almost the semblance of human beings--until they look inferior to the animals they drive. On the labor of these deformed mothers, of these bent and wrinkled girls, of little boys with the faces of old age, the heartless nobility live in splendor and extravagant idleness. I am not now speaking of the French people, as France is the most prosperous country in Europe.