earns; of men who amuse him with delusive schemes for reducing his expenditures, while they are employed in diminishing his receipts; of men who dangle the vision of cheaper food and cheaper clothing before his eyes, while they are in the very act of rifling his pocketbook. The whole art and part of certain gentlemen seems to be, to convince the workingman that the price of this or that article of his consumption is raised a few cents by the protecting system. As if the only subject of anxiety with the free American laborer was, "what shall I eat, or what shall I drink, or wherewithal shall I be clothed?" As if wages in this county were to be brought down to the standard of a bare and scanty subsistence! As if nothing was wanted by the laborer for the education of his children; nothing for paying his share of the support of religious worship; nothing to lay up, I do not say merely against a rainy day, but against that sunshiny day, which, by the blessing of God and a sound protecting tariff, is sure to beam on every honest, industrious man among us, when he may enjoy the fruits of his toil in a condition of comparative rest and recreation! Reduce the wages of labor to the standard of mere subsistence, and the laborer must be a laborer always. The noble spectacle which is so often exhibited in this country, and so rarely in any other, and which, let me say to the honorable member from Louisiana, is quite as often exhibited in the region of the Eastern manufacturers as in any other part of the Union, of what are called self-made men, the printer's boys, or ploughboys, or mill-boys of a few years back, elevating themselves to the highest stations of social or of public life, will be seen no You have cut off that hope of bettering his condition, which is the sweetest cordial to the heart of man, and the surest stimulus to industry, economy, and virtue. The one thing needful to the welfare of the laboring man, (temporally speaking, yet not without an incidental reference to things eternal,) is, that he should be able to lay up something. Ask any laborer what he thinks about the matter, and he will tell you that he cares not whether he pays a little more or a little less for his clothes; that he is quite willing, if need be, to pay his brother laborer or his sister laborer a little more for making his shoes or making more. his shirt, if you will secure to them both, not merely the means of paying for such things, but the means of making a little deposit, once in a week, or once in a month, or once in a quarter, in that most excellent of all institutions- the Savings Bank. Now, this is what the protective policy aims at; and this, too, in spite of all assertions to the contrary, is what it accomplishes. Look at this table of the amount of deposits in the Savings Bank at Lowell. I have here similar tables, showing an increase of wages in the manufacturing establishments of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, to the amount of twenty, thirty, forty, and even sixty per cent. in some cases, during the last three years. I have authentic information, too, that there has been a similar increase in some of the Maryland mills. And I have no doubt that other gentlemen will furnish similar testimony from other parts of the Union. And yet the Secretary of the Treasury has declared, that there has been no increase of wages at all, but rather a diminution, under the tariff of 1842! This, Mr. Chairman, I repeat, is what the policy of protection aims at. It looks at the workingman, not in his mere brute capacity of a consumer, but in his higher nature of a producer. It looks not to reducing the price of what he eats or what he wears, but to keeping up the price of his own labor. It looks, in short, to wages first, wages last, wages altogether. Shall the wages of the whole civilized commercial world be equalized and levelled off? This is the briefest, truest, most concise and most comprehensive statement of the question between free trade and protection. The wages of labor-by which is to be understood not merely the wages which are paid by the capitalist to the hired hand, but the wages also which are earned by labor of any kind working on its own account-are now higher in this country than in any other beneath the sun. If any body doubts this, let him stop the first emigrant whom he meets in the street, and ask him why he came over here, what condition he left behind him, and in what circumstances he finds himself within six months after his arrival? If any body doubts this, let him turn to the Parliamentary debaters, the economical essayists, or even the corn-law rhymers of England, and see what they say as to the condition of the great mass of British operatives. Listen to Charles Buller, in his admirable speech on systematic emigration as the only relief for the pauper labor of his country, while he tells you " of human beings huddled together in defiance of comfort, of shame, and of health, in garrets and in cellars, and in the same hovels with their pigs; of workhouses crowded; of even the gaol resorted to for shelter and maintenance; of human beings prevented from actually dying of starvation in the open streets, or of others allowed to expire from inanition in the obscurity of their own dwelling-places." Listen to him, again, while he gives you an account" of thousands of men, women, and children, congregated together without any regard to decency or comfort in noisome sites and wretched hovels - of those who wear out their lives in the darkness of coal and iron mines, doing what is commonly considered the work of brutes, in a moral and intellectual state hardly raised above that of the mere animal of the shirt-makers, who get tenpence for making a dozen shirts and of the fifteen thousand milliners in this metropolis, (London,) habitually working for the scantiest wages in close rooms, always for thirteen or fourteen hours a day, sometimes for days and nights together; nine out of ten losing their health in the occupation, and scores of them falling victims to consumption, or rendered incurably blind whenever a court mourning, or any festivity of particular magnitude, tasks their powers more than usual." Listen to Samuel Laing, in his prize essay on the causes and remedies of the national distress, while he describes to you those eight thousand inhabited cellars in Liverpool, whose occupants are estimated at from thirty-five to forty thousand persons: "These cellars are dwellings under ground, in many cases having no windows, and no communication with the external air, excepting by the door, the top of which is sometimes not higher than the level of the street. When the door of such a cellar is closed, therefore, light and air are both excluded. The access to the door is often so low as not to admit of a person of moderate height standing upright, and there is frequently no floor of any kind except the bare earth." - Go with him from the commercial to the manufacturing towns to Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds and follow him from thence through the agricultural districts, and hear him conclude, as the sum of the whole survey," that there is a large proportion of the laboring class who are unable to secure a tolerably comfortable and stable existence in return for their labor, and are approximating towards the gulf of pauperism." It may be, Sir, that the wages of the skilled labor of England will be found to approach pretty nearly to those of the same class of labor in our own country; though I remember finding an anecdote in the speech of a member of Parliament, not long ago, which conflicted even with this idea. In a debate on the corn-laws, a year or two since, Mr. P. Scrope is reported to have said, "that he had that evening met a manufacturer, who told him that he had last year discharged his foreman in consequence of not being able to pay him sufficient wages for the support of his family. That foreman had gone to America, and had written over to say that he was prosperous, that he was receiving double the wages he had had in England, while his expenditures and the price of provisions were two thirds less." Mr. Chairman, the fact is indisputable. The low price of land and its vast extent compared with the population, the vast amount of work to be done compared with the number of hands which can be commanded on our own soil to perform it, — these and other influences, secure now to American labor a remuneration which no other in the world receives. Shall this state of things, so fruitful of the greatest good to the greatest number, be continued; or shall we, in a fit of universal benevolence, go in for a horizontal scale of wages, and an average condition of labor, the wide world over? Equality of earnings, equality of encouragements, equality of opportunities, privileges, and wages, throughout the length and breadth of our own land, no man would disturb. We desire the establishment of no system which shall benefit or build up one class of our industry, or one section of our country, at the expense of another. But cannot our democracy be content with equality at home? Is it antirepublican or anti-American, to maintain and protect the superior condition of our own people? Cannot the frenzy of our philanthropy be appeased, until it has accomplished that universal level of labor, which can only be reached by the prostration of our own? Free trade says no, to this question. The Secretary of the Treasury says-no. The bill before us saysno. Or if they do not dare to say so in terms, they propose and pursue a policy which leads to such a result, with the speed and the directness of a railroad. The policy of protection, on the other hand, says "yes, yes; it shall not be in vain to the working-men of America, that their fathers threw off the colonial yoke, and secured for them a country and a government of their Other nations may well afford to enter into a free trade copartnership with us, for their labor has already reached that lowest depth to which there is no lower deep, and from which every change must be for the better. Other governments may afford to institute a free trade experiment on their own account, for they look to the intelligence, the education, and the independence of the few. But our institutions rest on the intelligence, education, and independence of the many. Our institutions rely on a condition of society, which nothing but a high rate of wages can maintain. If our labor be levelled off to the grade of European labor, our liberty must be cut down to the standard of European liberty. The government which looks to the laboring masses for support, must support the laboring masses." own. I may seem to have admitted, Mr. Chairman, in this view, that a protective tariff may raise the value of other things beside labor. Indeed, I expressly maintain, that it tends to secure a better price for agricultural produce, and that it is the only system which, in this country, can secure to that produce any price or market whatever. If gentlemen have any objection to this, let them tell it to the farmers. But as to the idea that it raises the price of the laboring man's clothes-it is utterly untrue. It has been proved again and again, by a hundred price-currents, that the effect of the protecting system has been to reduce, a hundredfold, the cost of the coarse articles of common wear. |