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.=