TARIFFS AND WAGES

The argument from the exchanges, which is now admitted to be wholly
false in practice, really brings us back to the old tariffist argument
that tariffs are required to protect us against the imports of countries
whose general rate of wages is lower than ours. On the one hand, they
assured us that a tariff was the one means of securing good wages for
the workers in general. On the other, they declared that foreign goods
entered our country to the extent they did because foreign employers in
general sweated their employees. That is to say--seeing that nearly all
our competitors had tariffs--the tariffed countries pay the worst wages;
and we were to raise ours by having tariffs also. But even that pleasing
paralogism did not suffice for the appetite of tariffism in the way of
fallacy. The same propaganda which affirmed the lowness of the rate of
wages paid in tariffist countries affirmed also the _superiority_ of the
rate of wages paid in the United States, whence came much of our
imported goods which the tariffists wished to keep out. In this case,
the evidence for the statement lay in the high wage-rate figures for
three employments in particular--those of engine-drivers, compositors,
and builders' labourers: three industries incapable of protection by
tariffs.

Thus even the percentage of truth was turned to the account of delusion;
for the wages in the protected industries of the States were so far from
being on the scale of the others just mentioned, that they were reported
at times to be absolutely below those paid in the same industries in
Britain. For the rest, _costs of living_ were shown by all the official
statistics to be lower with us than in any of the competing tariffed
countries; and in particular much lower than in the United States. There