they employed from the products of China, Japan, and of British India, the East Indies, and Mexico. The harrowing condition of labor in those countries has been dwelt upon as an apparently strong argument, and any wages-a few cents a day-were named as representing the earnings of these peoples. Textile fibres grown by "* pauper labor or labor paid in the most niggardly manner "; chemicals made, or to be made in China, with labor at starvation wages; machinery and machine products, the outcome of Japanese ingenuity in applying their ridiculously cheap labor to copying American inventions and trade-marks, the influx of Eastern copies of Western manufactures, were presented as the reason for a nearly prohibitive legislation enacted to protect the infant industries of the United States.

The fear over the possible competition in the East has grown in recent years, but a study of the commerce between the United States and Asia fails to disclose any evidence of this competition, as the official returns of the Bureau of Statistics of the United States Treasury Department shows that during the last five years the trade with China and Japan has increased slowly in so far as the imports from those countries are concerned, while the increase of the exports from the United States to them has been very material,' and the trade with British India and the British East Indies has decreased.

The tariff of March 3, 1883, was determined by a fear of European competition. An average duty of forty-five per cent. was regarded as good protection against the Continent of Europe as well as England; against the machine products of Great Britain, France, and Germany, as well as against the home industries of Russia and Austria. If that rate was required against Europe, what rate will be demanded against Asia and Mexico?

It is very strange that while many in the United States thought it necessary to protect their manufactures from foreign competition by high duties, Count Goluchowski, Premier of Austria, should be so much afraid about the competition of American manufactories in European markets, and should call on Europe to unite in a commercial league

'In the last five years imports from China have gained $1,600,000; but this increase is almost entirely to be found in the single item of raw silk. In the same period the imports from British India and the British East Indies decreased $4,400,000, and not a single item of manufactures shows a larger import in the year 1896 than in that of 1892. With Japan, the country most to be feared in manufactures, United States imports have gained $1,800,000 in five years, and in manufactures of silk, flax, and hemp, there has been a small increase: yet it is an increase too small to weigh in the supply of such a market as the United States. United States exports to Japan have gained $4,300,000 in five years, to China $1,300,000, and to British India have lost $400,000. On the face of the returns these countries are better customers for American products than the United States is for theirs. The gains with Mexico are still larger.

against the United States and Japan, in a speech delivered in Vienna in November, 1897.

Agricultural products of this country, like wheat, cotton, and others, notwithstanding the high wages paid here to field laborers, successfully sustain in the English and other neutral foreign markets, a sharp competition with similar foreign products obtained with low wages, in some cases even lower than those in Mexico, as in the case of China and the East Indies, as is shown by the very large increase of the exports of this country. The exports of the year 1897 exceeded those of 1896, which were abnormally large, by $93,292,278, or 9 per cent. There need, therefore, be no fear of competition from Mexico.

I believe that the people of the United States have the necessary enterprise and capacity to compete with any other people in the world. in the production of manufactured articles. It is true that the high wages paid here, the import duties upon raw materials, and the high price of coal as compared with its price in some other countries, increase the cost of the production of certain commodities as compared with similar ones manufactured in England, France, Germany, and Belgium; but it must at the same time be remembered that the application of machinery, which is used here on a much larger scale than in any other country, cheapens production so greatly that it enables this country to manufacture many articles at a less cost than any other. An instance of this is the manufacture of steel rails in the Edgar Thompson Factory at Pittsburg, Penn., where, the entire production being mechanical, few hands are employed, and where natural gas is used as fuel.

High import duties are not enough, by themselves, to keep up high wages. If that were so, the wages in Mexico should be higher than in the United States, because our tariff is still more protective than the tariff of this country. It is true that our products did not use to compete with foreign manufactures in our home markets, and that may account in some way for that fact. But we are beginning now to manufacture largely a coarser kind of goods, like textiles, iron, and others which compete with similar foreign manufactures, and are driving them from our markets, and if that principle were true, our wages paid for such manufactures ought to be higher than in the United States because our tariff is higher.

High import duties collected in Mexico, amounting in some cases to over three hundred per cent. ad valorem, have neither increased nor cheapened our productions, nor raised our wages. Our imports in the fiscal year ending on the 30th of June, 1889, amounted to $40,024,894.32; if we deduct from this the free articles, valued at $13,506,230.23, we shall have, as the dutiable merchandise, $26,518,664.09, yielding a revenue of $32,477,962.95, or an average of 122 per cent. upon dutiable

and 81.14 per cent. upon the total imports, which is larger in proportion than that of any other American nation, and almost double that of the United States, where the average was 44.41 per cent. for the fiscal year ending on the 30th of June, 1890, the last fiscal year before the tariff, approved on October 1, 1890, was in operation; the value of the dutiable articles amounting to $507,511,764, and the import duties to $226,540,037. This contrast appears still greater in the case of the foreign trade in the fiscal year ended June 30, 1896, of both countries. According to the information conveyed in the President's Message of December 6, 1896, the proportion on dutiable goods imported in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1896-during which the Wilson Bill was in operationwas 39.94 per cent.; and on all articles, dutiable and free together, it was 20.55 per cent.; while in Mexico the imports of the same fiscal year amounted to $42,253,938, out of which $37,249,405 were dutiable, the proportion being 57.6 per cent. upon dutiable goods and 50.8 upon the total imports. Notwithstanding all this, and although our wages are lower than those in this country, our production, as compared with similar articles produced in this country, is considerably dearer.

At the end of 1897 over 50,000 workmen employed in the cotton mills in Fall River and other places of Massachusetts had their wages reduced ten per cent., and a similar reduction was made in other mills in New Hampshire and Rhode Island, as well as in Lewiston, Auburn, and Biddeford, Maine, a reduction having also taken place in the wages of a great shoe factory in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

It would be unreasonable and unfair to make the present tariff accountable for that reduction, with which it has nothing to do, and the most satisfactory explanation given of it is, in my opinion, the one advanced by a committee of New England manufacturers sent South to investigate the subject, who have reported that the New England mills, in their effort to secure cheaper labor, have substituted FrenchCanadian and other foreign for American hands, presumably at lower rates, but not necessarily at lower cost of production, and that the Southern mills with which they compete employ American workmen and are getting excellent work.

In an Appendix to this paper I will present the views of distinguished American statesmen on this subject, which seem to support the views here contained, to the effect that the main factor of wages is the amount of commodities they produce, and that wages are higher in the United States than anywhere else because labor here is more efficient than in other countries.

The Mexican Laborer.-In Mexico we call a laborer any kind of wage-earner, and peon, a farm wage-earner, although the word peon is going into disuse, because it does not mean now what it did under the Spanish rule. I will speak in another portion of this paper of the

peonage system, and here I will only make general considerations regarding the wage-earners of Mexico and their present condition.

It is impossible to institute a comparison between a laborer of the United States and one of Mexico. Any such attempt would be futile; they are wholly different in habits of thought and in mode of life. Their ambitions are diverse, and their education and tendencies are dissimilar. There is no common plane of comparison. Mexico must be measured by Mexican standards. Erroneous conclusions would be reached were we to apply the English, French, German, or American systems to the Mexican laborer.

No one will dispute that the average American workingman is better off in many ways than his counterpart in Mexico. The public school educates the American workingman, and he has many wants to satisfy, and we are glad for it. Otherwise he would not be what he is, the most intelligent, on the average, of all the world's toilers. He is a great consumer of tropical products, and this fact makes him tributary to Mexico. The better his wages the more he will consume, and the better it would be for our hot-country planters.

The social and physical status of most of the Mexican toilers is very unsatisfactory, and is attributable to various causes. In the first place, they are the descendants of practically enslaved sons of the soil, conquered by the early Spaniards; in the second place, they have been practically and until recently living under conditions similar to feudalism; and, in the third place, education has not yet penetrated among the adult laborers. But public schools are multiplying all over Mexico, and in many regions the minds of the little children of the laborer are being trained and disciplined as well as informed. Railways, by making it easy for the laborer to go from one part of the country to another, are destroying the centuries-old state of serfdom among the laborers. Slowly, very slowly, but none the less surely, is the educational policy of the Mexican Government raising the level of the toilers of Mexico.

The laborer in Mexico is passing from peonage under the Spaniards, which was a very mild and tolerable form of feudal servitude, to absolute freedom of action, with a horizon that is continually expanding. He was contented in his former sphere, for the Spaniards, especially those engaged in agriculture, were generally good to their hands. They did not educate them nor attempt to elevate them, neither did they try to elevate themselves. The whole of Mexico was plunged into apathy, but it was the apathy of supreme indifference, not of despair. Now they can go where they like, serve whom they like, and return to their village when they like. And they use their liberty to the point of abuse. Yet still the horizon keeps enlarging. The rate of wages keeps moving upwards, and there is no sign that it has reached its limit. The number of Mexicans whose fathers were either virtual or

actual peons, and who are now receiving a dollar a day, is constantly increasing. It is easy to picture the satisfaction felt by a man whose boyhood was nurtured on the simple food of corn-cakes and beans, and who now receives a Mexican dollar, day in and day out, except upon Sunday, and then as well if he is willing to work on that day.

While the Mexican laborers are deprived of most of the comforts enjoyed by their brethren in the United States, it is the opinion of some thoughtful Americans who have visited Mexico that they are happier, because their needs are fewer, the necessaries of life for them are cheaper, and their employment is constant-conditions which sometimes do not exist in this country.

Mexican Peonage.-Peon in Spanish means a laborer who performs rough work that does not require either art nor any special fitness, and it does not give at all the idea of servitude, but under the Spanish rule the conquerors were given the ownership of a certain territory, where they exercised quasi-feudal rights upon the natives living there, and as they required their services to till the land, a very mild form of servitude was established, consisting in the landlord's providing for the needs of his laborers; that is, furnishing them money, in the shape of an advance for future services, whenever they had any special need in the families, such as marriage, birth, sickness, death, etc., they, of course, being obliged to repay their indebtedness to their employer. In some cases this obligation passed to the descendant of the laborer, who had to work to discharge his parent's debt. Since Mexico achieved her independence this condition of things has changed very materially. I never knew or heard of any case in which the descendant of a man had to discharge with his labor the debts of his parents, and the Mexican laws from the beginning have been directed to destroy that system, as I will presently state. I can therefore say with perfect truth, that peonage, in the meaning in which it is understood in this country—that is, a kind of slavery-never existed in Mexico, and that even the Spanish peonage system is not now in existence, although there are some districts which still have slight remnants of peonage, as will be seen farther on, but the laborers suffer there no more than they do in some other countries, as up to the end of the last century laborers were everywhere, as a general rule, held in a kind of slavery or peonage.

The early history of the United States shows that even white men were held in bondage in all the States to work out debts, and to expiate offences, and it is only a generation back that slavery on a great scale was abolished. There are, to-day, the "convict-camp" abuses in the Southern States of the American Union, against which influential journals in that section are strongly protesting. In Pennsylvania, one reads of the poverty-stricken condition of the imported foreign miners, who try to maintain families on fifty and sixty cents a day.