Take blankets also for example.  The tariff on coarse blankets is nearly one hundred per cent. ad valorem.  They can be bought in most of the markets of the world for two dollars a pair.  Yet our poor, who use the most of that grade of blankets, are compelled to pay about four dollars a pair.  The government derives little revenue from it, as the importation of these blankets for years has been trifling.  This tax has been a heavy burden upon the poor during this severe winter, a tax running into the millions to support protection.  Heaven save a country from a system which begrudges to the shivering poor the blankets to make them comfortable in the winter and the cold!

Secondly, protection has diminished the income of the laborer from his wages.  The first factor in the ascertainment of the value of wages is their purchasing power, or how much can be bought with them.  If in one country the wages are five dollars a day and in another only one dollar, if the laborer can in the one country with the one dollar, purchase more of the necessary articles required in daily consumption, he, in fact, is better paid than the former in the other who gets five dollars a day.  Admit for a moment that protection raises the wages of the laborer, it also raises the price of nearly all the necessaries of life, and what he makes in wages he more than loses in the increase of prices of what he is obliged to buy.  As already stated, a head of a family who earns $400 per year is compelled to pay $100 more for what he needs, on account of protection.  What difference is it to him whether the $100 are taken out of his wages before they are paid, or taken from him afterward in the increased price of articles he cannot get along without?  In both cases he really receives only $300 for his year’s labor.  The statistics show that the average increased cost of twelve articles most required in daily consumption in 1874 over 1860 was ninety-two per cent., while the average increase of wages of eight artisans, cabinet-makers, coopers, carpenters, painters, shoemakers, tail-ors, tanners, and tinsmiths, was only sixty per cent., demonstrating that the purchasing power of labor had under protection in thirteen years depreciated 19.5 per cent.  But protection has not even raised the nominal wages in most of the unprotected industries.  I find that the wages of the farm hand, the day laborer, and the ordinary artisan are in most places now no higher than they were in 1860.

But it is confidently asserted that the wages of laborers in the protected industries are higher because of protection.  Admit it.  I have not the figures for 1880, but in 1870 there were not 500,000 of them; but of the laborers in other industries there were 12,000,000, exclusive of those in agriculture, who were 6,000,000 more.  Why should the wages of the half million be increased beyond their natural rate, while those of the others remain unchanged?  More—­why should the wages of the 18,000,000