But the worst absurdity of all in the tariffist reasoning on this topic is the assumption that in no other respect than wage-rates is German industry affected by the fall of the mark.  The wiseacres who point warningly to the exchanges as a reason for firm action on fabric gloves never ask how a falling currency relates to the process of purchasing raw materials from abroad.  So plainly is the falling mark a bar to such purchase that there is prima facie no cause to doubt the German official statement made in June, that foreign goods are actually underbidding German goods in the German markets, and that the falling exchange makes it harder and harder for Germany to compete abroad.  We are dealing with a four-square fallacy, the logical implication of which is that a bankrupt country is the best advantaged for trade, that Austria is even better placed for competition than Germany, and that Russia is to-day the best placed of all.

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 were thus established the three facts that wages were higher in the Free Trade country than in the European tariffed countries; that real wages here were higher than those of the protected industries in the United States, and that Protection was thus so far from being a condition of good wages as to be ostensibly a certain condition of bad.  All the same, high wages in America and low wages on the Continent were alike given as reasons why we should have a protective tariff.