CHEAP LABOR vs. FREE LABOR.
Our manufacturers can only compete with England when they have provided an equal steam-power to the hands employed, and when they can find American free labor at English prices,—which we hope may not happen until the millennium.
We have tried cheap labor long enough in the South, and have found by sad ex perience that it brings poverty and ruin instead •of wealth and prosperity. We had 4,000,000 of slaves, whose labor we compelled with the whip and rewarded with the coarsest of food—corn meal and bacon—and the meanest of clothing only. Yet we impoverished the soil, held the poor in ignorance and vice, and, instead of advancing in intelligence, civilization, and wealth, that portion of our country, though naturally the richest part of our continent or the world, was relapsing into barbarism.
If we do not protect our labor against the capital, machinery, and low prices of Europe, we must come down to their standard. We may import $300,000,000 of cheap goods; but we also import cheap labor for our mechanics and farmers, because we cannot get seventy-five dollars per ton for our iron if English iron is selling in our markets for fifty dollars per ton ; and we cannot make iron at fifty dollars per ton if we pay our miners, mechanics, and experts two dollars per day, while those of England receive only fifty cents per day I If our miners, manufacturers, and mechanics, who buy $2,000,000,000 from our farmers, work cheap, they cannot pay high prices for their food. Will the American
farmer, therefore, advocate free trade, in order to purchase a few cheap goods, when the result must, in the nature of things, force him to sell his crops cheap ? or will he sacri fice a profitable home market of $2,000,000,000 where free American labor at two dollars per day is the buyer, for an unprofitable foreign market of $80,000,000, where cheap European labor at fifty cents per day is the only customer ? But there is another important consideration here. The foreign markets for breadstuffs and food generally fluctuate independently of the regulations of trade, and depend more on the wants of Europe than the prices of food. They only buy when short crops compel them, and only come to us for that which the agricultural portions of the Old World cannot supply them. Our farmers must sell their wheat in competition with the ill-paid Calmucks of the Don, and labor for the pittance paid to the barbaric serfs of Turkey, or not sell at all to Europe.