He looked dazed, and said, despairingly:
"Verily, I cannot make it out. Ye've just said ours are the higher, and with the same breath ye take it back."
"Oh, great Scott, isn't it possible to get such a simple thing through your head? Now look here - let me illustrate. We pay four cents for a woman's stuff gown, you pay 8.4.0, which is four mills more than double. What do you allow a laboring woman who works on a farm?"
"Two mills a day."
"Very good; we allow but half as much; we pay her only a tenth of a cent a day; and - "
"Again ye're conf - "
"Wait! Now, you see, the thing is very simple; this time you'll understand it. For instance, it takes your woman 42 days to earn her gown, at 2 mills a day - 7 weeks' work; but ours earns hers in forty days - two days short of 7 weeks. Your woman has a gown, and her whole seven weeks wages are gone; ours has a gown, and two days' wages left, to buy something else with. There - now you understand it!"
He looked - well, he merely looked dubious, it's the most I can say; so did the others. I waited - to let the thing work. Dowley spoke at last - and betrayed the fact that he actually hadn't gotten away from his rooted and grounded superstitions yet. He said, with a trifle of hesitancy:
"But - but - ye cannot fail to grant that two mills a day is better than one."
Shucks! Well, of course, I hated to give it up. So I chanced another flyer:
"Let us suppose a case. Suppose one of your journeymen goes out and buys the following articles: "1 pound of salt; 1 dozen eggs; 1 dozen pints of beer; 1 bushel of wheat; 1 tow-linen suit; 5 pounds of beef; 5 pounds of mutton.
"The lot will cost him 32 cents. It takes him 32 working days to earn the money - 5 weeks and 2 days. Let him come to us and work 32 days at half the wages; he can buy all those things for a shade under 14 1/2 cents; they will cost him a shade under 29 days' work, and he will have about half a week's wages over. Carry it through the year; he would save nearly a week's wages every two months, your man nothing; thus saving five or six weeks' wages in a year, your man not a cent. now I reckon you understand that 'high wages' and 'low wages' are phrases that don't mean anything in the world until you find out which of them will buy the most!"
It was a crusher.
But, alas! it didn't crush. No, I had to give it up. What those people valued was high wages; it didn't seem to be a matter of any consequence to them whether the high wages would buy anything or not. They stood for "protection," and swore by it, which was reasonable enough, because interested parties had gulled them into the notion that it was protection which had created their high wages. I proved to them that in a quarter of a century their wages had advanced but 30 per cent., while the cost of living had gone up 100; and that with us, in a shorter time, wages had advanced 40 per cent. while the cost of living had gone steadily down. But it didn't do any good. Nothing could unseat their strange beliefs.
Well, I was smarting under a sense of defeat. Undeserved defeat, but what of that? That didn't soften the smart any. And to think of the circumstances!
