Page:A Study of Mexico.djvu/158

148 and that, where such handicraft or ignorant labor is employed in manufacturing, the final cost of its product, as represented by the amount of time required, or the number of persons called for in any given department, must of necessity be high. Hence, wages under such circumstances (as exist in Mexico and elsewhere) will be very low, and the conditions of life very unsatisfactory and debasing.

On the other hand, when machinery is intelligently applied for the conversion or elaboration of comparatively cheap crude materials—coal, ores, metals, fibers, wood, and the like—a very little manual labor goes a great way, and production (as in the United States) is necessarily large. This being sold in the great commerce of the world, gives large returns, and the wages represented in such production will be high, because the cost of the product measured in terms of labor is low, and the employer is thereby enabled to pay liberally; and in fact is obliged to do so, in order to obtain under the new order of things what is really the cheapest (in the sense of the most efficient) labor. Or, to state this proposition more briefly, the invariable concomitant of high wages and the skillful use of machinery is a low cost of production and a large consumption.

The following circumstance curiously illustrates