Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/463

Rh, or of service for product, in order that those who are displaced from one kind of work by the application of science and invention may be most ready, able, and competent to take up some other kind of work less arduous, less exhausting, and more conducive to human welfare.

What is the object of exchange? How few people ever ask themselves that question! If each one of us did not save himself by exchange from some part of the necessary work required to sustain life, there would be no exchange; each one of us, and every other man, would live and work for himself alone. All this is elementary. It becomes perfectly clear when considered as between man and man. Does not the same rule govern the commerce of nations? What is the commerce of nations, except the sum of the exchanges between man and man? Unless each nation gains by the exchange, does not the trade stop? If both gain by the exchange, does it not hurt both to stop it by legislation? By obstructing exchange, we may make work where we might save it; but that nation loses most from such obstructions in which the greatest abundance of product is attained at the least cost of labor and at the highest rates of wages. If there were such a thing in the world as pauper labor, that nation which exchanged the greatest amount of the product of skilled labor for the greatest amount of the product of pauper labor would save itself the most work. Daniel Webster once said, when in his prime, "The people of this country can not afford to do for themselves what they can hire foreign paupers to do as well for them." This is true not only in respect to the price of labor, but to the kind and quality of the work which is to be done.

There are many branches of industry from which science has not yet removed the noxious or bad conditions of the work. Dipping sheets of iron or steel which have been treated with acid into melted tin for conversion into tin plates is one of the arts which it would be most undesirable to introduce into this country until, by way of science and invention, its noxious conditions have been removed: then it will come here itself; the conditions will then be equalized; we can then afford to take up what it would now be injudicious for us to undertake.

When we consider the obstructive and injurious effect of many of our taxes, light although they may be in money, we find that they are a heavier burden than those of almost any other nation except Russia, Turkey, and Spain.

They have not increased the profits in the arts which were intended to be promoted by their imposition, except for short or variable periods; they have reduced wages in the protected branches of industry below those which are attained in occupations which can not be subjected to foreign competition, while