Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/778

754 which we procure in exchange for the domestic products is an industrial war upon domestic industry.

This leads me back to the thesis which gives the title to this paper. We are now exporting goods and wares of every type, from the crudest product of the field to the highest finished product of the metal works. Our supremacy over nearly every other nation, if not all, in the low cost of production of the crude materials which enter into these exports, our very low rate of national taxation, and our other advantages are conducive to this power of service which we render to other nations. Yet in this service the highest rates of wages are earned by our own workmen that are secured in any part of the world, ranging from twenty-five per cent to one hundred per cent above the rates of wages in the manufacturing countries with which we compete, and even tenfold the earnings in the nonmachine-using nations from which we procure the larger part of our imports. If the rate of wages governed our cost of production by the unit of product, not one dollar's worth of any of these goods would be sent out from our harbors. In this friendly contest to serve other nations for mutual benefit, the survival of the fittest will fall to that nation which maintains peace, order, and industry, and which removes all legal or artificial obstructions to commerce such as now exist in the fines that we impose on foreign goods under the name of protection, and in the obstructive provisions of our navigation laws whereby we are deprived of the paramount position upon the sea to which we are entitled.

It may have seemed as if I had been led wholly away from the subject which is the title of this paper in this somewhat presumptuous suggestion that the theory of evolution as represented by Darwin and his followers is totally inadequate in its application to the metaphysics of production and consumption or of trade and commerce. If the dogma of Malthus had been true in its application to the present century, and if the survival of the fittest based by Darwin upon the theory of a purely physical natural selection had been complete, the retrogression of the century would have been marked by deficiency of product, higher prices, lessening wages, larger relative profits, and increasing want. The trial balance of the more important countries and states of the world which are to be found in their statistical abstracts prove the reverse of all these necessary conclusions which must be derived from the erroneous or incomplete observations of the great investigators whom I have named. I trust, therefore, that the conclusions to which I have brought you may justify the title of my essay.

The real wage which is the incentive to work is the enjoyment of the necessaries, comforts, and luxuries of life—food, fuel, shelter.