Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 10.djvu/213

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into free trade, would she have done it? Not if Cobden had been backed by the angelic host. History gives England credit for great sense.

It so happens that America is filled with workers. There are idle people, but they are fewer here than elsewhere except now, when we are living under the shadow of the Wilson Bill. If those workers are all getting good wages they are themselves the market, and if the wages are increasing the market is also increasing. The fact that in this country all the workers have been getting better wages than elsewhere is the very reason why our market is the best in the world and why all the nations of the world are trying to break mto it. We do not appreciate the nature of our market ourselves.

We are nominally 70,000,000 people. That is what we are in mere numbers. But as a market for manufactures and choice foods we are potentially 175,000,000 as compared with the next best nation on the globe. Nor is this diffi- cult to prove. Whenever an Englishman earns one dollar an American earns a dollar and sixty cents. I speak within bounds. Both can get the food that keeps body and soul together and the shelter which the body must have for sixty cents. Take sixty cents from a dollar and you have forty cents left. Take that same sixty cents from the dollar and sixty and you have a dollar left — just two and a half times as much. That surplus can be spent in choice foods, in house furnishings, in fine clothes, and all the comforts 179

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