Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 10.djvu/215

 REED

000,000. As compared with the rest of the world, England included, we are equal as a mar- ket to 700,000,000.

Instead of increasing this market by leaving it to the steady increase of wages which the fig- ures of the Aldrich report so conclusively show, and which have not only received the sanction of the member from New York, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the Democratic Bureau of Statistics, but the sanction of everybody who hears me, our committee propose to lower wages and so lessen the market and then divide that market with somebody else, and all on the chance of getting the markets of the world.

Who have these markets of the world now? There is hardly a spot on the globe where three generations of Englishmen, Frenchmen, or Ger- mans have not been camped in possession of every avenue of trade. Do you suppose that with machinery nearly as good as ours and wages at one-half these men are going to surrender to us the markets of the world? "Why, the very duties you keep on show that you do not believe it. If we can not without duties hold our own markets, how shall we pay freight, and the ex- pense of introducing goods, and meet the foreigner where he lives?

We were talking a while ago about higher wages. The question naturally comes up, How can these higher wages be got? There must be something for them to come from. Just think a moment what wages are. They are the de-

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