HIGHER WAGES AND PROTECTION.
CAN Protection make wages higher ? To answer this we must first ask, What is it that makes wages high or low ? Certainly it is not the mere number of pounds and shillings a man receives. The number of things he can buy with the pounds and shillings is clearly the essential point, not the number or names of the coins. At Klondyke five pounds a week may be very low wages if each pound will only buy as much in the way of housing, food, clothes, and other things as can be obtained for two shillings elsewhere. If, then, a workman is told that his wages are going to be raised by five shillings a week by Protection or preferen- tial duties, he must not be in too great a hurry to be thankful to Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Chaplin, or whoever else offers him the boon. He must at once ask : "Shall I have that as extra money, or will it all go, and perhaps a little more, on increased food and rent ? " As was wisely said long ago, "pounds and shillings are nothing but tickets for bread and meat ? " 'What, there- fore, the workman must remember is that he cannot eat pounds and shillings, and that though, if prices remain as now, he would like more of these tickets, the extra tickets are no boon if they will only bring the same amount of bread and meat as before. It comes to this : can we manage by interfering with our present free market—to which any man can now bring food of all kinds, and sell it as cheaply as ever he likes—so to increase wages that there will not only be more tickets for bread and meat given to the workmen, but that these tickets can be exchanged for more bread and meat than formerly ? It is admitted by every one that if we interfere with our free market, and tell a certain number of foreigners that the food they send here is not welcome, and that if they insist on sending it It must be taxed, we shall raise the price of food. But though it is admitted that this must be the case, Mr. Chamberlain and his supporters tell us that wages will also rise, and that therefore the workman will, at any rate, be no worse off, while trade generally will be a great deal better.
We agree in one particular. No one can doubt that the price of food must rise if food is taxed. For the moment, and forthesakeof argument, wewill also agree that certain of our workmen will get their wages increased. Let us now con- sider, first, what classes of workmen these will be, and, next, whether the rise of wages will be big enough to compensate for the rise in prices. Certainly the miners will not get increased wages out of taxation on food. They will feel whatever rise there may be in prices, but their tickets for bread and meat in the shape of pounds and shillings will remain as before. It must be the same with the railway- men, for no one can imagine that taxes on food will increase the use of railways, and so make the demand for railwa,ymen brisker. Next, no employer will see the force of paying higher wages to general day labourers, or to carmen, dock labourers, roadmen, and the tens of thousands of employes who work at miscellaneous trades. Again, .policemen, and all the men employed in Government service, will not be likely to get more wages. There will be just as many seeking employment as before, and the employers will naturally say that, since they can get plenty of men at the old wage, they cannot increase it. It must be the same with all the clerks, great and. small, in e great enthu-'ast offices, and with all persons living on .he has got faenk: pensions. They cannot hope to get vir to "go for bread and meat, though they protest never so much that to get the same amount of bread and meat as formerly they ought to have more tickets. We come, then, to the trades that, it is hoped, will be favourably affected by Mr.
Chamberlain's schemes. It is no doubt believed by Mr. Chamberlain that if we tax foreign food and not Colonial food, the Colonies will be so gratiffed that they will take no more manufactured goods from the foreigner, but will deal exclusively with us. Let us suppose this possible, and that besides all the trade we now do with the Colonies, we get all or nearly all—we cannot send the Colonies such things as champagne, claret, and Havana cigars, indiarubber and China tea—the trade the Colonies do with foreign countries. Unfortunately, even if that were accomplished, it would not make a very great increase in the demand for our manufactured articles, for those Colonies, it is calculated, only do a trade with foreign countries of the kind we could supply of some £20,000,000 a year. No enlargement of trade beyond what is now done with foreign countries is open to us, for the Colonies clearly tell us that they must " protect " their own industries against us as much as formerly. Let us assume, however, that though this trade is small, we should be able to get it all. Let us also assume that in order not to have their food trade injured, one or two foreign countries would agree to give us reciprocity in respect of manufactured articles, and that we should therefore slightly increase our trade with foreign countries,—it could only be slightly, for foreigners are bound to maintain their tariffs for revenue, and also, like our own Colonies, would not be allowed by their own Protectionists to take off duties to any large extent. Still, for the sake of argument, let us grant that we should get a certain enlargement of our market abroad, and so an increased demand for manufactured articles.
Now it is clear that if such an increase were the result of Mr. Chamberlain's scheme—a very large " if " in our opinion, but one which we adopt for the moment—the capitalists and manufacturers at any rate must benefit. If they sold more goods a gain must accrue to them. If, for example, "Mr. Hammers," a manufacturer of, say, sporting guns at Birmingham, sold ten thousand more guns a year to the Colonies because Belgian guns were excluded, and so made five thousand pounds a year more profit, his gain would be obvious. Even if the price of the food con- sumed by him and his family had doubled, he would still be very much to the good. Now let us take the case of his employes. Would they be getting higher wages owing to the increase in trade ? It is clear that "Mr. Hammers" would not find it necessary to pay his clerks more. Why should he ? Plenty more would be forth- coming at the old rate if his increased business necessi- tated two new bookkeepers, at thirty shillings and a pound a week respectively. Next, it is clear that the extra porters, carmen, and so forth required to handle the extra amount of goods, and also the old employes, would not be paid higher wages. These men can be got in plenty, as their labour is not skilled. Their wages, that is, are fixed by competition in the open market; and as there is no likelihood of there being a shortage, they would, of course, get no increase. It would be the same with all the unskilled workmen at the works. The fact that there is a more than sufficient supply of such labour at present rates would prevent any rise. Therefore all these categories of men in "Mr. Hammers's " employ would get the same number of tickets—i.e., of pounds and shillings—as before. But when they went to spend them under Mr. Chamberlain's scheme, they would find that the same tickets as before produced less bread and meat. Is that a prospect which is likely to appeal to them? We next come to the highly skilled gun- makers. They, clearly, might be expected to demand, and obtain, higher wages. "Mr. Hammers" would, of course, make as good a fight as he could against any large rise, but as probably other gunmakers would also be looking out for more skilled hands, he would have to increase wages in this category. No doubt "Mr. Hammers" and his colleagues in the gun trade would put their heads together to prevent the thing being pushed too far by the men. Still, taking everything into consideration, it is probable that in the circumstances there would be an increase of wages among the highly skilled men. Of course it is use- less to speculate how much this would be, but it would have to be a fairly big to compensate for even a small rise in bread and After a 1, the rise in wages is only on one unit, wheiletT74`a.man has a wife and, say, four children'. earning no " or, .03 the rise in the price of food is on six units. That is, stippose the increase in the price of food only amounts to a halfpenny per day per person, that increase is is. 9d. per week for a family of six. Therefore the skilled labourer, in order to be quits, would want is. 9d. per week higher wages, and to be what he would consider really better of he would want at least'3s. a week more,—a very substantial rise in the pay even of a skilled workman. Will he get it ?
It comes, then, to this. If the British working men endorse Mr. Chamberlain's policy they must remember that it cannot benefit the ordinary unskilled labourer in the trades unprotected; that it practically will not benefit the unskilled labourer even in the protected trades; and that therefore the skilled labourer in certain Picked trades is the only man who could hope to benefit,—besides, Of course, the employer, who no doubt would apparently benefit, though even he would not really do better owing to the general impoverishment which always follows in the wake of a Protective system. And even the skilled labourer in the protected trades will not benefit unless it can be managed that the increase in his wages is as great as the increase in the price of fool In these circumstances, we cannot imagine the British working man being so mad as to produce by law a certain increase in the price of the things he must spend his wages on—i.e., food—on the offchance of a very uncertain increase in the wages of skilled labour in a limited number of industries. At any rate, before he plunges into any scheme of the kind let him apply the test we suggested last week. Let him make it a conditicn that henceforth, at any rate in all the protected trades, wages shall be settled, not by the competition of the market, but by the enhanced price of the commodity, and that this rise m wages shall be secured to him by law. If, owing to legislative action, the price of a commodity goes up, let it, that is, be a statutory obligation on the employer to. increasethe wages of all his employs by a sum proportionate to the rise in price of the com- modity. Mr. Chamberlain, surely, cannot object to giving such a pledge as that to the men who, he asserts, Will obtain an increase in their wages. No doubt, from the Free-trade point of view, the suggestion is an unsound one, for we Free-traders like to leave prices to be settled in the open market. Those, however, who deny the Free. trade position, if they mean to deal honourably by the working man, should have no hesitation in giving the pledge we have suggested. It is, we repeat, a test which the leaders of the working men should not hesitate to apply to Mr. Chamberlain's scheme.
We have one more word to add. Let the workmen remember that there is only one way in which their wages can be truly raised,—that is, by increasing the purchasing power of the monetary tickets they receive. And there is only one way of increasing the purchasing power of those tickets,—that is, by leaving the market here free and open to all comers, and by letting every man who has anything to sell, sell it freely within the British Isles. It is only by preserving such an open market that the workman will be able to increase his wages, and secure for himself, his wife, and his children that full fruit of his toil to which, in the sight of God and man, he is justly entitled.
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