The answer to this pæan is found in the examination here made, and heard in the cry that comes up from every industry and interest. On page 24 I find the following:

"In reality the wages paid for prison labor-$1,624,515 per annum represent a product of $9,747,090, or less than one fifth of one per cent. of the products of the United States."

A clear net product of $8,122,575 from labor which costs only $1,624,515, appears to the ordinary reader a most excellent thing. But the trouble is, the statement is deceptive, not possessing one element of fact. So, also, on page 26, the following is found:

"The product of each person employed in the manufacture of boots and shoes in Massachusetts is $1,858 per year; that is, 48,090 operatives — the number of persons so employed in 1875 -produced $89,375,792 worth of goods."

The product of each person employed in the manufacture of boots and shoes in Massachusetts, is not $1,858 per year, as has been already shown. Yet the statement is continually appearing and reappearing, with similar misrepresentations touching other products, throughout the reports of that State, and in many other authoritative places and forms.

It is well to commend to these popular statisticians a more careful study of that maxim of Napoleon's, quoted on page xviii, vol. II, Massachusetts Census Reports, 1875, as follows:

"Statistics mean the keeping of an exact account of a nation's affairs, and without such an account there is no safety."

There is one other point in the Tenth Annual Re

port that I wish to examine. On page 27 is found the following suggestive statement:—

"One large manufacturer stated that he had at one time believed that prison labor must, of necessity, injure outside labor. He knew, he said, that Rice & Hutchings had the labor of 100 prisoners in the State Prison for 40 cents a day — a very small sum to pay for labor, and at first glance would seem to give them great advantage; but the great drawback is, that, by the terms of their contract, they were obliged to pay their men all the year round, whether they are employed or not.”

If forty cents a day, for the year round, amounting to $123 20 per annum, is the great drawback upon the employment of prison labor, pray what must be the yearly wages of the average boot and shoemaker when out of prison ? Certainly it can not be so large as to change the well known fact that free labor is cheaper than slave, because, in the case of the slave, he is guaranteed his subsistence from year to year for the work he does; but the free man, under present conditions, has no such assurance.

Then upon the point of the insignificance of the effect which the competition of 13,186 persons working in prison, at forty cents a day, has upon the work of those outside, as stated on page 24, I quote the effect of competition as shown in the agricultural volume of United States Census Reports, 1860, as follows:

"As long as we continue to export wheat, no matter to how small an extent, the price in Europe will regulate the price in this country. The price obtained in England for the 295,241 bushels of wheat which we exported in 1859 determined the price of our whole crop of over 173,000,000 of bushels raised that year. The price of the one and three fourths bushels ex

ported fixed the price of the thousand bushels consumed at home."

Perhaps there is no more deplorable feature connected with the present distressed condition of our industries, and demoralization of trade, than is the favor with which any fallacy, sophistry, or misrepresentation of the matter, or any attendant fact, is received by those who are popularly esteemed the most intelligent and "well to do" classes, and the exceeding disfavor shown towards any attempt to truthfully examine the real facts, and show actual conditions.

IT

CHAPTER XVIII.

WHAT SHALL WE DO?

T has been shown in these pages that for more than fifty years there has been in our country a constant and rapid development of a power that is irresistibly undermining the demand that, for all time before, has existed for such employment of man's ⚫ muscular force in this country as would guarantee to him at least his bodily subsistence.

It has also been shown that at this time that power has reached a development that practically throws into idleness at least one half of the working force that found full employment previous to 1830, and that industrial demoralization and distress is seen in every quarter.

It has also been shown that this power has attacked the agricultural interests of the country with a force that has already broken up and destroyed many of the small farms and homesteads of the people, and is moving on in that direction with alarming rapidity. That in their place monopolists have seized upon the lands in vast tracts, and have converted them into gigantic food factories, worked by machinery and laborers, without fixed population -- without women, or chil

dren or converted their great estates into tenant farms peopled by feudal slaves.

It has also been shown that whilst the people are being driven from the farms, and vast areas of territory are barred to population, our towns and cities are crowded with hungry, naked, houseless multitudes, without employment, without hope, and sinking deeper and deeper into the abyss of despair and crime.

It has also been shown that the constant struggle of the idle for work, causes an irrepressible conflict and competition between the employed and the idle, which tends directly to add to the ranks of the latter, the reduction of wages, and the increase of the general distress.

And it has been shown that as the idleness has increased, and the demand for work has grown more importunate, that monopolies have developed in every direction, and the tyranny of capital has become more despotic. That whilst labor has become more and more disunited, and weaker and weaker, capital has steadily gained in consolidation and power.

How have the industrial classes, the workingmen, those who should be the real rulers of the country, met the development of this great power, and the evils which have grown out of it? What have they done to avert the threatened catastrophe that is already upon us? or, better still, to so direct and guide the growth of this power as to derive from it the greatest possible benefits ?

In the matter of guidance nothing has been attempted, and every step that has been taken to