Excerpt from The Industrial Situation: Question of Wages The nature of this work needs some explanation. When I wrote the first chapter I had merely the intention of criticising in the public press the misconceptions under which the great questions of the day were held by the political powers then in control of the machinery of government. Not alone did the government organs show an incomprehensible ignorance of the true elements of price-making in products, but the public press, the legislative authorities, the public speakers, showed the same absence of a correct understanding of the relations existing between the earnings of the working classes in different countries and the prices of their product. The fact that the American laborer earns more than the European, is still taken as an indication of our inability to compete in neutral markets, or in our own markets, without the aid of an artificial device known as a protective tariff. In all these discussions it is usually...