Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 February 1893 — What Free Wool Will Do. [ARTICLE]

What Free Wool Will Do.

Mr. Edward D. Page, of Faulkner, Page & Co., a firm as largely interested in domestic woolen manufacturing as any mercantile house in the United States, begins, in the American Wool and Cotton Reported of January 19th, a series of articles on the subject of woolen goods and tariff revision. He presupposes that the manufacturers will soon have absolutely free wool and in general free raw materials. He says that: “The addition to our supplies of perhaps 400 varieties of raw stock, virtually prohibited from our market for many years, introduces into the condition of manufacture a new and serious educational problem. I fear that many manufacturers do not fully realize even now how much improvement and economy is to be accomplished by making their goods from a mixture of the stocks most exactly suited to the qualities the goods are to possess, instead of from the makeshifts which our meager market has hitherto afforded. I have been shown, in an English manufacturer’s wool-house, a mixture or blend of no less than fourteen distinct and different varieties of wool, from which is made a simple woolen fabric, in which, at home, no more than two or three qualities are used. Each of these fourteen varieties are found to lend some desirable peculiarity to the fabric, perceptible only in the finished piece, or else to economize its cost; and I was told that the blend used has been substantially the same for nearly thirty years. The goods manufactured from it were perceptibly superior in selling qualities to our own, and were produced at less cost for wool than would be warranted by the difference between the American and foreign quotations for similar grades.” Yet he says: “It is the opinion of many observers that no change that is likely to occur will In the long run affect the wool and woolen industries more unfavorably than have the tariffs of 1864 to 1890.” • Mr. Page thus enumerates several elements of cost of manufacture in which our manufacturers are at a disadvantage as compared with foreign manufacturers. These include, as mentioned above, lack of experience in blending all kinds of wools, higher costs of buildings, and higher rates of interest. As to the element of labor cost he says:

“It will be observed that I have not enumerated a difference in labor cost as one of the disadvantages under which American manufacturers suffer. In this respect lam disposed to agree with the opinion of eminent manufacturers when fresh from an actual experience of competition with the so-called ‘paupor labor of abroad,’ and I quote from the Bulletin of the National Association of Wool Manufacturers, Yol. 1., p. 45 (1866): American manufacturers admit that it is not so much the low rate of wages in England against which they have to contend as the low rates of interest, which permit the control of large capital and the most advantageous use of machinery. It is not that there may not be special instances where labor of certain kinds is, perhaps, extravagantly paid in our mills, but I have observed that, generally speaking: “1. The highest paid labor is the cheapest. “2. Nations that have the lowest paid labor are forced, as a rule, to protect themselves against those who pay higher wages.

“3. Higher paid labor, being the most intelligent, protects its wages against the competition of less intelligent and less highly paid labor by superior inventiveness and superior ability in handling machinery. “It is perhaps unfortunate that no unbiased or scientific comparison of American with foreign labor-efficien-cy has ever been made; but in unprotected industries we seem to be as well able to compete now with the foreigner as we could expect; and our experience under the revenue tariff 1857-1861 was that we could compete, notwithstanding a similar difference in wages to that which now prevails. I have very little question but after our industries have adjusted themselves to new conditions, the superior skill and intelligence of American manufacturers and workmen will maintain the supremacy of our industries in the future as it has in the past. “So far as the rate of wages is concerned it is dependent upon the relations existing between the amount of work to be done and the number of workmen qualified to do it If the new tariff gives more work and the number of workmen does not increase, it will assuredly raise wages.” Such articles are eminently sound and practical. They may give but little assistance to the new administration, but they will inculcate a broad and liberal spirit among the manufacturers themselves, that will greatly hasten that readjustment to new conditions which *vill not only insure success but will soon make us the greatest manufacturers, as we are, already, the greatest consumers of woolens.