The general rule for determining whether a branch of manufacturing can survive in the area of abundant land and well-paid labor is as follows: it can do so if the cost of making the article which this branch of business is devoted to producing is as low as the cost of acquiring it by exchange. The cost may in both cases be reduced to bare labor and the rule will then stand thus: if ten days' labor will make the article and if nine will make something that can be exchanged for it--_i.e._ if all the costs of the exchange can be covered and the thing can be brought from abroad for a total expenditure of nine days' labor instead of ten--the manufacturing of that article will not survive. In a region of abundant land and well-paid labor it is chiefly the tolls which governments exact which make it as costly an operation to get the manufactured products by producing other things to barter for them as it is to make them directly. Density of population, overworking of land, meagerness of returns to agricultural labor--these are the conditions that primarily fix the habitat of most kinds of manufacturing. In the case of particular products these influences may be overcome by the presence in limited parts of the sparsely settled area of exceptional natural advantages for production. Natural gas, special ores, particular kinds of lumber, etc., may draw some branches of manufacturing to the region of fertile land and high wages; but as the comparison which we are making is the most general one which it is possible to make we are safe in our assertion that, in the main, manufacturing processes tend, in the absence of exceptional influences, to concentrate themselves in the region of dense population and of meager earning power of labor. _The Approximate Static Adjustment of Prices._--In the main, and with tariffs as they are, the price of raw products is somewhat lower at the left of the figure, while that of highly wrought merchandise is markedly lower at the right of it; and with the comparative density of population as it is and with no change of commercial policy on the part of governments, this condition may be expected to continue. It is an approximately static adjustment of prices. Purchasing manufactured goods in Europe will long be profitable if they can be passed duty free through the customhouse, while food will be somewhat cheaper in America. [Illustration]