The Aldrich Report is a miserable fraud. It does not so much as mention farmers and planters or any of the laboring classes immediately dependent on farmers. It gives only the wages of the highest class of skilled laborers and in those trades only where the men are organized in ironbound trades unions which force up the wages of their members. Take the lists and census and add the numbers employed in every trade mentioned in that report, and you will find that all together they only amount to one fourth the number of farmers, or about 12 per cent. of the labor of the country. Furthermore, it takes no account whatever of the immense percentage of men in each trade who are out of employment. One who didn't know better would conclude from it that our coal miners worked 300 days in the year, and that stone masons, plasterers, and the like worked all the year in the latitude of New York and Chicago. And these are but a few of the tricks and absurdities of the report. Wages are labor's share of its own product. The claim that wages generally can rise on a declining market involves a flat contradiction of arithmetic; it assumes that the separate factors can increase while the sum total is decreasing, and that the operator can pay more while he is every day getting less. The whole philosophy of the subject was admirably summed up by a Southern negro with whom I recently talked. "If wages be up, how come 'em up? We all's gittin' but half what we useter git for our cotton, and how kin five cents a pound pay me like ten cents a pound, and me a pickin' out no mo' cotton?" His philosophy applies to 60 per cent. of all the working people in the United States, for that proportion do not work for money wages. They produce, and what they sell the product for is their wages. Viewed in this, the only true light, the wages of 60 per cent. of our laborers have declined nearly one half, making the average decline for all laborers nearly a third. How, indeed, could it be otherwise? Will any sensible man believe that a farmer could pay men as much to produce wheat at $.50 as at $1.50? Or take the case of the cotton grower. It takes a talented negro to make and save 3,000 pounds of lint cotton; when he sold it at $.10 he got $300, and when he sells it at $.05 he gets $150, and all the tricks of all the goldbugs in the world cannot make it otherwise. To tell such men that their wages have increased, in the face of what they know to be the facts, is arrogant and insulting nonsense. =This nation should have the best money in the world.=