It does not, of course, necessarily follow that low-priced labor is really cheap labor; it may prove to be just as uneconomical to employ such labor as to buy poor raw materials merely because they are low-priced. The quantitative measure is no more satisfactory as a standard of value when applied to labor than when applied to other things. Thomas Brassey, the famous English engineer and contractor, used to declare that the cost of carrying out great works in different countries did not vary according to the wages paid, and that his experience had been that in countries where wages were highest the rate of profit was also highest. Very similar testimony has been given by many large employers of labor, and the point seems to be fairly well established. It is said, for instance, that the cost of erecting large buildings does not differ very much in the great capitals of the world, though the rate of wages differs enormously, and that in America, where wages in the building trades are much higher than anywhere else in the world, the labor cost is really less than elsewhere.[145] In view of this economic fact, it has been urged that child labor is not cheap labor, except in a false and uneconomic sense, that it is inefficient, and that it would be to the interest of the employers themselves to employ adult labor instead. Doubtless this argument has been used in the true propagandist spirit of appealing to as many interests as possible, and proving the sweet reasonableness of the demand for the abolition of child labor, but I am inclined to doubt its value. We may, I think, trust the employers to look after their own interests. It is true that if you put an underpaid and underfed Italian laborer at a dollar a day to work, and alongside put a decently fed American laborer at double that wage, you will probably find the labor of the latter the more profitable; just as cheap, miserably paid coolie labor is the most expensive of all. But I do not think it follows that adult labor would be cheaper than child labor to the employer. Most child labor is made possible by machinery and conditioned by it, and adult labor would be conditioned by it in the same manner. There is very little scope for individual differences to manifest themselves where the machine is the controlling power. In other industries, such as glass manufacture, where machinery plays a relatively unimportant part as yet, the labor of the boys is conditioned by the speed of the men they serve. The men, urged on by the piecework system, work at their utmost limit of speed, and the boys must keep pace with them. It is unlikely that if men were employed to do the work now done by the “snappers-up,” they would be able to increase the speed of the glass-blowers, the only way in which their labor could prove cheaper. On the contrary, there is every reason to suppose that men would not consent to be driven as boys are driven. I have gathered from