The same tendency was observed in the carding departments of twenty-six woolen mills. The mill with the highest machine output per man per hour, namely 57.7 pounds, had a machinery-labor cost of twenty-three cents per hundred pounds, while the mill with a machine output of only six pounds per operative per hour had a cost of $1.64 per hundred pounds. Yet this mill, with a cost seven times higher than the other, paid its operatives only 9.86 cents per hour, as against 13.09 cents paid by its more successful competitor. These examples could be repeated for every department of woolen and worsted mills, but will suffice to illustrate the point that higher wages do not necessarily mean higher costs. They show that mill efficiency depends more on a liberal use of the most improved machinery than on low wages. Thoughtful planning in arranging the machinery to save unnecessary steps to the employees, careful buying of raw materials, the efficient organization and utilization of the labor force in the mill, systematic watching of the thousands of details, each affecting the cost of manufacture, will reduce costs to an astonishing degree. When the board, therefore, states that the labor cost of production in this country is on the average, about double that in foreign countries, we must bear in mind the difference in costs in our own country, and the causes to which high costs are due. The fact is that the woolen industry, being one of the best, if not the best, protected industry in the country, shows an exceptional disposition to cling to old methods and to use machinery which long ago should have been consigned to the scrap-heap. That is where the chief cause of the comparatively high cost of production in a large part of the industry is to be looked for. But, disregarding the question of efficiency, let us accept the figure of the Tariff Board, which found the labor cost in England to be one half that here, taking the manufacture from the time the wool enters the mill until it is turned out as finished cloth. The entire labor cost varies from twenty to fifty per cent. of the total cost of making cloth, according to the character of the cloth, and but seldom exceeds or approaches fifty per cent. If the protective duty is to measure the difference in labor cost, it should be fixed at not above twenty-five per cent. of the cost, that being the highest difference between the American and English labor cost. As against that, we now have a duty of about fifty-five per cent. of the selling price of the foreign cloth, in addition to the concealed protection in the so-called compensatory duty.