The heartbreaking part of it is that it takes but a little imagination, but a little knowledge, of what can and is being done to ease hard industrial conditions in the world, and in a scattered way in this very state, to show one how easily unselfishness could redeem Rhode Island. If the textile manufacturers were, as a body, men of enlightened minds, if they had caught even a glimpse of that vision of a new and nobler industrial society which has convinced so many men and women in this country not only of the brutality and wastefulness of our present system, but of the entire practicability of something better, they might easily make of their state as perfect an example of what an industrial society should be as it now is of what it should not be. This, then, is high protection’s most perfect work—a state of a half million people turning out an annual product worth $279,438,000, the laborers in the chief industry underpaid, unstable, and bent with disease, the average employers rich, self-satisfied, and as indifferent to social obligation as so many robber barons. It is an industrial oligarchy made by a nation’s beneficence under the mistaken notion that it was working out a labor’s paradise. Not only is it a travesty of the principles of protection, it is a mockery of that very individualism behind which it takes refuge. Individualism does not thrive at the expense of its fellows: it appreciates that the very kernel of its own existence lies in respecting and defending the rights of others. As for democracy, what vestige of it is left in either the political or industrial machine which controls the state of Rhode Island? Certainly the time has come when the pretence that high duties “protect” the American working-man can deceive nobody. The American working-man is not getting the duty. He pays for his higher wages by his higher productivity. It is an old and established law of industry drawn from the experience of all nations that low wages mean high cost. “The highest paid labor,” says Francis A. Walker, “is that which costs the employer the least.” The cotton spinner in India gets 20 pence a week—the cotton spinner in England 20 shillings, but English cottons flood India. The iron worker in Russia gets 3 roubles a week, in England four or five times as much, but it is the Englishman who supplies the markets of Europe. The cotton labor of Egypt and India receives not over one-tenth of what the Southern labor does, but it is our cotton which supplies the world. The wheat hands of the Eastern world are paid from a twentieth to a fifth of what the laborers in the United States receive, but we export vast quantities in competition with the world.