quets it is true the merchant likes to see among his guests as many generals that is to say, official personages as possible, but he never dreams of thereby establishing an intimacy with them, or of being invited in return. It is perfectly understood by both parties that nothing of the kind is meant. Finally, it is worthy of remark that the trading class recognizes no aristocracy but that of official rank. To them, and in a notable degree, as we have said, to all Russians, distinctions of birth, as discriminated from rank, are unintelligible. Many a merchant would cheerfully give a hundred roubles for the presence at his board of an actual State Councillor," who perhaps never heard of his grandfather, while the same host would not give a kopek for the company of a Prince destitute of official status, although the latter might trace his pedigree up to the half-mythical Rurik. Of such a person the shrewd Muscovite would say, "Who knows what sort of a fellow he is?" whereas the Councillor exhibits unmistakable marks of the Czar's favor, -in other words, demonstrates to the merchant's eye some personal merit gauged, indeed, by a rude, often illusory, yet by no means wholly untrustworthy, standard. This is one of those superficial signs which partly reflect and partly reinforce the more profound indications of the essentially democratic character which belongs to the social structure of Russia, and of the comparative abruptness and facility with which an autocratic may perhaps one day be exchanged for an extremely liberal government, when the mass of the people shall have become fitted by partial and local experiment for self-government.

M. W. HAZELTINE.

ART. VII.- How SHALL THE NATION REGAIN PROSPERITY?

How shall we as a nation extricate ourselves from the present hard times and regain material prosperity, is a question that comes very close to the interests, moral as well as material, of every man, woman, and child that helps constitute the nation, whatever may be their social position, occupation, or sectional location.

It is proposed to here attempt to contribute something in the way of fact and argument in answer to this question; or something which, if not a full answer, may at least help the people of the United States to determine what course of policy on the part of their government, in respect to economic and fiscal matters, will be most likely to effect the result which all agree is most desirable.

And, first, a word in the nature of general propositions. All wealth, meaning thereby property or material abundance, is the result of labor. Persons acquire and accumulate wealth by means other than labor, in the sense of physical toil, but no one produces wealth or abundance without labor.

Again, the results of labor exerted for production under the same circumstances as respects natural and accumulated capital, intelligence, and physical energy, are wonderfully equal all the world over; so equal that, other things being equal, one man's labor will exchange for another man's everywhere. In fact, there is nothing so permanent and so uniform and so equal in value as labor; and wages are nearly identical in all places, when measured by the same standard. Property or wealth (in the sense of the results of embodied or accumulated labor, which alone constitutes property or wealth) being once acquired, no nation or individual can increase such property or wealth by merely making or multiplying titles to it, and then counting the actuality as one property, and the title - as a debt, a promise to pay, written or printed, or a mortgagebased on it as another and distinct property; nor can property be increased by adopting and using a big unit or standard for measuring it. These propositions, as thus stated, may seem in the nature of truisms; and yet there are few subjects in respect to which peo

ple in general, and the people of the United States in particular, are more inclined to deceive themselves. Thus, by most courts and legislators, and by many writers of eminence on law, finance, and political economy, debts are still regarded as property, as rightful subjects for taxation, and as rightfully included in valuations of the aggregate wealth of communities or of the nation, although each man's individual experience unerringly teaches him just the contrary. Again, the delusion we are apt to take upon ourselves from not clearly perceiving that the actual results of labor cannot be varied by varying the units or standards employed to measure or estimate them, is also very remarkable. Thus, with labor at three dollars per day, and the value of the products of labor measured proportionally, the aggregate product or wealth of the United States appears enormous. In China, on the other hand, they have neither debt, paper-money, nor coin; and the real standard of value — labor -is on the average twenty cents per day. Consequently taxes are small, revenue small, expenditure small, and country poor, according to our arithmetic. Other things being equal, however, the annual product of labor in the two countries will be in proportion to numbers; and by this rule the aggregate product of China to that of America should be in the ratio of five hundred millions to some forty-three millions.* Change now the standard for measuring the value of the product of the labor of these millions; reduce wages in the United States to twenty cents per day, and raise wages in China to three dollars per day. America will then appear most poor, while figures could hardly compute the value of the product of China. Yet nothing would be really changed, and yet nothing more uncommon than right notions on this subject.

So much in the way of propositions, the correctness of which, it is believed, cannot be impugned. Let us next see what in the way of deductions we are legitimately warranted in making from these propositions.

If labor is the source of all wealth, if labor under the same circumstances will produce equal results, then that country which possesses the greatest natural resources, which commands the most energetic and intelligent labor, which avails itself to

Examination of Chinese archives at Pekin, instituted by the Russian Legation, indicates that the population of China in 1860 was in excess of five hundred and thirty millions.

the largest extent of labor-saving machinery and processes, which has the best and cheapest facilities for intercommunication, and the freest and most enlightened government, ought to produce to greater advantage than any or all other countries, ought to produce the most for the expenditure of a given amount of labor, ought to be able to sell cheapest, ought, finally, to take the first place in the race for industrial and commercial supremacy among the nations.

Now, the United States confessedly in very many respects occupies these positions of advantage. It is a country fitted by nature, and by the character of the people who occupy and possess it, to be a country of abundance. A given amount of labor under existing circumstances will here produce more, on the average, of the essentials of a comfortable livelihood than any similar area on the earth's surface. The evidence on this point is too conclusive almost to admit of even formal questioning. All the world has admitted it, for the surplus population of all the world, possessed of sufficient information to form an intelligent opinion in respect to their material interests, has rushed here to live. Men do not often think, when they hear or read of the hordes of Goths, of Vandals, or of Huns, which in the olden time rolled in upon the civilization of Southern Europe to obliterate or destroy, that, momentous as were these movements of population in respect to historical results, they were nevertheless, in point of numbers, especially if we take time into consideration, small in comparison with the wave of immigration which, impelled by peaceful motives, has flowed in upon the United States from other countries during the period from 1840 to 1873 inclusive (8,038,195),* to industrially produce and develop. Other evidence on this point, no less striking, is to be found in the rates of wages and of interest which for many years have prevailed in the United States, and which, as is well known, have been greater than in most other countries. But capitalists and laborers have received large remuneration in the United States simply and solely because their industry has produced largely. Wages being labor's share of the product of labor, and interest capital's share of the same product,

Gibbon estimates the number of the entire Gothic nation, "of both sexes and all ages," which crossed the Danube in 876 A. D., at only ". 'near a million." The army of Huns led by Attila into Gaul in 451 A. D. is estimated at 700,000.

neither wages nor interest can be large in any country unless the general average product resulting from the employment of labor and capital is also large. The late Professor Cairnes of London, one of the most careful observers and thinkers, a few years ago made an estimate, based on the best available industrial statistics for 1868-70, to the effect that in the commercial dealings of the several nations the product of a day's labor in the United States ought to enable "a workman to command the product, in round numbers, of a day and a third's labor in Great Britain; the product of a day and a half's labor in Belgium; the product of from one and three quarters to nearly two days' labor in France and Germany; while it probably would command the product of four or five days' labor in China and India." In truth, there are no criteria which better indicate the relative material prosperity of nations and communities than the rates of interest and wages which they are permanently willing and able to pay; high rates prevailing of necessity in countries where the products of labor and capital are comparatively large, and low rates of necessity in countries where the products of labor and capital are comparatively small. Wages at the present time are comparatively low, and declining in the United States, because, owing to various circumstances, the results of labor are not largely remunerative to employers. Again, there is no more capital in the country than there was four years ago, when the rates of interest were high,-probably not so much, for the multitudes of workers who have been idle during the last four years have been consuming rather than creating capital, as they have had to live, even if idle; and if rates of interest depend mainly, as many suppose, upon the abundance or scarcity of capital, interest at present ought to rule high. But so far from ruling high, it never was so low, and simply because the profit resulting from any use that capital can now be put to in the United States is not sufficient to justify a high rate of interest.

The circumstance that wages and interest have been and are now higher in the United States than in most other countries is often dwelt upon by men claiming to be statesmen and economists, as if it constituted a disadvantage to the country in making its foreign exchanges, which it was necessary to guard against and counteract by legislation. But permanent high wages and large interest in any country where life and property are reasonably NO. 257.

VOL. CXXV.

8