must of necessity be high. Hence, wages under such circumstances (as exist in Mexico and elsewhere) will be very low, and the conditions of life very unsatisfactory and debasing.
On the other hand, when machinery is intelligently applied for the conversion or elaboration of comparatively cheap crude materials—coal, ores, metals, fibers, wood, and the like—a very little manual labor goes a great way, and production (as in the United States) is necessarily large. This being sold in the great commerce of the world, gives large returns, and the wages represented in such production will be high, because the cost of the product measured in terms of labor is low, and the employer is thereby enabled to pay liberally; and in fact is obliged to do so, in order to obtain under the new order of things what is really the cheapest (in the sense of the most efficient) labor. Or, to state this proposition more briefly, the invariable concomitant of high wages and the skillful use of machinery is a low cost of production and a large consumption.
The following circumstance curiously illustrates the prevailing low money rate of wages in Mexico, and the obstacle which such cheap labor interposes to the attainment of large production: At one point on the Mexican Central Railroad, while journeying south, a machine, the motive-power of which was steam, for pumping water into tanks for the supply of the locomotives, was noticed, and commented upon for its compactness and effectiveness. On the return journey, this machinery was no longer in use; but a man, working an ordinary pump, had been substituted. The explanation given was, that with hand-labor costing but little more than the (Colorado) coal consumed, the continued employment of an engine and an American engineer was not economical.
But at no point within the observation of the writer, either on the Continent of North America or in Europe, do wages, or rather remuneration for regular labor, reach so low a figure as at Santa Fé, within the Territories of the United States. At this place, one of the notable industrial occupations is the transport and sale of wood for use as fuel. The standard price for so much as can be properly loaded upon a donkey (or burro) is fifty cents. The money price of the wood is high: but, as it is brought from a distance of fifteen, twenty, thirty, or even more miles, each load may be fairly considered as representing the exclusive service of a donkey for two days—going, returning, and waiting for a purchaser—and the services or labor of an able-bodied man, as owner or attendant, apportioned to from three to five donkeys for a corresponding length of time. The gross earnings of man and donkey can not, therefore, well be in excess of twenty-five cents per day; from which, if anything is to be deducted for the original cost of the wood, its collection and preparation, and for the subsistence of the man and beast, the net profit will hardly be appreciable. Or, in other words, able-bodied men, with animals, are willing to work, and
