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of each wage-worker amounts to $304 per annum, and the average annual net profit on the labor product of each wage-worker is $374. The United States census for the year 1880 contains tables which show that the daily average product of each wage-worker in manufacturing industry is valued at $10, and the daily average wages at $1.15. The increase in the quantity of wealth which a wage laborer can now produced compared to 1870 is ascribed to the increased application of machinery and the increased sub0division and consequent simplification of the process of production. To this fact is also due the diminution of the share (wages) of their product, which the workers now receive, as well as the increase of the number of the enforced idle since 1880.
The Unites States Census for 1880 gives the annual average wages of each laborer engaged in manufacture at $304, and the annual average net profit on capital invested at $374. in other words, each laborer produced values amounting to $678, for which they received $304 in wages, the remaining $374 being the amount which the owners of capital charged them for its use.
The wage system is the foundation upon which the United States Government, in common with all other governments, rests. This foundation was laid in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, as described by John Adams when he said: "What matters it whether you give the food and clothes to the slave direct, or whether you just give him enough in wages to purchase the same?" Nearly one hundred years later the citizens of the United States appealed to armed revolution; the Constitution was set aside and millions of property and nearly a million human lives were sacrificed in order to place the chattel slave upon the same industrial plane as the wage-worker. Before the inauguration of the war of the rebellion offers were made to the slaveholders to pay them $1,000 apiece for their slaves, as being far cheaper and more humane than to embroil the nation in civil war. That price was indignantly rejected, as being too small; besides the slaveholders held the chattel slavery was a "divine institution," and it would, therefore, be sacrilege to attempt its abolition. In 1810, sixteen years after the close of the rebellion, the United States Census states there was invested in the woolen industries of the country capital amounting to $159,000,000, and the number of
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