524 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
elusion unless it can be shown that it takes five women to do the work of one child. The decrease in the number of children seems gratifying, if true, or if it be not because women's work has become so cheap that it does not pay to employ children. Pos- sibly the children have been driven into employments even less desirable than that of the factory. That this is the fact the writer does not assert only that the statistics presented by Colonel Wright do not, as he claims, "show clearly the tend- encies of the times."
When statisticians so noted as Mr. Mulhall and Colonel Wright are so misled by our census it does not seem strange that those unused to statistical investigation are also deceived and that Colonel Wright finds it necessary to attempt explanation as follows : T
During the past two or three years a statement purporting to give the relation of wages to cost of production, or the proportion of labor cost to the whole cost, has been going the rounds of the press. This statement has gen- erally been in the following form :
" Mr. Carroll D. Wright, the national labor statistician, has figured out that the average rate of wages per year paid in the United States is $347, and the average product of each laborer is valued at $1888. This gives the employer 82.2 per cent, while the man who does the work and produces the results is allowed a paltry 17.8 per cent. In spite of our boasted free country and high wages the fact remains that the proportion of the proceeds of his labor paid to the American workman is smaller by far than that paid to any other workingman in any civilized or uncivilized country on the globe."
. . . . The prominence given to this statement warrants its notice
in the Bulletin The figures themselves are in the main
correct ; they relate more particularly to the census of 1 880 than to any other collection of data. Analysis of the figures and the facts underlying them shows the fallacy of the conclusion drawn from them.
If the aggregate wages paid in the manufacturing and mechanical indus- tries of the United States, as shown by the census of 1880 be divided by the total number of employes to whom the wages were paid, the quotient will be 347, thus determining the average wages paid to the employes in the manufac- turing and mechanical industries of the country as $347. Dividing the aggre- gate value of all the products of manufacturing and mechanical industries by the number of employes engaged therein the quotient is 1965. Now, $347 is
'Department of Labor Bulletin, March 1896.
