ally interested me, as a statesman, was the matter of
wages. I picked up what I could under that head
during the afternoon. A man who hasn't had much
experience, and doesn't think, is apt to measure a
nation's prosperity or lack of prosperity by the mere
size of the prevailing wages; if the wages be high, the
nation is prosperous; if low, it isn't. Which is an
error. It isn't what sum you get, it's how much you
can buy with it, that's the important thing; and it's
that that tells whether your wages are high in fact or
only high in name. I could remember how it was in
the time of our great civil war in the nineteenth cen-
tury. In the North a carpenter got three dollars a
day, gold valuation; in the South he got fifty -- pay-
able in Confederate shinplasters worth a dollar a