What do you pay for a stuff gown for the wife of the laborer or the mechanic?"
"We pay eight cents, four mills."
"Well, observe the difference: you pay eight cents and four mills, we pay only four cents." I prepared now to sock it to him. I said: "Look here, dear friend, _what's become of your high wages you were bragging so about a few minutes ago?_"--and I looked around on the company with placid satisfaction, for I had slipped up on him gradually and tied him hand and foot, you see, without his ever noticing that he was being tied at all. "What's become of those noble high wages of yours?--I seem to have knocked the stuffing all out of them, it appears to me."
But if you will believe me, he merely looked surprised, that is all! he didn't grasp the situation at all, didn't know he had walked into a trap, didn't discover that he was _in_ a trap. I could have shot him, from sheer vexation. With cloudy eye and a struggling intellect he fetched this out:
"Marry, I seem not to understand. It is _proved_ that our wages be double thine; how then may it be that thou'st knocked therefrom the stuffing?--an miscall not the wonderly word, this being the first time under grace and providence of God it hath been granted me to hear it."
Well, I was stunned; partly with this unlooked-for stupidity on his part, and partly because his fellows so manifestly sided with him and were of his mind--if you might call it mind. My position was simple enough, plain enough; how could it ever be simplified more? However, I must try:
"Why, look here, brother Dowley, don't you see? Your wages are merely higher than ours in _name_, not in _fact_."
"Hear him! They are the _double_--ye have confessed it yourself."
"Yes-yes, I don't deny that at all. But that's got nothing to do with it; the _amount_ of the wages in mere coins, with meaningless names attached to them to know them by, has got nothing to do with it. The thing is, how much can you _buy_ with your wages?-- that's the idea. While it is true that with you a good mechanic is allowed about three dollars and a half a year, and with us only about a dollar and seventy-five--"
"There--ye're confessing it again, ye're confessing it again!"
"Confound it, I've never denied it, I tell you! What I say is this. With us _half_ a dollar buys more than a _dollar_ buys with you--and THEREFORE it stands to reason and the commonest kind of common-sense, that our wages are _higher_ than yours."
He looked dazed, and said, despairingly:
"Verily, I cannot make it out. Ye've just said ours are the higher, and with the same breath ye take it back."
"Oh, great Scott, isn't it possible to get such a simple thing through your head? Now look here--let me illustrate. We pay four cents for a woman's stuff gown, you pay 8.4.0, which is four mills more than _double_. What do you allow a laboring woman who works on a farm?"
"Two mills a day."
"Very good; we allow but half as much; we pay her only a tenth of a cent a day; and--"
"Again ye're conf--"
"Wait! Now, you see, the thing is very simple; this time you'll understand it. For instance, it takes your woman 42 days to earn her gown, at 2 mills a day--7 weeks' work; but ours earns hers in forty days--two days _short_ of 7 weeks. Your woman has a gown, and her whole seven weeks wages are gone; ours has a gown, and two days' wages left, to buy something else with. There--_now_ you understand it!"
He looked--well, he merely looked dubious, it's the most I can say; so did the others. I waited--to let the thing work. Dowley spoke at last--and betrayed the fact that he actually hadn't gotten away from his rooted and grounded superstitions yet. He said, with a trifle of hesitancy:
"But--but--ye cannot fail to grant that two mills a day is better than one."
Shucks! Well, of course, I hated to give it up. So I chanced another flyer:
"Let us suppose a case. Suppose one of your journeymen goes out and buys the following articles:
"1 pound of salt; 1 dozen eggs; 1 dozen pints of beer; 1 bushel of wheat; 1 tow-linen suit; 5 pounds of beef; 5 pounds of mutton.