ABSTRACT
Poreigners have known that American wages are unique. Smith anticipated that once the colonies outgrew their infancy the discrepancy in wages between old England and new America would tend to disappear. At the beginning of the nineteenth century advocates of free trade emphasized that the fostering of new industries would endanger the high wages of American labor, for the cost of living would inevitably be raised by the tariff. High efficiency and high wages might result in low labor costs, a likely contention when one recalls the proverbial efficiency of American industry. Money wages after the World War were appreciably higher than those that had prevailed in the decades preceding the war, a fact that led many to correlate the rise in wages with the general expansion of the economy. Wage earners in manufacturing, clerical and low salaried workers, government employees secured increases in money wages, but these increases were smaller than the rise in prices.
