Political Quotes

On the record
Now where labor is so scantily paid, fabrics can be produced more cheaply; and if these fabrics can be sent into this country, free of duty, they will undersell ours, until the prices of our labor and the condition of our laborers are reduced to theirs.
Said by
Horace Mann
Free Soil · Massachusetts

Editor's note · Context

He warns that low wages abroad can lead to cheaper products that undermine local labor markets.

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This ruinous system of large farms cultivated by slaves showed its effects in Italy, eighteen hundred years ago, when the Roman empire was at the height of its grandeur.

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Old Virginia was the first to sow this land of ours with slavery; she is also the first to reap the full harvest of destruction.

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No man of common sense, who has observed this result, can doubt for a moment that the system of free labor promotes the growth and prosperity of states in a much higher degree than the system of slave labor.

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Behind these forty-one indictments for stealing stand drawn up, in battle array, against this same prisoner, seventy-four other indictments for transporting the very slaves whom he is charged to have stolen.

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