60 
INTERNATIONAL TRADE 
aa and 
did the leading branches of the cotton manufacture. But the 
utilization of cheap common labor enabled them, not indeed to 
hold their own without protective duties, but to get on with a 
less barrier than would otherwise have been called for. The effect 
was the same in kind as that on the cotton industry, but not so 
marked in degree. 
These peculiarities in the American labor situation did not rest 
on permanent causes. They were due, as has already been said, 
primarily to the great inflow of immigrants during the period in 
question. The restrictive legislation of 1916 brought a complete 
change, one whose effects will ramify far and in many directions, 
but in no way more than in a new adjustment of the relative 
wages of skilled and unskilled laborers. The differential will 
become less pronounced in favor of the skilled as against the 
unskilled. The industries which have adjusted themselves to a 
large and relatively cheap supply of the unskilled will have to 
readjust their ways. So far as they are subject to competition 
from foreign industries, they will be in a less advantageous position 
than before. The relations between the wages of the two groups 
will probably come to be in the United States not different from 
those in England, in Germany, and in Australia. This particular 
source of comparative advantage (or of an offset to a comparative 
disadvantage) will grow less and less, and probably will in the end 
disappear.! 
1 Tn these paragraphs I have sketched in bare outline the labor peculiarities of 
the American industrial situation as it stood before 1916, with regard only to their 
bearing on the particular phase of the theory of international trade here under con- 
sideration. As regards other aspects of the situation — the economic and technical 
development of the several industries, the tariff problems involved —1I refer the 
reader to the extended discussion in my book on Some Aspects of the Tariff Question.