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70 ECONOMIC INQUIRIES AND STUDIES
obtained in England by exporting something else. All
these general comparisons between nations in which the
foreign trade is spoken of or assumed to be representa-
tive of the total trade are, therefore, very much to be
deprecated. Import and export statistics, apart from the
special danger of using them, which I have described,
cannot be properly used for such comparisons.
I come next to international statistical comparisons
in respect to wages, which present some curious diffi-
culties of which most of those who make sucl\ com-
parisons seem totally unaware. In the primary use of
records of wages, viz., their use by the labourer or
workman, who has no employment, or small wages, in
one place, and finds he can better himself by going to
another, these difficulties do not arise. If the facts re-
corded are true, the labourer or workman has some-
thing on which to act, and he can attend to all the
points and qualifications necessary. But when the same
records are used, or an attempt is made to use them,
for more general purposes, difficulties begin. Length
of working day, continuity of employment, and other
points must all be recorded when a general statistical
account of the wages-earning classes of a people has to
be built up. So little have such matters been studied,
however, that I doubt the existence of any comparison
of wages in different countries which is even formally
complete. No country has, as yet, a tolerably complete
account of its own wages in which attention is given to
all these points; much less is there any possibility of
international comparisons. l
As the primary records are, however, sometimes used
for such comparisons, and we get such statements based
on them as that wages are 50 or 100 per cent. higher
in the United States, say, than in England, special
attention may be drawn to the failure of the comparison
in point of logic. In the absence of any account of
length of the working day and continuity of employ-
1 Since this was written wages statistics have been greatly improved,
but international comparisons continue to be most difficult (19°3-4)-