The most potent argument for protection at the present time is the wages argument, which assumes that protection causes higher wages than would otherwise be the case. Its exponents hold that protection accounts for American workers getting higher wages than foreign workers engaged in the same trade or industry. They usually fail, however, to explain by similar reasoning why wages are higher in free-trade England than in protected Germany. It must be remembered too that at no time under the highest tariff rates was more than one-tenth of the workers of the country engaged in protected industries.