The document is based on a premise that mid-twentieth century experience with income distribution cannot be adequately understood without a better knowledge of the long-term macroeconomic forces that have endogenously determined the wage structure. The secular performance of the price of skills and the occupational wage structure are important to an understanding of technique choice, labor-saving technological change, capital formation, and income distribution. A quantitative documentation and an analysis of related literature on the relative price of raw labor, skills, and machines during the period 1816-1896 are presented with illustrative tables and discussion. An attempt is made to redress the balance from labor supply to demand explanations of the long and short-term behavior of wage differentials in the nineteenth century and compare this with the twentieth century experience. (Author/EC)