Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/480

476 with the estimate of Professor E. C. Chapin, quoted by Professor Scott Nearing in his new book, "Wages in the United States," that "a New York family, consisting of man, wife and three children under fourteen, could maintain a normal standard at least so far as the physical man is concerned on an annual income of $900." According to these estimates, then, the cost of living rose for New York City from $624 in 1903-3 to about $900 in 1911, a rise of no less than 44 per cent. The reader will notice that this figure is still higher than the increase of 36 per cent, arrived at above by comparing the index numbers for 1896 and 1906, although the latter period is longer.

But some people deny the great social and eugenic effect of this undeniable rise in prices, because they think that it has been accompanied by a corresponding rise in wages. This is a much discussed question, and wages vary so in different parts of America, and have risen at such varying rates in different trades, that it is impossible to obtain such accurate figures here as I have given for prices and the cost of living. Inasmuch as the majority of our wage-earners are still classed as unskilled, I will take a large class of them for comparison. In 1900 the Industrial Commission reported that the 150,000 trackmen working on the railroads received wages ranging on the average from 47.5 cents a day in the south to $1.25 a day in the north. Not allowing for unemployment, these men had a yearly income of less than $150 in the south and less than $375 in the north. Nine years later the Interstate Commerce Commission reported that the 320,000 trackmen then employed on the American railroads received an average of $1.38 a day, or $414 a year. This is an increase above the average for the north of only 10 per cent, for the nine years, as compared with the rise of 44 per cent, above quoted in the cost of living in New York City from 1902 to 1911. In some few trades, to be sure, wages have risen much more, though hardly in any as much as has the cost of living; but space does not permit of detailed comparisons; a general estimate for unskilled workers at the beginning and the end of the last decade must here suffice. Robert Hunter, for example, wrote in 1904: "It is hardly to be doubted that the mass of unskilled workers in the north receive less than $460 a year," and this must include more than half of all wage-earners. And Dr. Scott Nearing in the book already mentioned estimates that half the adult males of the United States are receiving less than $500, and three quarters of them less than $600 yearly. This lower-paid half of the total male workers must correspond fairly well with Mr. Hunter's "mass of unskilled workers," except that his estimate was confined to the north, where wages are higher than in the south. To compare the two estimates, then, quite fairly, we should probably increase the later one of Dr. Nearing's, which refers to the whole country, by about 10 per cent, to express the slightly higher