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106 exhibiting themselves in increasing degree down to the lowest stratum. The economic equilibrium having been disturbed, however, the change in the ratio of division of the produce of industry occurring somewhere around the line of the income tax payers of 1916, we may expect consequently to discover a reversal of experience, at least partially, below that line.

In the great mass of people possessing incomes of less than $3,000 in 1916 there may be made some clear-cut classifications. Primarily there is a division between the farm population, which numbers about one third of all, and the urban and suburban population. The latter comprises what is commonly called “labor” and the small merchants, clerks, public servants and others who may be generalized as the “white collar” classes.

I do not think there can be much doubt that the scale of living by the farmers on the whole was lower in 1922 than in 1913. As a class they did not suffer from shortage of shelter and probably not much from shortage of food, although perhaps they did not have so much luxury under that head. In clothing, fuel and transportation service they were not so well off. On the other hand they came unmistakably into great enjoyment from automobiles, cinematography, radiotelephony, and the phonograph and telephone. We may ask seriously however, whether such enjoyment has not been largely at the expense of their roofs, fences, equipment and live stock and the fertility of their land; in other words at the expense of their principal.

Among the urban and suburban population there is no doubt that the white collar classes have suffered impairment of their scale of living. It is notorious that in general the wages of clerks and public servants have