Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/201



I have tried to make it clear in these studies that the people of the United States are living in a state of economic unbalance, first as between property and management on the one hand and wage-earning labor on the other; and secondly among wage-earners themselves. This is producing a reduction in personal efficiency and at the same time an extravagance in living, which is largely at the expense of the national principal itself. So long as these conditions prevail we shall be in a situation of economic instability. While there may be temporarily some advantage in this to certain groups of workers at the expense of the owners of capital and of other groups of workers, it is certain that the workers themselves as a whole will in the long run suffer the most injury from restricted production and maldivision of it.

Now, I do not ascribe blame upon anybody for deliberately bringing about and seeking to perpetuate bad conditions. They are the natural consequences of the upheaval of the war and of human nature as it is constituted, and just as their development has been inevitable so will be their correction. The great question is whether the correction can be instituted short of ruin, so that it may be completed in 20 years, let us say; or whether the evils will go so far as to produce a downfall from which the recovery may be a