Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Wealth and Income of the American People (1924).pdf/195

Rh discerning an analyst as Friday quotes approvingly a story of a charwoman who said to a charity worker: “This war has made many a happy family, sir.” Of a similar nature is the anecdote of the wife of a profiteer, who remarked to a friend: “My husband says that if this war lasts six months more, he does not care if there is never another one.” It is of course undeniable that many people enjoyed luxuries as never before, but this was at the cost of housing and transportation facilities and other material things. For a while, we got along by drawing upon our normal and necessary surpluses of such things, living upon our fat so to speak, and later when we began to let our property run down we began to live on our principal, or to continue the previous analogy, upon our tissue. The consequence was the development of what in pathology is called acidosis.

In 1915–1916 we really did make some gain at the expense of Europe, however, and here also my previous indications are not out of tune with Friday’s estimates. At our pre-war normal rate of earning and saving we should probably have accumulated about 10 or 11 billion dollars in those two years. We got about five billion dollars from Europe by the sale of our goods, which in part may be recorded as something extra, but only in part, for even then we were applying those proceeds to the extension of plant for war purposes, which we reckoned deliberately would have to be thrown away. Even if the war had ended with 1916 we should have found our metallurgical and manufacturing plant greatly overbuilt. Friday estimates the national accumulation of these two years at 23.5 billion dollars, which includes the writing up of things