Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Wealth and Income of the American People (1924).pdf/26

4 “Pre-war prices are not to be expected. All through the war it was pointed out how one result would be a new scale of living for the world; that what were the luxuries of the masses had become the necessities. A difficulty has always existed in attempting to give a quantitative measure of what the new basis must be. All that is definite is that it must be the foundation for further normal progress.”

The same thought finds expression in the present cry of the labor leaders that “Wages may not be permitted to come down; for any thing Jess than the scale of 1920 does not permit a decent standard of living.” Thus Samuel Gompers in an interview at Atlantic City, August 21, 1921, said:

“Certainly we are going to fight to our utmost the reduction of wages. Every one knows that the cost of living has been lowered but little and the ‘cost of living’ as regarded by capital is too cruel. The workman must not be put on the same stratum as the lower animals. The workman needs a wage that insures something more than enough barely to exist. The workman needs some of the worthwhile things of life, some of the little luxuries and the finer things of life, and we are going to fight to see that he gets more than a bare existence.”

Now, no one will dissent from the idea that the scale of living should be elevated to the highest possible plane and should be kept there if conditions permit. Who but a misanthrope could have any different desire? But if the production of the country be insufficient to afford to all the people what is deemed to be a proper kind of living, in what way is the desire—no matter how laudable—to be fulfilled? The requirement of the