| General administration | 3,119 |
| Transportation and traffic | 128,823 |
| Traction and material | 80,732 |
| Way and structures | 81,897 |
| Auxiliaries | 82,809 |
| Female employes | 29,178 |
| Total | 406,558 |
The official statistics only give the compensation of employes in the division of traction and material, where the 80,732 men employed get an average of $187 per year.
On the state railways of Belgium, firemen receive from $15.20 to $22.80 per month, the higher wage only after 15 years' service; enginemen begin at $22.50 per month and at the end of 24 years' service work up to $38.00 per month; conductors earn from $15.97 per month up to a maximum of $34.70; brakemen, beginning as shunters (switchmen) at 45 cents a day, when promoted get a minimum of $17.10 per month, from which they are slowly advanced to a maximum of $22.00. The average railway worker in Belgium gets 2.22 francs (43 cents) a day.
Whole classes of American railway employes get more in a month than Belgian railway employes average in a year.
The Cost of Living.
What and how great the virtue and the art,
To live on little with a cheerful heart.—Pope.
Not because it has any legitimate place in fixing the standard of railway wages, which should be relative to the part capacity, intelligence, industry, loyalty and experience play in railway service, but because in recent years the steady increase in the cost of living has been made the fulcrum on which every lever to advance wages works, is it proper to refer to the subject in this report.
Now there is nothing in the whole wilderness of economics so utterly illusive and misleading as this same cost of living. It is as incapable of statistical expression as the airy imaginings of a dream and yet it broods over the domestic happiness of nations with all the disquieting effects of a nightmare—and like every nightmare it comes from eating too much and wanting to eat more.
In economics, beyond the barest subsistence, the cost of living is not ruled by necessity but by individual choice. Each person and family settles it along the lines of abstinence or indulgence. It ranges from the "dinner of herbs where love is" and the virtues of self-denial are nourished, to the feasts of Lucullus and Pompeian profligacy in whose indulgence whole peoples have perished.