The golf-links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.
The defenders of our industrial system will admit these facts, if you pin them down, but they say that things are getting better all the time. A professor of Harvard University has just published a book, in which he tells how our glorious system is rapidly solving all problems; very certainly and very soon there will be no poor. Well, now, I am going to make a statement, Judd, and you paste it in your hat, and look at it every now and then while you are sawing timbers or mixing cement:
The condition of the mass of workers in the United States has been getting slowly but steadily worse for the past thirty-five years.
Let us see now. We want to determine what are called “real wages”: that is to say, wages in relation to the cost of living. It is clear enough that if your wages rise from four dollars a day to eight, and at the same time the cost of living doubles, you are no richer than you were before. That is one way to fool the workingman; but we are not going to let ourselves be fooled!
The problem is not a simple one; you have to figure wage-rates in representative industries over a term of years; and then you have to figure the average cost of goods for the same period of time. It is easy to “load” your figures, by giving emphasis to those trades in which wages rose, or, on the other hand, by featuring those goods whose prices stayed low. For example, as I write, Secretary Hoover reports to the President, and the President gives out to the press, a set of figures showing how the American workers have made some gains in real wages during the last few years; and these glad tidings are featured upon the front page of all our great newspapers. And what is it? Simply a barefaced fraud! Mr. Hoover has figured wholesale prices! He knows that these prices have gone down, while retail prices have not gone down correspondingly; also, needless to say, he knows that American workingmen do not buy their food and clothing at wholesale!
Prof. Paul H. Douglas of the University of Chicago published in the Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science (Vol. XI, No. 2), a very elaborate study of real wages from 1890 to 1924. This is the best work I had seen, and the results may be summed up in one sentence: real wages in the United States from 1890 to 1924 suffered a decrease of five per cent. To phrase it another way: where a workingman could buy 20 pounds of necessaries in 1890, he could buy 19 pounds today.
These figures caused a sensation; for you can understand that there is nothing our masters try so hard to keep from their servants as this very fact. I used the figures throughout these letters; but just as I am through, and about to send the manuscript to the printer, the professor writes me a letter, saying that he has revised the work, and he now shows a gain in real wages during the past four years. The reason for the change is, he has decided that the earlier figures were “unduly weighted with pork and beef, which rose much more rapidly than other commodities.”