the United States Commissioner of Labor Statistics, that after all these years of investigation and statistical toil in the cost-of-living field, we don't know clearly the difference between the higher cost of living and the cost of higher living.1

Yet, after a careful examination of all available data, Professor Litman cautiously concludes that "it does not seem that wages rose as rapidly as the prices of commodities.2

This view is concurred in by those who speak for organized labor. The following is from Prof. Lauck's statement before the United States Railroad Labor Board, quoted on a previous page:

An examination of the experience of every industry shows, practically without exception, that wage increases have lagged behind price increases, and usually very far behind. . . . They [the workers] have merely struggled as best they could and in the only way they could to keep their old standards of living. In this struggle they have met with only very partial success. For the great body of wage earners, wages have not kept step with prices. As a result, labor as a class is now worse off than it was before the war. Almost without exception a day's wage buys less than it did in 1912 to 1914. In other words, in the distribution of the income of the country, labor is receiving a smaller proportion than it did before the war, while capital—in the form of profits, interest, and rent—is receiving a very much larger proportion.

On the other hand, the same statistical material leads Professor Friday to the opposite conclusion, viz., "that the real wages of labor have risen, and are higher to-day than they were in 1914."4 But at the end of the same chapter, he qualifies this general statement as follows:

There are so many different kinds of labor, so many different kinds of wage payment, and so many different rates of pay, that the task of obtaining a general view of the course of wages is considered by experts to be one of the most difficult and complicated scientific undertakings

1 Simon Litman: Prices and Price Control in Great Britain and the United States During the World War, p. 201.

2 Ibid., p. 197.

Loc. cit., p. 5.

Friday: Profits, Wages, and Prices, p. 107.

in the whole field of economics.... Consequently all general statements regarding wages, of which many are always appearing in print and on the platform, should be accepted with extreme caution.1

His own computation of the increase in wage rates and employment of from ten to twelve million workers shows that the yearly earnings per employee increased from 1913 to 1917 slightly over 30 per cent, whereas it appears from other sources that the cost of living during the same period increased 42 per cent.3

The most conclusive corroboration of the decline in real wages is furnished by the investigations of the Bureau of Child Hygiene of New York City, which show a decided increase of the proportion of malnourished school children during the World War. The figures are presented in Table 136.

TABLE 136.

PROPORTION OF MALNOURISHED SCHOOL CHILDREN IN THE BOROUGH OF MANHATTAN, NEW YORK CITY.4

This condition was not peculiar to New York City only. Dr. Thomas D. Wood, in an address delivered before the National Council of Education, February 28, 1918, estimated "that between 15 and 25 per cent of our school children are undernourished." 5

Was this lagging of wages behind the advancing cost of living due to the failure of the wage workers to "insist" upon a higher rate of wages—to put it in the language of the eco

1 Friday: Profits, Wages, and Prices, pp. 110-III.

2 Ibid., p. 122.

Monthly Labor Bulletin, February, 1921, p. 61.

"What Is Malnutrition?" by Lydia Roberts. Children's Bureau, Publication No. 59, p. 7.

Ibid., pp. 7, 19.

nomic experts of the Immigration Commission? The statistics of strikes during the world war prove that labor did not submissively acquiesce in the terms offered to it by employers.

In the period from 1881 to 1905 there occurred on an average 1,532 strikes a year. During the three years 1916-1918 the number of strikes averaged more than twice as many, vis., 3,697. The annual average number of strikers during the decade, preceding the predominance of the "new immigration" was 267,000, and in the first decade of its ascendancy 344.000. During the years 1916-1918, the annual average number of strikers rose to 1,310,000,2 i.e., 391 per cent above the average of 1886-1893, whereas the number of persons engaged in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits, trade, and transportation, increased from the X. to the XIII. Census (1880-1910) only 208 per cent.3 Nor were those strikes unorganized outbursts of inarticulate disThe percentage of strikes in which the workers were members of unions rose from 82 in 1915 to 90 in 1917, and remained at 83 in 1918.4

Moreover, strikes were not the only means by which labor was able to assert its claims:

During the war the principle of collective bargaining was of necessity, albeit in many cases rather grudgingly, recognized by all employers engaged on direct government work or in the production of essentials. The Quartermaster Corps, the Ordnance Office, the Emergency Fleet Corporation of the Shipping Board, the National War Labor Board, the Fuel Administration, and many other government agencies, sought to secure greater and more continuous production by means of collective agreements covering wages.5

1 See Table 104, on p. 345.

2 Alexander M. Bing: War-time Strikes, pp. 292-293.

XIII. Census Reports, vol. iv, p. 41.

4 Bing, loc. cit., p. 297.

Royal Meeker, Commissioner of Labor Statistics: "Employees Representation in Management of Industry," Monthly Labor Review, February, 1920, p. 2.

Neither could the presence of the "un-Americanized" foreign worker serve as an explanation for the decline of real wages. It has been brought out, on the basis of the calculations of the Bureau of Applied Economics, that whereas the real wages of common laborers in the iron and steel industry— of whom 64 per cent are foreign born—have gone up, those of locomotive firemen of whom 84 per cent are native-born Americans have declined to a point 31 per cent below "the minimum budget under American standards." 1

Among the potent factors in the decline of real wages must be noted the movement of labor from agriculture to urban industries in response to the attraction of higher wages. In consequence, agricultural production during the war barely kept pace with the growth of population,2 while the demand for breadstuffs was increased by exports abroad, as indicated in Table 137. The great interests which control

TABLE 137.

WHEAT PRODUCED, EXPORTED, AND RETAINED FOR CONSUMPTION, FISCAL YEARS 1911-1918.3

1 The production is of the calendar year preceding the fiscal year. * Including wheat flour reduced to wheat.

the agricultural produce market were thereby enabled to raise the prices of food. What the wage earner gained in

1 Editorial in The New Republic, February 25, 1920, p. 373.—XIII. Census Reports, vol. iv, Table VI: Laborers in blast furnaces and steel rolling mills, iron foundries, and other iron and steel factories; locomotive firemen (computed).

2 See Diagram XXIX.

3 Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1918, p. 559. For statistics of exports of other breadstuffs, see Appendix, Table XXXIII.

money wages, he was forced to surrender in the higher prices of necessities of life. This fact is established by Prof. Wesley C. Mitchell's study of prices during the war, from which Table 138 is compiled.

TABLE 138.

INDEX NUMBERS OF THE YEARLY PRODUCTION AND PRICES OF VEGETABLE PRODUCTS, 1913-1918.1

The next question to be considered is, What were the substitutes for immigrant labor during the war years? The movement of workers from agriculture to urban industries has already been referred to. It struck the public eye in the migration of Negroes from the agricultural South to the industrial East and Middle West. The volume of that migration is officially estimated at from 400,000 to 500,000. "Shortage of labor in Northern industries" is given as "the direct cause of the increased Negro migration during the war period." "The agricultural regions of the Southern states began to suffer for want of the Negro worker." 2

1 "History of Prices During the War," by Wesley C. Mitchell: W. I. B. Price Bulletin No. I, p. 45.—"In vegetable husbandry the harvest depends partly upon the acreage sown, which the farmer can control, but quite as much upon the weather. Thus the annual supply of vegetable products increased in the dull year 1914 and increased largely again in 1915. Nineteen sixteen was a bad year, and all the efforts to encourage agriculture in 1917 and 1918 did not bring the harvests close to the 1915 record." (Ibid., p. 46.)

2 "The Negro at Work During the World War": Department of Labor Division of Negro Economics, George E. Haynes, Director. Second Study on Negro Labor, p. 10. See also: Emmett J. Scott: Negro Migration During the War, pp. 3, 14.—According to a preliminary statement issued by the Bureau of the Census, the Negro population of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana decreased from 1910 to 1920 by 142,598. On the other hand, of the total numerical increase in the Negro population of the United States during that de