Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/935

EFFECT OF AN INCREASE IN THE LIVING WAGE 899 bulk. No jugglery, not even a complete transformation of our industrial system in accordance with the ideals of state socialists or guild socialists, would enable a community to maintain higher real wages than are warranted by the prevailing conditions of financial prosperity. Under the present social system, the fact is apt to be lost sight of, owing to an exaggerated impression of the extent to which increased wages may be paid out of profits, instead of out of prices. According to English statistics, if the national income were equally divided among all, the result would only be 3/- a day at pre-war prices. Writing with reference to the lessons of the war, a contributor to The Round Table for December last remarks:^ "We have learnt that the true wealth of a nation consists in a healthy, strong population, and in the utilisation of its material resources to that end. But unfortunately — as we shall find — we have discovered no new Aladdin's lamp, no new short new cut to prosperity. Wages and profits depend as of yore on hard work, saving, efl&cient management, co-opera- tion between Capital and Labour, and up-to-date plant. There is no inexhaustible fund of riches into which the State can dip its hand, and which it can distribute gratis to its citizens. Our wealth is what we produce and what we save. If we have wasted capital in war, we shall have to make it good. If our production is impeded and saving gives way to extravagance, profits and enterprise will decline and wages and em- ployment with them. We must not be misled by the fallacious appear- ances of war. We have been enjoying the temporary prosperity of a spendthrift, speeding towards bankruptcy. We have been living easy, because we have been living on our capital." In illustration of the fallacious appearance of prosperity during the war, the same writer relates that in Russia peasants now weigh instead of counting their paper money; that in revolutionary France, Mirabeau's paper-money policy was pursued until a pair of boots cost £100 in the depreciated currency, and that the consequence of thinking only of the distribution of wealth, as distinct from pro- duction, is seen at the present moment in Russia, where the great proportion of factories is likely before long to be closed, and the town populations, at any rate, to be without the necessities of life. If a statutory direction authorizing a complete automatic ad- justment of existing awards according to variations in the cost of ' "The Financial and Economic Future," 33 The Round Table, December, 1918.