48o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



up from the ranks. Neither inference is necessarily correct. Generali- 

 zations can be made safely only where the facts about the great mass 

 of instances are known. One man has made a million in the steel in- 

 dustry; four fifths of his co-workers in the industry are paid less than 

 $1,000 a year. Is the industry lucrative? One man rose from the 

 ranks to be president of a great railroad system. There are a hundred 

 thousand of his fellows still in the ranks. How much chance have 

 these men to become president of the railroad ? The time has come to 

 cease crude generalizations, and, by an appeal to the facts, to discover, 

 not the average, but the actual way in which service income is distri- 

 buted among gainfully employed people. 



The races of men always face the statistician with the stern de- 

 mand that he render a quick, easily comprehensible generalization, even 

 though it be from a few insufficient instances. "Be brief" is a dan- 

 gerous behest for science to follow. It leads to falsehood and inexact- 

 ness more often than it leads to truth. It often happens that the sta- 

 tistician must sacrifice brevity for the sake of accuracy. 



II. Salaries and Wages 



The first large fact encountered in the analysis of service income is 

 the distinction between salaries and wages. Although this distinction 

 is arbitrar}^, it is significant for two reasons. First, because the in- 

 comes of "officers" and "salaried employees" are often very much 

 higher than the incomes of " wage-earners " ; and second, because in a 

 large number of important publications dealing with service income, 

 the incomes of wage-earners alone are given, while in other cases the 

 figures frequently contain statements for salaries and wages. In the 

 main, the emphasis will be laid upon wages, first, as a matter of neces- 

 sity. There is no analysis of compensation which shows salaries with 

 the same minuteness that wages are set forth. Secondly, as a matter of 

 choice. The wage-earners, being an overwhelming majority of the 

 whole, constitute the bulk of the human income problem in industry. 



The contrast between the amount paid to salary-earners and to 

 wage-earners is in some cases considerable, and in others it is far less 

 marked. Average figures alone are available for this comparison, be- 

 cause there is nowhere any statement of classified earnings for 

 "officers." Although crude in the extreme, these averages give some 

 idea of the divergence between " salaries " and " wages." 



The Iowa Eailroad Commission reports several instances in which 

 the compensation paid to officers is not much greater than that paid to 

 wage-earners. The general ofiicers of the Iowa Terminal Companies^ 

 receive an average daily compensation for one company of $7.67, and 

 for another company $4.38, while for the same companies the average 



1 Annual Report of the Board of Railroad Commissioners of Iowa, 1911, 

 Des Moines, 1913, p. 498. 



