476 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



with the estimate of Professor E. C. Chapin, quoted by Professor Scott 

 Nearing in his new book, " Wages in the United States," that " a J^ew 

 York family, consisting of man, wife and three children under four- 

 teen, could maintain a normal standard at least so far as the physical 

 man is concerned on an annual income of $900." According to these 

 estimates, then, the cost of living rose for New York City from $624 

 in 1903-3 to about $900 in 1911, a rise of no less than 44 per cent. 

 The reader will notice that this figure is still higher than the increase 

 of 36 per cent, arrived at above by comparing the index numbers for 

 1896 and 1906, although the latter period is longer. 



But some people deny the great social and eugenic effect of this 

 undeniable rise in prices, because they think that it has been accom- 

 panied by a corresponding rise in wages. This is a much discussed 

 question, and wages vary so in different parts of America, and have 

 risen at such varying rates in different trades, that it is impossible to 

 obtain such accurate figures here as I have given for prices and the 

 cost of living. Inasmuch as the majority of our wage-earners are still 

 classed as unskilled, I will take a large class of them for comparison. 

 In 1900 the Industrial Commission reported that the 150,000 trackmen 

 working on the railroads received wages ranging on the average from 

 47.5 cents a day in the south to $1.25 a day in the north. Not 

 allowing for unemployment, these men had a yearly income of less 

 than $150 in the south and less than $375 in the north. Nine years 

 later the Interstate Commerce Commission reported that the 320,000 

 trackmen then employed on the American railroads received an 

 average of $1.38 a day, or $414 a year. This is an increase above 

 the average for the north of only 10 per cent, for the nine years, as 

 compared with the rise of 44 per cent, above quoted in the cost of living 

 in New York City from 1902 to 1911. In some few trades, to be sure, 

 wages have risen much more, though hardly in any as much as has the 

 cost of living; but space does not permit of detailed comparisons; a 

 general estimate for unskilled workers at the beginning and the end 

 of the last decade must here suffice. Eobert Hunter, for example, wrote 

 in 1904: "It is hardly to be doubted that the mass of unskilled workers 

 in the north receive less than $460 a year," and this must include more 

 than half of all wage-earners. And Dr. Scott Nearing in the book 

 already mentioned estimates that half the adult males of the United 

 States are receiving less than $500, and three quarters of them less than 

 $600 yearly. This lower-paid half of the total male workers must corre- 

 spond fairly well with Mr. Hunter's " mass of unskilled workers," except 

 that his estimate was confined to the north, where wages are higher than 

 in the south. To compare the two estimates, then, quite fairly, we 

 should probably increase the later one of Dr. Nearing's, which refers to 

 the whole country, by about 10 per cent, to express the slightly higher 



