Am  jour.  Pharm.  i       jjlc  Raz^'  Material  Situation. 
June,  1919.       J  OOV 
which  come  normally  from  Russia,  Germany  or  Austria,  even 
assuming  we  wanted  goods  from  there  and  could  get  them.  We 
cannot  expect  the  products  of  war-shaken  France  to  come  out  at  old 
prices  even  when  her  shattered  industries  again  strike  something 
like  their  natural  stride.  The  same  is  true  of  the  other  allied  coun- 
tries. It  is  true  of  the  neutrals  or  most  of  them,  and  it  is  true 
finally  of  ourselves.  The  whole  world  is  staggering  under  the. 
burden  of  a  war  debt  of  almost  incomprehensible  magnitude. 
Anarchy,  strikes,  turmoil  and  terror  are  rampant  practically  through- 
out Europe.  Our  own  country  has  remained  pnysically  almost  un- 
touched by  the  war,  while  commercially  and  financially  we  have 
prospered  enormously.  But  our  very  prosperity  and  the  tremen- 
dous excess  of  activity  which  it  engendered  have  brought  us  high 
prices ;  and  the  reasons  are  plain  and  on  the  surface.  We  all  know 
the  extraordinary  condition  of  the  labor  market.  We  know  the 
plight  of  the  railroads  and  other  public  utilities  and  what  it  is  cost- 
ing us.  Wre  know  the  governmental  strong  arm  program  of  main- 
taining farm  products  at  exorbitantly  high  price  levels  and  what 
the  consequences  must  be.  We  know  that  gold  is  substantially  at, 
a  discount.  We  know  finally  that  all  these  things  acting  and  react- 
ing upon  each  other  have  to  an  alarming  extent  impaired  the  pur- 
chasing power  of  our  money,  and  this  literal  cheapening  of  the 
dollar  naturally  and  inevitably  finds  direct  expression  in  high  prices. 
We  are  taking  it  for  granted  that  as  a  matter  of  course  these 
abnormal  conditions  will  somehow  gradually  correct  themselves,  and 
that  ways  and  means  will  be  found  to  help  along  the  remedial 
processes ;  but  it  must  also  be  obvious  that  this  will  take  time  and 
that  the  period  of  re-adjustment  and  re-construction  will  be  much 
longer  than  we  thought.  We  can  and  must  all  help  to  shorten  this 
period,  and  the  point  I  wish  to  make  here  is  that  the  way  not  to  do 
our  share  of  this  work  is  to  allow  ourselves,  from  fear  of  the  buga- 
boo of  crumbling  prices,  to  sit  tight  in  a  mistaken  attitude  of  self- 
preservation  and  practically  stop  doing  business  simply  because  the 
business  may  not  promise  to  be  as  profitable  as  it  has  been  during 
the  past  two  or  three  years. 
By  way  of  illustration  of  the  fact  that  instead  of  a  sudden 
collapse  of  values  we  have  had  only  a  partial  and  orderly  decline,  I 
have  plotted  for  comparison  the  prices  of  25  representative  per- 
fumery raw  materials,  synthetics  and  essential  oils,  which  you  are 
