that our present cost of government is somewhere between one-eighth and one-sixth of our total income, and this discovery is focusing public attention upon the importance of economy in public expenditures.
But it is our present knowledge of the amount of the national income and the division thereof between the wage earners on the one hand and property and management on the other hand that bas been of the greatest importance. It is true that we previously possessed knowledge on this subject that was convincing to the engineering mind. Mallock bad shown us that in the economic history of Great Britain the benefits of invention and managerial organization had mainly accrued to the masses of the people. Bowley had shown that in Great Britain the major part of the current income accrued to the wage earners. I had shown the same thing with respect to the United States in my study for 1916, proving conclusively to any scientific mind that about 75 per cent of the American income, other than agricultural, went to the wage earners. Here was another case of economic prophets to whom no special attention was paid. Such as might have been given to us was passed away with the explanation that we were the partisan exponents of capitalism. The prevalent idea expressed among professional representatives of labor was that labor received a mere dole out of what it produced, 25 or 30 per cent, and that it ought to get a fairer share. Pink socialists, members of the Fabian Society, and philanthropologists generally supported this contention.
Then came along the National Bureau of Economic Research, organized as an impartial fact-finder, and with respect to the United States substantially con-
