because of the poverty of their customers. The fact is that the whole civilized world—victors, vanquished, and neutrals—is impoverished. Millions of men who | would have been producers and consumers have been killed or maimed for life.
“The most important consequence of the war must, therefore, be an inevitable reduction for all the nations, during a period, of their people’s standard of living, perhaps even below the pre-war standard. We are under the necessity of making savings out of our present production, in order to compensate for the assets consumed without replacement during the war.’
This is a logical expression, in broad terms, of the economic consequences of the war. It is irrefutable except by the assumption of an offsetting condition, viz., improvement in efficiency. I shall show that that condition did not develop and does not yet exist. In the meanwhile the great majority of our citizens do not know the facts, do not understand them if they do know them, or if they both know and understand them are unwilling to face them. Close to the root of our troubles at the present time lies the desire to escape toil, and at the same time to consume lavishly, two mutually destructive ideals, the pursuit of which has already brought one nation to chaos, and bids fair to involve others. The idea that labor can maintain a more exalted living-scale upon a reduced labor-scale is a fallacy—although for political motives it has been preached loudly to credulous ears.
T read recently in one of the oldest and most reputable of the commercial papers of the United States the following prognostication, which exemplifies the misconceptions that exist in minds of superior intelligence.
