WESTIRII HARDWOOD I.UMBER G0.

PRospect

Tumbe R

is the most criticql oI cll wcr mqtericrls.

This lcrct explcins in c few words the conlinued pressure on the mills for greater production for wqr needs.

"The problem of abolishing want is NOT one of DIVISION, as politicians aver; it is a problem in multiplication. Conquer poverty by the only credible method-by PRODUCTION on a basis so efficient, upon a range so vast, upon a scale so magnificent, that the real wealth of the world flows to the common mxn."-p1ss. Wriston, Brown University.

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We have three major problems before us today: First, to win the war, wholly and completely; second, to win the peace by the making of arrangements for a warless future; and third, to win the battle of reconversion from war to peace here at home. If we may judge from all we read and hear of late, the third, which I am going to discuss here, is a problem of vital and staggering importance. The question seems to be, what philosophy shall prevail in this transition period; the philosophy of scarcity, which prevailed in this country from 1933 until we got into the war; or the philosophy so well expressed in the opening para. graph-the philosophy of PRODUCTION TO CREATE \VEALTH AND EMPLOYMENT.

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Already we are hearing much from the prophets of scarcity. Working hours, they say, must go down; wages per hour, must go up; production of every sort must be cut to a pattern to fit the ideas of the believers in scarcity; bribery (subsidies) must be used to pay people not to produce enough to glut the market and get costs down; high WAGES, not high PRODUCTION, must be the vehicle over which wartime prosperity must be continued into peacetime prosperity. These, and many other like ideas, are being ofrered as a panacea to prevent economic demoralization after the war when many millions of people must change their employment.

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Before the war we spent more than fifty billions of dollars trying to artificially cure the depression. Yet when the war came along to furnish copious employment for all those who wanted to work, we still had nearly ten.million men unemployed. We used all that money to prime the pump. The trouble was we had to keep on spending to keep it primed, because with an economy based on scarcity, there was no hope for the industrial machine ever to get running in high, and take industry off relief. Industry and agriculture were both on a part-time operating basis when the war came along. Never once during the years between 1933 and the beginning of the war inflation, did we ever try to cure the depression by turning industry loose and attempting to cure the depression by real, rather than artificial means. We tried one panacea after another, but all of them were based on scarcity, on deficit spending and the like. And we kept the depression. Our financial strength was great enough to sustain us.

Now things are di,ffer"la.oJr,n three hundred billions of dollars public debt. there is not the slightest hope that we can go back to the philosophy of deficit spending, paying the producers of the nation cash to make less and less of the fundamentals of life. We have got to find some other system. Let us pray that ure turn our faces and our brains away from the false doctrine of creating prosperity by decreasing production, and try what all sound economists have advocated all along-the broad highway of greater and greater, rather than less and less Production'

If a better understanding could be had by the workers of the nation of the actual relationship between wages, and employment, and production, our postwar planning could be greatly simplified. The greatest hurdle we have got to climb to get this nation back into sound civilian high gear is the false belief that has been drilled into the heads of millions of working men during the past decade that WAGES means WEAL?H; that the thing that counts is how many dollars go into his weekly pay envelope, instead of the important question being, how much of those things that he wants in this world can a man trade for his week's effort or production. ***

There is much talk today about what is to happen to wages in the reconversion of industry and agriculture from war to peace. Wages are as generally and thoroughly misunderstood as money; and there are few subjects concerning which so many people know so little, as the subject of money. What every man needs to'know and understand clearly is that there are trvo kinds of wages-MONEY wages, and REAL wages. Money wages mean a certain number of dollars and cents for a certain time or amount of work. REAL WAGES mean what can be bought with that money. There is a vast difference. The country seems well populated with so-called leaders who believe firmly-or act like they do-that the nu.rnber of dollars and cents in the pay envelope-NOT what it will buy- is the whole story to the worker. That sort of thinker naturally concludes that by raising money wages he solves the labor problem. Whereas, any person of the most ordinary thinking capacity must realize that unless the in-

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