50 INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND WAGES 
and an established minimum should be construed in the light 
of these considerations; 
That for the present the board or its section should con- 
sider and decide each case involving these principles on its 
particular facts and reserve any definite rule of decision until 
its judgments have been sufficiently numerous and their 
operation sufficiently clear to make generalization safe. 
This resolution was submitted and adopted at the request 
of former President William H. Taft (now Chief Justice 
of the Supreme Court), who was at that time one of the 
public Joint-Chairmen of the National War Labor Board.* 
Its chief significance was three-fold: (1) in the precedents 
established in the future activities of the Board, where it 
was practically invoked in the adjustment of exceptionally 
low wage standards: (2) in the intimation that the prin- 
ciple was one which might be deserving of sanction under 
normal peace-time conditions, and (3) the injection of this 
principle into the wartime code for industry gave it a 
prominence which stimulated its discussion and advocacy 
in the period of post-war reconstruction. 
TuE EFFECTS OF THE WAR 
Because of the truce which had been arranged between 
capital and labor, the war period, therefore, was not 
marked by any decided changes in the theory and actual 
adjustment of wages. When the Armistice was signed, 
both capital and labor were, fundamentally speaking, 
highly dissatisfied. As cost of living had tended to advance 
more rapidly than money wages during the war period, 
labor, as a rule, was anxious to throw off all restraints, 
and by the use of organized pressure to secure immediate 
advances in rates of pay and improvements in working 
1 Minutes of the National War Labor Board, July, 1918. Report of the 
Secretary of National War Labor Board, 1919. “The Industrial Code,” 
Lauck and Watts, 1922, Chapter IV, and also pp. 124-129.