A NEW CONSTRUCTIVE POLICY 70 by way of greater consuming power lay in increased wages and incomes, and higher standards of living for the people. This fact was very forcibly stated by many representative industrial leaders. As typical of this changing attitude, Colonel Robert F. Stewart, Chairman of the Board of the Standard Oil Company of Indiana, in December, 1922, declared :? It were suicide to attempt to beat down wages and salaries to the bare level of the cost of living, and when I say “living” [ mean a good living; the kind of living that permits a thrifty man to build his own home, to properly clothe, feed and educate his wife and children. One industry can not profit at the expense of another. In this country our pros- perity is best assured by the prosperity of the entire people, not of this class or that class, and for American industry as a whole to seek to hold down the pay envelop so that it pro- vides only the bare necessities of life, were to weaken, and eventually to wreck, the greatest market which American industry possesses—the American market. Finally, the turning point came early in 1923, when the Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, publicly and unequivocally condemned the fallacy of assuming that the pre-war standards of living were “normal” standards. On the contrary, he vigorously stated, post-war “normal” standards were vastly different, and future prosperity, in turn, was contingent upon still further improving these living standards. His statements were so revolutionary at the time and were so significant in their bearing upon future developments, that liberal quotations may be profit- ably cited from them. In a speech delivered in the early part of 1923, Secretary Hoover said, in part :® We must get our minds away from the notion that pre- 1 Bulletin of American Petroleum Institute, December 8, 1922. 2 See Press Release by Department of Commerce of Speech of Mr. Hoover, delivered May 8, 1923.