208 INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND WAGES 
their incomes so employed. The extent of investments of late 
years in Government, State and municipal bonds, and the bil- 
lions of dollars poured into foreign industries and securities, 
give emphasis to this fact. These people have no occasion 
for risking their money in industrial enterprises. 
The growth of partnership and cooperative arrangements 
between capital and labor that would result in dividing the 
gains from the wealth created by them between capital and 
labor seems to me the only just or plausible solution; if there 
be, in truth, any solution whatever beyond a mere compromise 
resulting in the improvement of present conditions but not 
entirely removing the evil. 
I have always felt, and it cannot, in my judgment, be gain- 
said, that labor is reaping a mere fraction of the rewards of 
the wealth it produces. To the extent to which those rewards 
are more equitably distributed will the purchasing power of 
the masses be increased, and with that increase will come 
added demands for labor brought about by increased con- 
sumption to meet those demands. It is the workman with a 
family, on a small income, through whom money circulates 
and consumption grows. 
One of the most interesting analyses and appraisals of 
the new order in business and industry was written by Mr. 
G. C. Selden in the early part of 1928, for The Magazine 
of Wall Street. Several interesting quotations from it may 
be submitted as exemplifying the attitude of the most con- 
servative financial groups of the country toward the theory 
of high wages as the foundation of permanent prosperity :* 
It has always, until very recently, been considered a sort of 
axiom of industry that the employer would—philanthropy 
apart—endeavor to hire at the lowest wages which would 
command and retain the services of the kind of men he re- 
quired. Low wages, it has been assumed, would, other things 
1 Magazine of Wall Street, February 11, 1928.