ACCEPTANCE OF NEW THEORY 129
other classes of employees, unless existing differentials are
wiped out, and the policy is adopted of taking away from the
different classes of railway employees, for the benefit of
management, all surpluses in earnings which may exist above
the actual physical needs of subsistence. This, of course, is
inconceivable,
We can conceive that under the conditions of the existing
breakdown in trade and industry, the Board may defer the
uestion of a living wage, or what the earnings of unskilled
employees should be, until a more propitious time, when
normal conditions have developed. On the other hand, it is
axiomatic that the Board cannot fail to consider at the present
time what the lowest level of earnings should not be.
There is a stopping point below which, for reasons of public
policy as well as those bearing on efficiency and output in
industry, rates of pay can not be permitted to fall. Moreover,
there is a human view-point. Men who love humanity
and who have a sense of public responsibility can not doom
other men and their families to ill-health, misery, low morals,
and their babies and children to malnutrition and to certain
death.
THE EFFECT OF LOW WAGES UPON HEALTH AND MORALS
It is our purpose in asking the Board to subpena the list
of unbiased and distinguished experts which we submitted,
to prove that if the Board should, in response to the complaint
of the railroads, reduce the wages of section men and
unskilled laborers below their present level, it would impair
the efficiency of the railroads, it would be directly contrary
to enlightened public policy, it would result in the physical
and moral deterioration of these employees and their families,
and it would, just as surely as I am standing here, result in
the malnutrition and actual death of their children.
These are not mere sentimental or sensational statements.
They are the solemn, terrible truth. They are capable of
absolute demonstration by competent witnesses. Before these
awful truths, vast compilations of statistics and elaborate
