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 consider
 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 principle
 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.