54 INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND WAGES

been too low. It was also declared that old wage theories
should be abandoned, and a new industrial code should
be sanctioned which should set forth more equitable,
humane, and democratic principles for determining wages
and industrial relations. They also wished to substitute
for pre-war industrial conflict, a system for the judicial
settlement of wage disputes with these new principles as
a guide. This attitude was nowhere better expressed than
in the statement issued shortly after the Armistice by the
National Catholic War Council in Washington, Its recommendation
 for post-war reconstruction was, in part,
as follows:

The general level of wages attained during the war should
not be lowered. In a few industries, especially some directly
and peculiarly connected with the carrying on of war, wages
have reached a plane upon which they can not possibly continue
 for this grade of occupations. But the number of
workers in this situation is an extremely small proportion
of the entire wage-earning population. The overwhelming
majority should not be compelled or suffered to undergo any
reduction in their rates of remuneration, for two reasons.
First, because the average rate of pay has not increased faster
than the cost of living; second, because a considerable majority
 of the wage-earners of the United States, both men and
women, were not receiving living wages when prices began
to rise in 1915. . . . Therefore, wages on the whole should
not be reduced even when the cost of living recedes from its
present high level.
Even if the great majority of workers were now in receipt
of more than living wages, there are no good reasons why
rates of pay should be lowered. After all, a living wage is
not necessarily the full measure of justice. All the Catholic
authorities on the subject explicitly declare that this is only
the minimum of justice. In a country as rich as ours, there
are very few cases in which it is possible to prove that the