The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-12-26
LIVING STANDARD
 HAS ADVANCED Cost of Living Not AS
 High As Believed ALL EMULATE RICH Poor and We'll to Do Constantly ''Pinching and Inching' to Keep Up With Standards Set By
 Wealthier NeighbOrs

Vernon Murray in the St. Louis Globe
 Democrat.
 It is curious how all domestic problems move in a circle. Fighting the high cost Of living is now, as ever question be- tween luxuries and necessities, and econ omy in the household is the old, old rem edy most in evidence. It is incontroyert- ible that as a matter of bare living the essentials of life could be generally with in reach if the nonessentials were in less demand. It is astonishing how little it takes to sustain existence If all the extra demands and trappings that enter into tho problem of living are dropped out. Even the loss of cooks and housemaids has been revelation to many a house. wife of the tremendous reduction in her living expenses. The cost of food is small matter in comparison to what it costs to prepare and serve it. and keep tie general machinery of the home up to the standard of modern life. It verify comes back therefore, to the position of the ancient Thessalian who declared, &C., cording to Plutarch, that he "counted his felicity and happiness to lie in the super fluities of life and not the necessary things" It is an attitude indorsed also by as solid a scholar as John Lathrop Motley in his familiar saying: Give ds the luxuries of life and we will dispense with it's necessaries," and Holmes adds the poets appreciation of it when he calls this reflection of the historian "a glorious epicurean paradox uttered in one of his flashing moments
 Whats the use, then, for to be try ng this problem of high living out along the old prosaic lines of bread and l.44 erln nran flashes of poet and sage into the true felicities that make up the worth of be- ins. The lone man or woman, who may, perhaps, live on 5 cents a day. as one close figuring gives 1t, but there is noth- ing in the picture that would make lie worth living to most people, nor probably to the party in question, save as it min istered to a literary or other ambition which promised @ somewhat more lux urious life in the end. There is no ques- tion that it is more the standard of liv- iug than the cost of living that has gone up, as set forth by different students in the case, and therein lies a confirma- tioH of the philosophers and the hls- torian's claim that more than the bare necessities of life are requisite to the de- velopment and happiness of the human being. The whole progress of civilization is grounded upon this principle of in- creasing the comforts and advantages which wealth, culture, science and inven- ton can bring to the mere question of living. Nor is it possible that the poorer classes should miss the sense of this which the very air of the civilized world carries When the Paris mob inscribed on their revolutionary banners: We don't want bread; want caie," they were quite in the line of the great states men who held the luxuries of life beyond the necessities in the progress and fehc- ity of mankind
 Makes for Happiness
 That the standard of living has gone up that the ease and comfort of life have increased a hundred fold in America since the early '70s" should certainly make for the happiness of a whole people, instead of the prolonged wall over the high cost of living which sounds through out the land. And it would no doubt, but for that same sense of deprivation in the coveted gain alive in American toil- CTS which reused the revolutionary spirit in the Paris mobs. It is wages too low, incomes too meager, to give more than a. fraction of the American people the benefit of that better standard of life which their own labor has largely se- cured to the more fortunate, that is at the foot of the .difficulty. It is no use to look to the long-abused housewife to remedy the mischief. or send her scrap ping around to get the cheapest cut at the butchers and the stingiest reputa- tion at the markets. Nor is it in the or der of her higher life and need to spend the better part of her time cooking the stuff and eeonomizng on menus and ev- erything else that makes life rich and pleasing. It is not only the time and labor that all these calls to the house. wife to offstand Lucullus' steed include, but that in the end the things that min ister to the best needs of mind and body are not to be had for her pains. Where are the books and pictures and needed re- taxation and entertainments of the ra- tional being to come in where lowering the average on the daily expenditure is the absorbing business to which the best of their counselors commit the house. wives and householders of today? And why should it be held an offense that any of them reach out for the things that are beyond them?
 All Strive to Live Higher
 The poor man apes the well to do man and he in turn strives to emulate the luxurious habits of the millionaire, says one critic, who leans to James J. Hills