The daily Nome industrial worker., 1916-06-09

insutficiency at that, and have moreover, to enforce their instinct i've demands for sufficiency with | strikes and labor struggles that now are everywhere throughout the nation.
 Food prices are now at war time heights. Not because the United l States is at war but because few American capitalists have made the war produce them great profits by selling to belligerents and starving the people at home to do so. The food supply of this nation is not in the hands of those who raise it. The farmers are no more prosperous now than before the war began. The number of tenants has not been re- placed by number of owners, there is no diminution in the num- Der of mortgages clustering the farms Quite the contrary, the plasters have increased since 1914. But the
  mand in brokers hands have never been higher. Men who gamble ana speculate upon the supplies ot wheat and barley and oats and corn and beef and sheep and pork wouldn't know what could be raised on a field if they were questioned. and some of them wouldn't know growing field of barley from growing field of wheat or corn.
 And it is no use blaming the enormous supply of gold that has been sent to this country as respons- ible for the high prices. What ever indirect cause that may have exerted in the actual condition the country faces, it is one at least oves which the workers can exercise no control. The only thing that they can do and the only thing they do Is to struggle and strike on the eco homie field for better conditions, and that they are doing to the best of their ability and within the lim,- tations that the economic pressure of their sphere of life allows them.
 The fact of high prices and the fact that men speculate and gamble and export and profit in the enorm- ous surplus that the labor of the country produces are characteristics of the present industrial system. That system wherein production is for profit as is distribution for profit accounts for all the disabling conditions which have followed ana which have, been excited by the in- creased cost of living. Steadily they are getting more and more serious. Steadily prices are rising and al- though at recurrent periods thera may be witnessed a slight depres- sion, the increase withal is steadily and consistently maintained from decade to decade
 Even an increase in wages is not a permanent remedy because the prices increase steadily above any increase that has been given to the workers by employers.
 The problem that has to be con- sidered is the problem of bringing within the reach of every individual human necessity the requirements of all. It is not because those who would have enough do not labor, it is because those who have not enough do not get enough, whether they work or not, and those who do no work but lead a life of pleasure and wastefulness have oftentimes the most.
 It is because the country to main- tain itself, to provide it's population with the creature comforts must overhaul its entire economic system if there will be sound minds in sound bodies not among a narrow and fortunate few but among all the people and among the people who labor most of all, this question is so serious.
 The duties of each one to serve the country in war is insisted upon But obviously that carries with it