The daily Nome industrial worker., 1917-05-17
PROFESSIONAL CONSOLATION.


 professors have stepped into the arena to persuade working folk that they are not so badly off after all that really they have too high a standard of living g-that they are wasteful--that the cheaper cuts of meat are more wholesome-that reform in dietetics is urgently need ed-that by resorting to cheaper food greater food values can be ah- sorbed and so on al infnitum.
 Comes to us through the United Press the following dispatch:
 Seattle Wash,-A carpenter in the 14th century received a wage ot only 12 cents a day. against S4.5o today Ye:, cost of living was, rela- lively. higher than it is today.
 The statement is that of Profes. sor R. NJ. Garrett of the University of Washington. who also recites a list of food costs taken from the &C., counts of the expenditures of the Earl of Derby, later King Henry ", of England as he was about to em- bark in 1890 on campaign against the Lithuanians.
 A carpenter in those days, for his daily wage of 12 cents could buy one pound of butter, two pounds of cheese, pound of salt, two pounds of flour, one dozen and half of eggs, a chicken and pound of rice.
 A carpenter of today would have 10 pay $2.60 cents for this bill of goods but il wouldn't eat up his en- lire daily wage, as it would that of the carpenter of 1890. The latter carpenter would still have $1.90 left. So. argues Professor Garrett, while the workers of today pays more for necessities, he gets more comparatively for his labor. So the times are better.
 In 1890 eggs were nine cents a gross that today would would cost from $12.50 to s14.00. For II pounds of butter that would cost him $700 he paid shilling or 25 cents. Rice brought by way of Venicia from the east cost ten pound for shilling. Ut costs dollar today.
 The one shining exception to the general rise in prices that has oc- cured since that time is sugar. In 1890 it cost 36 cents pound and now it retails at eight cents".
 The fact that Henry IN was Henry. Duke of Hereford, son ot John of Gaunt, is no matter. The point of importance is that here is a college professor takes us back over eight hundred years of progres and tells the workers to be satis- fled that they are better off to- day than they were then. They can buy all the food they want and have a little over but in the days of Henry " they could do no such a thing.
 That ought to keep the yaps quiet for a while, and everyone ought to see that Professor Garrett is deserving of the control of some establishment which is munifcent- ly endowed by the Rockefellers.
 Professor James E. Thorold Rog CTS, of Oxford University. has studied the very period which Pro lessor Garrett uses for his compari- son with present day things in the labor world in monumental work entitled Six Centuries Of Work and Wages. He says in Chapter XII ~'I find that the fifteenth century and the first quarter of the six teenth were the golden age of the English laborer, if we are to inter pret the wages he earned by the cost of the necessaries of life'.
 Moreover while the carpenter got but his twelve cents day, the cost of maintenance was but twelve or sixteen cents week. But more often than not twelve cents and board were paid or if not boarded an allowance given him to cover it. 'This is espe- cially the case when the workman is hired by opulent corporations or associations. There was always a servants table in these establish ments, and the workman is bidder to it without stint or grudging. find for example, at some of the OK