What has been the effect on the professional and intellectual classes? Of course where they have linked themselves to big business or made their work fit into mass-production they have weathered the storm of the high standard very well. No one need worry about the general counsel of a motor-car company, the artists who draw the syndicated comic strips, or the movie stars. But there are whole classes who do not or cannot thus fit in. A nationally known trust company officer recently wrote that most of those who disliked the present situation and who were given to dire comment or prophecy were merely those who had had comfortable incomes before the present high standard hit us and who had been unable to adjust themselves to it, that is, make large incomes. But according to the present modes of dividing the national income, how can these classes thus adjust themselves except by abandoning their work and going into business? Our glance at the minimum wage budget prepared by[Pg 51] the street railway men has shown us what can be done on $1900 a year: $12 a year for education, $30 for all reading matter (one-third of which would be consumed by one daily paper), and $12.20 for tobacco and all recreation. The average pay of all clergymen throughout the United States is $735 a year. Even if this frequently includes a house, how are they to adjust themselves? To attain even to the minimum budget of the street railway worker they would nearly have to more than double their income, that is, to give approximately one-third of their time to the work of their ministry and two-thirds to making money solely. Even if they could do so, what would they get as their share of the “high standard”? We have seen that even the street railway company had to cut out all reading matter, even newspapers, from the homes of its men if they were to live on $1505. Yet under the high standard the country allows its clergy scarcely half that sum and complains that the church is failing in leadership.