Let us glance at writing under the high standard. Big incomes can be earned by anything adapted for mass-production, such as best-selling novels (with possible movie rights), articles for the mass-circulation magazines, certain sorts of “syndicated stuff,” and so on; but that sort of writing is not the most valuable for our national culture as a rule. The cost of living is certainly from 200 to 250 per cent of what it was in the decade before the War. “Index[Pg 53] figures” are misleading. It is of little importance to the average man whether pig lead is up 25 or 50 per cent. It is of prime importance to him that, as I can show by my checkbook, a cook who cost $30 a month then costs $75 now, that a suit of clothes which cost $28 then costs at the same store $74 now, and so on; to say nothing of all the new things to be bought. Of course, the changes in wage schedules would differ from newspaper to newspaper, but in one which gave me the figures for before the War and now I find that editorial salaries have advanced 50 per cent, junior reporters and book reviewers the same, poets 25 per cent, whereas, rather oddly, space writers get actually 10 per cent less than before. I am told that writers for the high-grade magazines get about double. Comparing the flat price paid for scholarly volumes in two similar works twenty years ago and now, I found that the scholars working to-day were paid no more than before the War. On a royalty basis, owing to higher book prices and larger sales, authors probably fare better than fifteen years ago, though strict comparison for many reasons is difficult. On the whole, taking the ordinary man of letters who lives by his output and who writes books, articles, reviews, and does the other various literary jobs, it would seem that in order to maintain himself in the same relative position in the social and economic scale he would have to increase his output very materially.