Business rewards are greater than ever for those who are successful, but granted the social value of the business man’s services and granted also the “dignity of labor,” it may well be asked whether a standard of living is really intrinsically high which thus places additional burdens on the shoulders of whole classes of the country’s spiritual and intellectual[Pg 54] leadership, its clergymen, its teachers, and writers, in order to lighten the load of the carpenters, cooks, and chambermaids. It may be truly said that Society has always expected the intellectual classes to content themselves to a great extent with rewards that are not pecuniary. That is so, but the tremendous advance in the standard of living and the tremendously increased gulf between the man of large income and the man of a moderate one has served to depress these classes in the comparative scale far below the point of two decades ago. I have every sympathy with labor, but its increased share of the national income should come from the accumulating surplus, the location of which is very clearly indicated from the income tax lists, and not from mulcting the professional and clerical classes scarcely a step now in the economic scale above labor itself. I cannot see that the standard of life for the community as a whole is going to be made higher by taking a vacation and a cook away from the college professor and giving them to the conductor or the bricklayer, while the rich business men get incredibly richer. Before we leave this phase of the question, let us glance at some of the office workers under the new standard. What mass-production methods have done in the way of deadening routine for the factory workers is too well known for repetition, in spite of much glossing over, but what is going on in office work may be less generally understood. The new idea of the relations between employer and employee in mass-production is that the employer buys “production,” that is, “output,” from the employee. Thus we read in a book on office technic how improvement was made in an up-to-date office. Motion pictures were taken of the clerks opening the morning mail. As a result of a study of these pictures, the[Pg 55] motions of the clerks were “reduced from thirteen to six and the output increased from 100 pieces an hour to 200 an hour. A further refinement in the manner of arranging the opened and unopened letters on the table brought the rate to 250 an hour. Output was still further increased by the use of a ‘motion-studied table’ to 300 an hour.”