Contrast that cumbersome method of ours with one which was adopted in Great Britain but a year or two ago and which so far has apparently given absolute satisfaction to both the rail workers and their employers over there. Under the wage agreements between the railway workers of the United Kingdom and their executives the wage-scales have been fixed upon a basis which permits them to rise or fall as the cost of living rises or falls. These agreements were signed more than a year ago. The official charts issued by the British Board of Trade, and held by all save a few of the most radical of labor leaders to be both accurate and impartial, are taken as the basis of the railway wage. The charts come as the result of repeated and regular investigations by the Board of Trade agents into house-rentals, clothing, foodstuffs, and all the other essential factors that enter into living costs. Upon them an arbitrary reckoning of 125 points was fixed as the maximum that these should reach after the period of after-the-war readjustment was fixed. But despite this fixing of a purely arbitrary figure the cost of living refused to stay put. It steadily rose until two years after the signing of the Armistice the Board of Trade figures had reached 169 points. And British railway wages had risen even more than ours. A station-porter, who in the pleasant English days before the coming of Armageddon had been content to receive fifteen shillings a week, found himself in January, 1921, receiving sixty-six, an increase of considerably more than 300 per cent. To-day he is getting a little less pay. At the time that these paragraphs were being written the Board of Trade's entirely arbitrary but very scientific reckoning of living-costs had already dropped to 141 points and was going down further yet. The station-porter's weekly wage had dropped three shillings, and Sir Eric Geddes, the British minister of transport, was beginning to predict that a continuation of this lowering of wage-costs would be reflected in the not distant future in lowered passenger-fares and freight-rates. For definitely it is fixed that for each five points that the Board of Trade's cost of living report drops or rises the railway employees' wages shall drop or rise a shilling a week. But they shall never drop to the depths of the former pay-envelope; minima have been fixed ranging all the way from 200 per cent. of the pre-war wages upward. In the case of our station-porter the minimum of the future is to be forty shillings a week, which is considerably better than fifteen. Yet fifteen was in truth an outrageously low figure, even eight or ten years ago. British railway wages were then decidedly too low. Now they are nearer a fair figure, and so are likely to remain.