Wages in the Last Half-Century.

Hon. Carroll D. Wright spoke last night on "The Course of Real Wages in the last Half-Century," a sequel to his lecture of the night before on the course of money wages during the same period. In the latter lecture he had shown the great rise in the wages of labor and in his discourse last night he showed that the effects of this rise had been accentuated by the contemporaneous decrease in prices.

The first part of this century was a period of marked decline in prices, as is shown by the tables of Parker and Levi in which the price of flour is shown to have been reduced in 1865 to one quarter of that of 1800. Giffen, in his table published in 1885, shows the range of prices from 1839 to 1884 and makes the statement in his introduction, that the condition of the workingman has improved vastly, since the purchasing power of money has doubled and he is earning an increase in wages of from forty to sixty per cent. Comparing the dates 1839 and 1884 further, he shows that in the former time an English laborer had 15 shillings left after paying his rent while in the latter year he would have 27 shillings.

The most complete tables for tracing the courses of prices are those of the London "Economist," Sauerbeck's Reports, and of the United States Senate. In all these tables index numbers are used to condense the results into a relative statement. The "Economist" makes use of the quotations on twenty-two articles, and uses as its standard of comparison the average prices between 1845 and 1850. The great objection to the method of the "Economist" is, that in considering the twenty-two articles it gives equal weight to commodities which are very unequal in importance as, for instance, wheat and indigo. Sauerbeck's method is the same as that of the "Economist," except that for his basic number he has taken average prices from 1867 to 1877.

The Aldrich Report of 1891 in the United States Senate and its sequel, the Report of the United States Bureau of Labor, are the only examples in the United States of the use of index numbers. In the former, which follows the trend of prices from 1841 to 1891, the standard is the average price of the year 1860. The sequel to the Aldrich Report, "Bulletin 27" adopts as its basis the prices of 1890-91. But despite the lack of uniformily in construction, all of these tables show approximately the same trend of prices.