up from the ranks. Neither inference is necessarily correct. Generalizations can be made safely only where the facts about the great mass of instances are known. One man has made a million in the steel industry; four fifths of his co-workers in the industry are paid less than $1,000 a year. Is the industry lucrative? One man rose from the ranks to be president of a great railroad system. There are a hundred thousand of his fellows still in the ranks. How much chance have these men to become president of the railroad? The time has come to cease crude generalizations, and, by an appeal to the facts, to discover, not the average, but the actual way in which service income is distributed among gainfully employed people.
The races of men always face the statistician with the stern demand that he render a quick, easily comprehensible generalization, even though it be from a few insufficient instances. "Be brief" is a dangerous behest for science to follow. It leads to falsehood and inexactness more often than it leads to truth. It often happens that the statistician must sacrifice brevity for the sake of accuracy.
II. Salaries and Wages
The first large fact encountered in the analysis of service income is the distinction between salaries and wages. Although this distinction is arbitrary, it is significant for two reasons. First, because the incomes of "officers" and "salaried employees" are often very much higher than the incomes of "wage-earners"; and second, because in a large number of important publications dealing with service income, the incomes of wage-earners alone are given, while in other cases the figures frequently contain statements for salaries and wages. In the main, the emphasis will be laid upon wages, first, as a matter of necessity. There is no analysis of compensation which shows salaries with the same minuteness that wages are set forth. Secondly, as a matter of choice. The wage-earners, being an overwhelming majority of the whole, constitute the bulk of the human income problem in industry.
The contrast between the amount paid to salary-earners and to wage-earners is in some cases considerable, and in others it is far less marked. Average figures alone are available for this comparison, because there is nowhere any statement of classified earnings for "officers." Although crude in the extreme, these averages give some idea of the divergence between "salaries" and "wages."
The Iowa Railroad Commission reports several instances in which the compensation paid to officers is not much greater than that paid to wage-earners. The general officers of the Iowa Terminal Companies[1] receive an average daily compensation for one company of $7.67, and for another company $4.38, while for the same companies the average
- ↑ Annual Report of the Board of Railroad Commissioners of Iowa, 1911, Des Moines, 1913, p. 498.
