Living Conditions

The New York Globe, continuing its series of articles on the German industrialists, said about the Reich: " Through the inflation of the currency, the German State (Reich) has reduced its debt to its citizens from over $30,000,000,000 to a few millions. The rent law which fixes rent at a twentieth to a fiftieth, of the normal figure has taken hundreds of millions of dollars annually from the house owners." About the people: " How do they live? The petty officials of the Government, who receive $10 a month; the physicians who wear themselves out attending patients who can never pay; the writer who receives royalties of $50 for a book, which represented a year of research; the officer's widow, who receives a pension of a few cents a month; the artist obliged to sell a fine etching for half a dollar; in short those who once had a little leisure or money and who could transmit and enlarge the nation's fund of knowledge and beauty, how do they live ? " An example: "... a man, let us say, with two children and in good health, has managed to get a Government position at 400,000 marks a month ($8.20). This is an exceptionally good salary and is a trifle better than that of a skilled workman in unoccupied Germany. " His rent for a four-room apartment is about 60 cents a month. But coal . . . consumes 90,000 marks ($1.84) or nearly a quarter of his income. . . . Food for four people . . . would come to 10,000 marks a day (20 cents), or during the month three-quarters of the income ($6.15). ... Of all possible articles of food there are just three which are really within the 400,000 mark monthly income--black bread at a fixed price, potatoes and cabbage."