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Show w i ..BREAD AND BUTTER DANGER SIGNALS In the altogether important report of John Skelton Williams, Comptroller of Currency, there is one part of particular gravity. It is his reminder and warning to the American people and to the wor ' of falser and dangerously deluding themselves them-selves as too the economic worth of what Hrey are doing with their opportunities and their energies. It is his analysis of tho true value of the production and trade expressed in billions of dollars that nowadays trip so lightly off the torgue of the captain of industry or the day laborer. lab-orer. He shows a bread and butter danger dan-ger signal. , , It is true, as thee Comptroller says, but it is a truth wantonly ignored, that there is more wealth for the nation and for the world in. 40,000,000 tons of steel at a low price than 30,000,000, tons at a high price. There is more heat and light and power for mankind; in a ton of coal at $2 than in half a toon at $100. There is J uore food in a bushel of potatoes at a nigf ardly price than in a peck of potatoes pota-toes at the price of pearls. Too much of what we count as wealth production in these days is more empty dollar marks than solid substance- Coal in abundance can work for us; beef and wheat and potatoes in abundance can feed us; dollar marks cannot. We can paint them on a loaf of bread with figures fig-ures rising in geometrical progression, .but if we mark the five cent loaf up to a dollar loaf there never will be a single bite more of bread in the loaf. All these necessaries we can get surely with physical physi-cal work, never with mathematical gymnastics. The world has been swept with the delirium of trying to get the necessaries of life out of a paint pot smearing penny pen-ny prices off our goods and doubing on dime's; smearing out dollar bills and doubing five dollar bills on our wages; smearing out millions and doubing billions bil-lions on our national production without with-out labor delivering the work, industry producing the goods and nations amass ing the wealth. On any such basis of economic lunacy as that we never can restore the war's immeasurable destruction of wealth. We never can regain the solid prosperity of good living and essential savings. We can only whirl along to the inevitable end of national want, international destitution des-titution and economic sterility as of fields and gardens blasted by a thunderbolt thunder-bolt from the skies. Sun and N. Y. Herald. |