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IGHT at this moment, I know of five people, all capable and formerly well employed, who cannot find anything to do. One of these, a woman, up to a year or so ago, always in demand and in work, to-day finds it impossible to get a job of any kind. She applied, recently, to the Telephone Company and to a large department store in the town where she is personally known as a capable worker. At both places she was shown long waiting lists. Her name was added, but that was all that could be done for her. Her experience elsewhere was the same, and the other four people had similar experiences.

Moreover, during the past two years and more, whenever I have been brought in contact with a case of unemployment the story has been the same, a great volume of business, but no vacant jobs. Yet, on all hands, if the financial papers and financial pages of the daily papers are to be credited, is prosperity and again nothing but prosperity. The stock-market having reached -some considerable time ago the limit beyond which no stock market had ever gone before or ever could have been expected to go, continued to go higher. Financial authorities issued warnings; statisticians issued figures;

brokerage houses issued bulletins and "flashes," all designed to show that the limit of expansion had been reached, and that the inevitable period of recession was on the way. But the stock-market just took no notice. It went higher still.

It is still, at the time of writing, going higher. Only the other day a prominent Wall Street operator remarked to me with a sigh, "For two years now I have been waiting for a recession in the market, yet the prices to-day make the prices of two years ago look like the shore at ebbtide." Business, in the aggregate, is booming as business has never boomed before, yet here are my five people who cannot get jobs, and— for so I later discovered-there are hundreds and thousands of others like them.

Then again, I used occasionally to take a walk through the financial district during the lunch-hour. Thousands and thousands of young men and women all with jobs! Hundreds and hundreds of middle-aged men with splendid businesses supplying the thousands and thousands of young men and women with jobs! Why should my five people be unable to get jobs? Each one of these thousands of young men and women must have got his job sometime.

However, it chanced one day a friend came in to see me. He had a very good, if not very ambitious job, and was, I knew, doing well. I had not seen him for some time, but, as soon as he got inside the door, I knew something was wrong. It was not long before he was telling me the whole story.

He had been doing very well in his work with every chance of getting ahead. From the first, his wife and he had felt that it was going to be just the right thing, and had determined to settle down. They rented a little house, and his wife enjoyed every moment of the day fixing it up, and so on. They had enough to get along comfortably, even to have a little second-hand roadster; but they had to be careful, and there was not much in the way of luxuries. Yet they had been happy enough-and still were, of course, he assured me in our conversation. But one day his wife came to him with an idea. She wondered why she should not get something to do and earn some money. He told her he was old-fashioned enough not to care about his wife's "contributing to his support." She told him not to be an idiot, that she knew he could support himself and her as well, and that he had proved it. What she wanted was to earn money to put

the icing on the gingerbread. She pointed out that every penny she got they could spend on the hundred and one things, little and big, that they had to forego, that she had heaps of time, and that it would be great fun to do it.

They discussed the matter this way and that, and, finally, she made him see it her way. Perhaps, after all, he thought it might be a good thing for her to have such an interest and, anyway, there was no harm in her trying. And so she tried. She set about it methodically. She went to a school for secretaries, studied hard, quickly became a prize pupil, and before he had even thought of stopping his playful joking about it, she had landed a job in a big real estate office. Three months afterward, she was promoted to the position of office manager, having developed "decided executive ability" as she put it to him. Finally she was earning $300 a month against his $250.

And so for some time thereafter, they were, as he expressed it, “on the top of the pig's back." Their income was more than doubled, and all the rough edges vanished over night. It was not long, however, before he began to realize that, in a sense, they were no better off than they were before. They were not getting "any forrader," if I knew what he meant. It almost all went in luxuries. The little second-hand roadster was really well enough, but it was not long before they were considering a real car. When he feebly remarked that it might be a good thing to accumulate some money, and buy a bond, as their savings bank was always insisting they

should do, she very justly pointed out that she had gone into business for the express purpose of ultimately getting just these very things, a car and a radio and an orthophonic, and of having a hair wave and a manicure just as often as she wanted them without feeling that she was burning money. And so, he really had not a leg to stand on. He said, "Very well, my dear," and now they had them all and many other things besides; most of them were on the instalment plan, it is true, but they had more than enough to meet the payments, and all was well.

Still, he was uneasy, and he had come round to talk to me about it. He felt they were not getting anywhere. He felt that if he were earning the whole $550 that was coming in, they would be taking a much more provident view of things. But they had both got a kind of sense that anything his wife earned was essentially spending money, that it was a bit extra, a monthly windfall; and so they "blew it every time." The psychology of the thing was wrong, somewhere, he thought. He had talked to his wife about it "with ever increasing frequency," but she could not see it his way. He supposed because he really had not a ghost of a notion how he was seeing it. And that was why he had come. What did I say about it? What did I advise him to do?

Well, I did not advise him. Long and sometimes sharp experience has taught me that, in such cases, the giving of advice is a perilous adventure. And so I refrained. But we talked the subject over in all its bearings, and as soon as my visitor had gone, I sat down

deeper in perplexity than ever-and wrote to an old friend of mine. He is one of the most honored of educationalists and economists in these United States, but for reasons which will appear later he must be nameless.

I opened by telling him about the workless five, went on to describe the interview I had just had, and then continued with a tentative reading of the matter”—for it seemed to me I had seen a lightsomething as follows:

Twenty years ago, there were very few women in business; to-day there are very many. Ten years ago, when a girl in business married, she relinquished her job; to-day, she keeps it, with the result that a young married couple, both in work, have much more than is necessary to keep them in the way they would have lived, ten years ago, when only the husband would be in work. They have plenty of money to spend in luxuries such as motor-cars, radios and so forth.

It is, however, a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul; and while Paul runs round in an automobile, and has a radiola and a victrola and a ciné-kodak and buys three suits for himself and his wife where ten years ago he would have bought one, Peter, whose place is, may be, filled by Paul's wife, has difficulty in buying the bare necessaries of life. Ten years ago, when husbands only were working, every one might have had money enough to be well fed and clothed, but comparatively few money enough to buy a car or a radio or whatever in those days was its equivalent.

In other words, the apparent

to-day to buy luxuries is not entirely due to a general prosperity, but is to a large extent due to a new reapportionment of wealth under which one class of people is afforded abundance by the simple process of leaving another class short.

In other words, a new social condition is steadily being evolved. Fifty years ago, the community was divided roughly into two classes, the comparatively wealthy capitalist capitalist and the comparatively poor wageearner. To-day, from this latter class there has emerged a third, the double-wage-earning married couple, a new plutocracy, representing a great national wage-earning merger, in which overhead has been reduced, and enormous sums of money, which otherwise would have been expended on necessaries for all, diverted to the purchase of luxuries for a certain. favored group.

Such a situation, I wrote to my friend the economist, if it really existed, could not fail to have some remarkable ramifications; but I wanted, first of all, to establish the fact that it did exist, and I should be much interested to know sometime what he thought of it.

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The reply of my friend to all this seemed to me at the first reading somewhat disappointing. He declared that it was perfectly true that there was no special prosperity in the United States at the present time; that certain favored classes had made enormous sums out of the war; that this had been to a large extent participated in by their employees, but that the American people at large had had no part in

he wrote, "has made both ends meet since 1920. Those who got rich in wartime got rich out of the rest of us. There was no other way."

All of which, at first, struck me as not being much to the point. He went even further than I did when he maintained that there was no special prosperity in the country, and that, therefore, any melodramatic evidence to the contrary, such as the financial papers presented, must be, in a measure, fictitious; still, he neither agreed nor disagreed with my interpretation of the matter.

But if the professor's letter did not seem to be much to the point, what was to the point, was another letter inclosed with it. It was marked confidential, and I discovered on turning to the signature that it was from the professor's private secretary. It was clear from the first line that she just had to write or burst.

"You are on the trail of something big," she began, "and I hope you will keep on until some attention is paid to this matter of married women working.'

And then she went on to tell me how, before she married, she had been a secretary, but that as her husband would have been hurt if she had appeared to think that he could not support her, she gave up her job, had her children, kept house "in the good old-fashioned style," and was in a fair way to live happily ever after. Then suddenly came the all too frequent tragedy. But let her speak for herself.

"My husband died of flu contracted in 1918. He was sick two years, and at a time when we had

moved to a strange State and he had not yet worked into as good a position as the one he had left. So I had to go to work. And then I found that the married flappers, who had no intention of ever raising any children, or keeping house, or even keeping a husband too long, held the jobs at a wage often very much less than a woman who really has to support herself, and often a family, could possibly live on."

And then she went on to tell me, how, in the small university town in which she lived, there were dozens of such cases, while many worthy women and even men, who had to work to live, were either out of work or trying to support themselves and their families on salaries kept low by the young married woman, just working for fun. "Not many are interested in this phase of the question," she added, “except the victims, and they are not in a position to do anything; so here's hoping that you may go forward and stir up something."

Well, such a letter was, as might be imagined, quite sufficient to dissipate any sense of uncertainty engendered by my friend the economist's apparent lack of enthusiasm and I determined to continue my investigation, my idea being not so much to stir up something as to get at facts.

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My next move was to enlist the help of the well-known head of a wellknown State bureau of labor statistics. I refrain from mentioning his name, but he was and is-for he is still at it, morning, noon and nightone of those intensely practical, highminded, large-hearted public offi

cials who do an incalculable amount of good in the world, but seldom get their names in the papers.

"Yes," he said, after I had unfolded my story, "it is all true enough. I am kept so busy attending to individual cases, trying to find jobs for this one and that one and the other one, that I do not get much chance to stand off and study the trends of things. But I have noted and studied, in a measure, the tendency to which you draw attention. So much so that I have made it a rule never to give a job to a married woman whose husband is working unless there is some special reason for it. The attitude of the average employer is very different. He really prefers the married woman whose husband is working, not so much because he can often get her for less than a man or woman who has no other means of support, or even chiefly for that reason, but because she is more prosperous, dresses better, is more contented and less likely to ask for a raise. As to the use they make of their money, come here and I'll show you something."

He took me to one of the windows of his office which overlooked a large public parking space. It was mid-morning, and the space was filled with cars, all manner of cars, from veterans of pre-war days to the latest things in Victoria coupés.

"Most of those cars," he said, "belong to men and women workers in the offices round about here. If you were to inquire into the history of each one of them you would find, first of all, that the ultimate ownership of at least eighty per cent of them, and they the newer ones, are