June 17, Unper the title of ''The Standard of Life'' the British Chamber of Commerce Journal for June contains a most interesting and suggestive article on a subject which is very close to all thoughts to-day. And precisely because the views advanced will be ''no just popular" they ought to be widely known, What the writer evidently has in mind, although he does not say so in so many words, is whether the now universal demand for increased salaries is really justified by the higher cost of living. Admittedly the latter has gone up in many respects since prewar years, but has it done so proportionately to the extra amount of pay asked for by employees? Rents, of course, as. we all know have gone up greatly and the price of imported articles." On the other hand, as we mentioned the other day, accounts kept for ten or eleven years past show that market) prices have increased but little: and certainly the. supply of articles manufactured locally, begins to offer some help in respect; of the things for which we once depended entirely on imports.
The moral of the Journal's reflexions may be summed up thus: It is not so much what people need that makes the H.C.L. today as what they have come to consider as their right: the standard of living is altogether too high. And this he thinks is) due to the fact of that standard) being measured from the top downwards and not, as in Europe and America, from below upwards. "There is practically speaking, no' white manual labour in the country. In other words there is no) white lower class as ordinarily understood."' And later on he makes the shrewd observation that the individual's importance is enhanced by the difficulty that is commonly felt of trusting too much to the ordinary Chinese employee. The individual white) man is thus credited with, and specially recompensed for, a value which at Home is comparatively commonplace and cheap. "He comes thus to regard himself and to be regarded as very much more important than he would be in ordinary, more competitive circumstances." Meanwhile, the rich man and the man of modest means mingle more freely andithose who do not frequent these are brought more vividly under each other's notice than in Western countries.
We measure our standard of life not by what we have but by what we have not. And the writer in the Journal concludes It is permissible, one hopes, to say these things plainly because there is growing in Shanghai a wave of restlessness, amounting in a good many cases to discontent, which a little sober thinking—and a little less self-indulgent living—would dissipate. The true facts of the case are not that the standard of life is too low but that it is too high.
Exception can and must be taken to some of the arguments advanced. For example, commenting on the often heard phrase, ''A man does not come to China. to be no better off than he was at home," the writer scoffs at the notion of ''a clear-sighted bright-eyed youth deliber-alely choosing a career in China because it offers a richer reward in money. The youth takes the opening that comes to him and is very gild to get it" We disagree with that entirely. We think that the blight-eyed youth (not to mention his parents) is very decidedly influenced by the prospect of better pay and the possibility of one day making a fortune. And if people expect to be better off in China than at Home, it is at least partly because for climatic reasons they do unquestionably need more, physically, than in their native land. Most important of all, the Journal seems to overlook that H.C... bears most heavily on those least able to bear it. A rent increase of thirty per cent. is a far greater calamity to the three-hundred-tael man than even one of fifty to the six-hundred.
But in the main one can hardly disagree with the view that Shanghai residents demand more,. live at a much greater rate, than was customary only a few years ago. People who would once-have thought twice about keeping a private riesha now blossom out into a motor-car. Dinner parties. which were once content with a round game to fill in the evening, or perhaps no more than an hour or two's conversation, must now adjourn to cinema or dancing hall: and the enormous number of places of public entertainment that has grown up all over Shanghai and far out into the country testifies to the all prevailing hunger for dissipation. Even
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.