摘要：The high cost of literature, medical or secular, is a mathematical function of the high cost of living, in other words, of the inflation of values which came in with the World War and went on expanding until the bubble burst in the financial crash of 1929. The World War brought about ominous transvaluations everywhere. Its abrupt onset got on peoples' nerves and, in consequence, everybody, from bell-hop to bull-head, from roustabout to ruler, got the war "on the brain." It became the common staple of conversation, displacing even the matutinal commonplaces about the weather. People talked about it incessantly, in most cases from a dim realization of the fact that it spelled the end of the old order of things, the destruction of a decadent or worn-out civilization, the eventual triumph of the machine over man, of hands over heads. Our own country, albeit professedly neutral, became in reality, a virtual museum of ethnology, with race divided against race to the mathematical limit of "find the American," and a strong sectional division of opinion between East and West. By the time of our entry into the War, many engaged in intellectual pursuits began to find their occupations gone. College professors found themselves lecturing to empty benches, literary people perforce made the war their centric theme, publishers' agents deliberately activated the production of literature of military interest, even stenographers, secretaries and touch-operators faced unemployment via sadly diminished incomes. With our entry into the war, however, everything "clicked." Many people flocked to the colors as to a band-wagon of employment. College professors took on military avocations in mufti or in uniform. Over 30,000 American physicians were commissioned officers in the Medical Reserve Corps, and the draft did the rest. Even under the new dispensation, civilians passed rapidly from one military employment to another and there was a constant cry for more personnel. In consequence of all this, human life and labor at first cheap, became more and more expensive, as time wore on, while the prices of food, raiment, shelter and the material of war soared to unheard of heights. At the same time, since money is "the sinews of war" and armies travel on their bellies, the all but bankrupted allied nations borrowed liberally of the United States and some of these moneys were not spent for military purposes. By Armistice Day, our whole nation was virtually mobilized for war. At the end of 1918, when people began to drift back to their old civilian employments, the cost of labpr was as high as that of food and raiment. Machine gun operators and experts in motor mechanics from the front were offered salaries of $25,- 000 per annum, on the theory that wartime experience had made them masters of "mechanical ability," i. e. of insight into machinery and the science of mechanisms of precision. It was hard to get hold of mechanics, electricians, gas-fitters, steam-fitters, messengers and ordinary day laborers of whatever kind. The influenza epidemic of 1918-19 demonstrated an appall-ing dearth of doctors and nurses, so much so, in fact, that after the war, hundreds of American cities in our most progressive states turned out to be utterly devoid of physicians and had to resort to public health nurses for medical aid and attention. The prow-wave of profiteering, top-notch prices and general "prosperity" went on unabated up to the panic of 1929. Only a few sensed "the rumble of the distant drum," in other words, that, as Dr. Fabian Franklin observed, the high cost of living was the cost of high living and would eventually have to be paid for. The "prosperity" of 1918-28 has been described as a Pactolian flood of gold, flowing down incessantly, securing million dollar gate-receipts to pugilists and royal incomes to moviequeens, apparently unexhaustible, but ending as abruptly as it began. By 1930, the grim ghost of unemployment began to stalk abroad, food, raiment and other material commodities began to get cheaper, England fringed the abyss of bankruptcy through the dole, Germany went bankrupt anyhow, and the Central and Eastern European nations were on the verge of falling between the two stools of Fascism and Sovietism. The world was either to be capitalized or communized, in either case, to be brutalized, in lieu of the sane medium tenuere tutissimum.
