Expenditures of the Russo-Japanese war / by Gotaro Ogawa.

EFFECTS ON THE NATIONAL LIFE

247

It is patent that the smaller this L1 or L2, the more difficult
was the living. If L1 and L2 were larger than I, it must be
concluded that the war improved the standard of living of the
people.
o 7.5. I09.5
L I6. Io00.
L2=II2I. =88. 2
II6.o I00.0
The index numbers of the actual wages for 1904 and I905
are 9I.I and 88.2, respectively, showing the difficulty of living
on account of the war. The living of the lower classes must
have been harder than indicated by those figures, especially
when it is taken into consideration that the rise in the prices
of daily necessaries, indicated by the figures quoted already,
was far greater than that in the prices of general commodities.
It should be remembered that this was the life of those
people and their families who stayed at home and engaged in
productive enterprises. The life of the families of the soldiers and sailors was still more difficult, deprived in most
cases of their main labor reliance, and many of them without
any means of living except by outside help. That they were
not driven to starvation was entirely due to the finely reorganized relief work. The government issued an ordinance
for the relief of the families of soldiers as early as April 4,
1904. It provided for the grant of the monthly sum of 1.20
yen or less per person above 20 and under 60 years old; I yen
or less per person above 60 and under 70, or above 12 and
under 20; and 0.80 yen or less per child above o1 and under 12,
if they could not support themselves.
In accordance with this ordinance, some 120 families or
390 persons in Osaka Prefecture received the monthly allowance of I96,056 yen, the total sum for relief being 1,737,080
yen. (Census taken in December, I905.)
However, relief of this kind was given only to those families
of soldiers and sailors who were in extreme distress. As
regards the peasants' families who produced the bulk of the
soldiers, their relatives, friends, and neighbors looked after