be noted: It is said that if these charges, however the incidence may be adjusted, result in a higher cost of production, it will react upon the workman in an increased cost of living. But it must be remembered that the workman is not a consumer to the same extent that he is a producer. It has been authoritatively stated that one fourth of the people of the United States consume two thirds of its income and that of the other three fourths, two fifths consume more than the remaining three fifths; in other words, two fifths of the total population, comprising perhaps the majority of workmen, do not consume per capita more than one eighth or one tenth as much as the richer one fourth. Obviously the workman may not suffer as much from an increase in prices as he gains by the higher rate of wages which contributes to higher prices.

The claim that it is immaterial where the incidence of insurance charges falls will not bear scrutiny. Public policy in all such matters should conform to economic facts and not be based upon fictions. If dependence, in cases of industrial misfortunes, were the result of intemperance or improvidence; if it indicated that wages, ample or excessive, had been ruthlessly squandered; if this dependence could be attributed justly to the fault or even

1 C. B. Spahr, Distribution of Wealth, pp. 128, 129.

the folly of the victim; if society in its industrial adjustments had done its full duty by him, possibly there might be righteous and wholesome discipline and warning in visiting upon him the contempt and odium which the public dependent is made to feel. But we do not believe this to be the case even in the majority of instances. Why, then, should we preserve in industrial bargaining, in the forms of law, in social usages, and in current thought, these absurd fictions? If insurance is the rational method (and no other has yet been devised) by which the workman should make provision for sickness, accidents, invalidity, and old age, for the widow and the orphan, -in other words, the method whereby he may assume all of his own burdens, -and if the protection of insurance is his right as well as his duty, why should not he himself pay the cost? Why should not his wages be made sufficient, if not already sufficient, to enable him to meet this charge? Why should he receive as a suppliant what is his of right? Why should he accept as the dole of condescending charity a portion of his just wages P Why should it be represented to him by constant iteration that society or his employer is paying the cost of his insurance, since it must ultimately come out of the product of his

own toil?

It is better that the state should not be looked upon as a bounteous and indiscriminate giver; that the employer should not be exalted above his employee on account of supposed benefactions which are merely apparent; that there should be cultivated in the workman a sense of dignity rather than of servility; of manliness, self-reliance, and thrift rather than of dependence.

No statistician can now tell us, approximately even, what it costs to care for the wrecks of industry, the maimed, the sick, the infirm, the aged, the widow, and the orphan; nor can any one have a definite conception as to the incidence of the burden. But the cost of insuring against the vicissitudes of life can be actuarially determined and with increasing precision as data accumulate under a scientific system. As to a given industry we may know, with some approach to accuracy, what that industry costs in addition to the labor cost as now understood, in accidents, in sickness, in shortening the industrial life of men or impairing their capacity for work.

If it is true to-day that a large percentage of workmen are receiving a bare living wage based upon the working days and years of life, this actuarial determination of the cost of insurance would disclose just how much they lack of a real living wage; it would reveal, as

though by a chemical or other scientific test, a radical defect in the present basis of wages.

Our conclusion, then, is that the cost of workmen's insurance should fall upon workmen and should distinctly come out of their wages; that such an arrangement would accord with essential facts, and that there could be no gain through any disguise or indirection; that it would necessarily lead to a readjustment of wages wherever inadequate to conform to the requirements of a real living wage, a living wage based upon the whole life and not upon a fraction, to include the waste as well as the productive portion.

While any rational system of workmen's insurance ought to bring courage, hope, and contentment to the wage-earner, the payment of the cost out of his own wages, the realization that it is his own provision for his own future would surely inspire him with a higher spirit of manliness, of thrift, and of self-reli

ance.

VIII

OLD-AGE PENSIONS

THERE is said to prevail among certain barbarous tribes a simple but summary method of dealing with the aged poor: A council is called, and if the person under consideration is found to have reached a certain stage of decrepitude and dependence a feast is held in his honor, he bids his friends a last farewell and submits to the penalty of death. The victim cheerfully acquiesces in the decision that he ought not longer to incumber the earth. This would seem to be a very humane custom compared with that of most civilized nations, where the aged pauper, physically exhausted, destitute, friendless, forsaken, drags out a miserable existence in the workhouse or as the recipient of some humiliating form of poorrelief. The pathos of the situation is heightened when it happens that the unfortunate one is a veritable soldier of toil, worn out on industrial battlefields, perhaps after fifty years of ill-requited labor. His misery is sometimes emphasized by his conviction that an undefined portion of the material prosperity that surrounds him is rightfully his; that the community in which he lives and perhaps the fel