overstocked market and must take the attitude of a suppliant. The situation is often aggravated by the immobility of labor. While mobility is highly essential to the well-being of labor, through local attachment, through ignorance of other localities and labor conditions, through that degree of poverty which makes transportation impossible, through mere inertia resulting from the debasement of poverty, the laboring man does not migrate; he does not even pass from one stratum of labor to another in his own locality. We do not need to claim universal application for the "iron law" of Lassalle or the theories of other economists upon this point; they seem to apply to some localities and some conditions. Whatever the cause or explanation, there are large classes of laborers in this country who do not receive a living wage according to the standard suggested, -a wage sufficient for support for the entire life. Investigations have frequently been made to determine the basis of wages, judged by their sufficiency for the maintenance of health, vigor, and physical efficiency. No lower standard could be justified under any circumstances, although, as a matter of fact, a lower standard does obtain often over wide areas and for long periods of time. 1 F. A. Walker, Wages, ch. xi. We are apt to think of the laboring classes in this country as well fed, well clothed, and well housed, and not proper objects of solicitude. We are incredulous when told that Germany's poorer classes, though less favored by circumstances, maintain a higher level of well-being and a far higher level of vitality than those of either the United States or England; or that we know less about the poverty of our people than almost any other nation of the Western world; or that Americans work themselves out at an earlier age and are more subject to fluctuations of employment than European workmen, and industrial accidents are much more frequent.3 As a basis of comparison, we might take $600 per annum as a minimum wage, based upon a family of five or six, in industries outside of agriculture. Upon a figure somewhere near this, there has been, in a very general way, some unanimity of opinion among expert observers. While the minimum wage permissible varies much with local and other conditions, it is obvious that under given circumstances it must be quite inelastic in the sense that it cannot be materially diminished 1 A. Shadwell, Industrial Efficiency, ii, 453. 2 Robert Hunter, Poverty, p. 12. T. S. Adams and H. L. Sumner, Labor Problems, p. 159. ▲ J. A. Ryan, A Living Wage, p. 150; E. T. Devine, Principles of Relief, p. 35; Hunter, op. cit. p. 51, and authorities there cited. without consequent suffering. It is instructive to compare this minimum wage with actual wages. In Massachusetts during a period of great industrial prosperity, — with the necessary attendant cost of living, out of over 300,000 adult workmen only about two fifths received as much as twelve dollars per week; this, with proper allowance for a considerable percentage of unemployment, would make considerably less than $600 per year.' But this would be exceptional as to time and locality. It has been said that the 18,000,000 wage-earners of the United States receive an average wage of only $400 per annum; that the mass of unskilled workmen in the Northern States receive less than $460 and in the Southern States less than $300; that even this lower figure may be reduced by unemployment to $225 to $250 per year; and this for large classes of workmen and for considerable periods of time. These figures would seem to show the gross inadequacy of wages even if the vicissitudes of life are entirely disregarded, as they are and must be by the great majority of laborers, 1 Compare Mass. Labor Bulletin, No. 44, December, 1906, p. 430, with Thirty-seventh An. Report, 1906, Mass. Bureau of Statistics of Labor, pp. 279–281. Address before American Association for Advancement of Science, December 27, 1906, by Henry Laurens Call. 166. Hunter, op. cit. pp. 53-56; Adams and Sumner, op. cit. pp. 160 and to demonstrate the futility of all attempts at saving even with the highest degree of thrift. There are myriads of wage-earners whom only the narrowest margin separates from bitter want. It has been said that in Europe in most cases a serious accident to a workman means an immediate demand for charitable assistance;1 and that in some localities in England a snowfall is a serious calamity, as no provision has been made for the resulting day of idleness. There could undoubtedly be found in many a manufacturing town, both in England and America, families who have not once caught a glimpse of prosperity in four generations, nor once been separated from actual want by an interval of thirty days. "For commonplace and average abilities, in mill and factory, the cheering promise of getting free from an 'existence wage' scarcely exists."s 2 For such workmen poverty is not mere destitution; there goes with it apprehension as to the future apprehension lest work shall cease; lest sickness or accident may befall for which surgical or medical aid shall be lacking; lest death may come leaving wife and children destitute. For such there are days of unremitting toil and nights of physical weariness in 1 W. F. Willoughby, Workingmen's Insurance, p. 11, 3 J. G. Brooks, Social Unrest, p. 92. vaded by ceaseless anxiety. There goes with poverty, too, the consciousness of the loss of dignity and manhood; the knowledge that there is left no capacity to make the contract for labor except on unequal terms. They must accept whatever conditions may be imposed, if not in a spirit of resignation, with the mute passiveness of the beast of burden, transformed not by the siren of hope but by despair. There is a feeling, too general, that poverty and pauperism are the results mainly of intemperance and improvidence, and we sometimes think that we see in them a sort of retributive justice. Statistics both in England and America would seem to indicate that only a small part of existing pauperism is traceable to intemperance, only about one seventh, - while about three quarters - seventy-two per cent is attributable to misfortune.1 As to improvidence, it is undoubtedly, to some extent, both the cause and consequence of poverty, but obviously there must be somewhere in the scale of poverty and of earnings a condition where saving or provision for the future is impossible; the present need may be so constant and so imperative as to preclude all thought of the future. Budgets have some 1 Charles Booth, in London Statistical Society, liv, 610; A. G. Warner, American Charities, p. 46, and Table VIII. |