birth, are not to be welcomed by the state, the only remedy is by efficient restriction; the individual should be denied the right to come as an immigrant, even the right to be born. But theories and abstractions aside, every civilized nation acts upon the principle stated; it does not propose that any person within its limits shall perish for lack of food, clothing, or shelter. Therefore, without analyzing its action, it decides in substance that the product of labor of a given generation must support all during that generation.1

But while the industries of a community ought to support the great body of workmen, it is true that specifically any given industry ought to support those workmen who devote themselves to it. This consideration is highly important, for while the natural wage-earning period of a man may be placed at about fifty years, there are industries so detrimental to health or so dangerous to life that they may exhaust the capacity for work in twenty years, or even less.

In considering the industrial life we must weigh the waste as well as the utilized, the productive portion. If the wage earned during life is insufficient to cover the waste, it is not a living wage. If a given industry does not pay the necessary living wage, it is not a self-sup1 F. A. Walker, The Wages Question, p. 34.

porting industry; it is, in some measure, parasitic.

The elements of cost and waste have been studied with somewhat definite results. There is the rearing of children to the age of selfsupport, with the fact that about thirteen per cent die during that period; the loss from the death of wage-earners during the fifty years of the assumed productive life, estimated at a loss of twenty-five per cent in the United States;1 six per cent lost through illness, nearly an average of nine hundred days in fifty years; the cost, in money and time, of accidents; the support of the aged, — all inescapable elements.

If all employers were a unit, and if this unit were intelligent and sagacious, however merciless it might be; if it were confronted with the problem of procuring labor merely upon hard business principles, keeping in mind both cost and efficiency, seeking the lowest cost consistent with high efficiency, it would consider how much it would cost to rear the human being or the class of human beings best fitted for its purpose; how long a period of infancy must precede his capacity to work and what loss from death would occur during that period; how long the natural term of labor may

1 F. A. Walker, Wages, p. 35.

C. S. Loch, Insurance and Savings, p. 50.

be and how much diminished by premature death; what allowance must be made for incapacity resulting from accidents, from sickness, from invalidity of any sort; how long a period of dependence there would be after working days were over. It would find that, for the best results, this working man and his family must be well clothed, well housed, well fed, and that he must live and work under proper hygienic conditions; that he must have hospital, medical and surgical attention in illness and after accidents; it would even find that, to a certain extent, he must be educated and have mental and moral training. Having determined this cost, it would pay that and nothing more. In other words, it would act as intelligently, not to say humanely, in rearing a workman destined for efficient labor as it now does in rearing a beast of burden.

On the other hand, labor, acting with similar intelligence and singleness of purpose, and making similar allowances for waste, could demand nothing less than the cost of living for the whole period of life and covering all its vicissitudes, and would of course make the scale of living as high as possible. It might have in addition certain theories as to its right to a certain proportion of the produce of labor and be very keen as to any injustice in the distribution of profits.

But practically it happens, as though through some inadvertence, that in making a contract of the greatest possible moment, both parties seem to ignore absolutely certain very important elements; the contract is made as though sickness, accidents, invalidity, and old age had been permanently banished from the earth. The daily wage is sufficient only for daily necessities; a man entitled to support for a lifetime unwittingly consents to a wage based upon a portion of that lifetime; for the competition in the field of labor is among the strong, the able-bodied, the efficient; the sick, the maimed, the superannuated are necessarily excluded.

The disparity between the wage paid during the period of earning capacity and a wage sufficient for the workman's support throughout his life is most striking in dangerous and unhealthy employments. If the industry, paying what is a living wage for the moment merely, exhausts its victim in twenty years or less, as is frequently the case, it has drunk the wine of the wage-earner's life and left to him, or to society, the dregs. It has often wastefully used up this human material and thrown the wreck aside as remorselessly as though it were inanimate machinery. The injustice of this state of things is frequently emphasized by the fact that those very industries have

yielded large profits to their promoters. It betrays a singular apathy on the part of the public that a usage so abhorrent to every instinct of justice, so shocking even from the standpoint of social expediency, should go on practically unchallenged for generations.

The subject has usually been discussed as though it concerned individuals or classes, the employer and the workman, to be governed by the maxim laissez faire, involving merely the question of supply and demand or matter of private contract, over which the state ought to have no control. This might be a safe policy if the parties to the labor contract met on equal terms; but we cannot ignore the fact that there is no industrial equality between them necessarily. In communities where population is congested or those where immigration is easy and unrestricted, not to say promoted for the very purpose of keeping down wages and making the laboring classes more humble and subservient,1- the rate of wages is such as to bring the scale of living very near to what is vaguely termed the line of subsistence. Rather than a fixed relation between supply and demand, we frequently find what might be termed a constant demand and a supply varying at the will of those who fix wages; the workman brings his wares to an 1 J. G. Brooks, Social Unrest, p. 20.