the attention of the charity society to the fact that a man, wife and four children could not possibly live decently in that city on $10 a week, and asked whether the society would be willing to give the man a pension to supplement his wage. He explained that $10 a week was all that he could afford to pay an elevator man.

This manufacturer was asking the community to repeat the experience of England with the Elizabethan poor law, under which the employer paid a part of the wages of tens of thousands of English families, who were forced to depend for the remainder of their incomes on the grants of poor relief from the public authorities. In the course of time, wages were so adjusted that the man with a family to support took his wages and as a matter of course supplemented them by an appeal to the poor law authorities. The public authorities subsidized the business of employers, who were relieved of the necessity of paying living wages to their employees.

Wages must be sufficient to enable the wageearner and his family to live like self-respecting members of the community. It is not enough to keep the wolf from the door. The worker should be able to set up a positive standard of respectable living.

Surely, no man in the community deserves to live better than the man who does its work. If there is wealth enough to support anyone in decency, that person should be the worker.

There is nothing that builds self-respect more

surely than honest work honestly done. The first consideration of an industrial society should be to see that the people who do the work of the world have every possible return in the form of wages that permit respectable living.

Finally, the wage paid to the worker must be a family wage. The home is the basic institution of the community. Each man expects and is expected by the community to make a home and bring up a family. There is no other basis on which the community can hope to persist. If men are to make homes and to raise families, the wage paid to them by industry must be adequate for family support.

Expenditures vary from one family to another. One housewife will make a wage go farther than her neighbor. Ability to manage and a knowledge of the way are both necessary for domestic success. After making all due allowance for this fact, there remains the undeniable fact that under any standard of house management there is a minimum of food, clothing and shelter below which no family can exist. This minimum may be placed at a high figure or at a low figure, but when all is said, there it stands. Unless the wage of the worker will pay for this minimum of family life, neither individual efficiency nor family decency is possible.

If the American wage is sufficiently high to maintain individual efficiency, to prevent social dependence and to guarantee self-respecting family life, it is an adequate wage. On the other hand,

CHATEAU AND TENEMENT

The handsome country residence of an American captain of industry is built in the French style, beside an artificial lake and surrounded by beautiful private parks and gardens. (Photo from "House & Garden.") The tenement house shown below is inhabited by a large number of poor people, for whom there is only one wash room. One floor and the basement are below the street level. (Photo by Hine from "Neglected Neighbors.")

if the American wage will not permit these things for a family of reasonable size, under the direction of a person of ordinary managing ability, it is an inadequate wage.

6. What is the American Wage?

The "American Wage" has been talked about and written about at great length. Is it a tangible something that can be measured and described as one would measure and describe a city lot?

The best way of showing the wages paid to a group of people is to employ the scheme of classified wage figures. Instead of saying that the average wage is $1.80, we say that among the 200 wage-earners under consideration, 40 received less than $1.50 a day; 65 received $1.50 but less than $1.75; 50 received $1.75 but less than $2, and so on. By this use of classified wages, if the wage groups are small enough, a very clear idea may be obtained of the actual status of the 200 wage-earners.

There should be no confusion on one point. The wage figures that are published show the wage that is paid by the industries of the United States to the people who do the work of industry. These wages The wages

do not represent what the men earn. paid by the American industries to the workers in those industries represent not what the workers earn but what they get. The wage is simply the amount received by the wage-earner in return for a given expenditure of time and energy.