conservative policy, which estimates as best it can the productive power of labor in ill-paid occupations and prescribes a corresponding amount as the minimum of pay, and the radical policy which boldly demands whatever labor needs for a life of modest comfort, there are various gradations of policy, and the guiding principles in choosing between them are: first, that any legal rate above the value of labor to its employer will cause idleness; second, that the amount of the idleness will be greater the higher the rate established; and third, that any idleness created in this way and not relieved by natural causes will give to the workers an unanswerable claim on the state for emergency employment.

But will not the employers give the required pay and pass the tax at once on to the public? Will they not keep as many workers as ever and simply add the amount of the extra wages to the prices of their goods? Would not this make the community stand the cost of rescuing the class that at present has to bear the worst buffets of civilization - a burden which it may properly be asked to accept? It will not do naïvely to assume that producers can add what they please to their prices. They are now getting all that they can get for the amount of goods that they are putting on the market. If they continue to produce as much as they now do, they cannot get higher prices for it. An added cost will not, in itself, help them to get it. If they raise their prices, they will to some extent reduce their sales; and that will cause them to discharge some workers which is the point we are studying. Raising prices will cause 'some discharges.

What is probable, even as the result of a more modest legal increase of pay, is as follows. Of the lowest grade of workers some would be promoted to a

higher rank and some would be discharged. The output of the business would be reduced, and that would make it possible to raise the prices of its products, and thus pay the legal wages to all the workers remaining in the industry. Discharging some of them is the condition of getting the advance in prices and so retaining the others.

Will automatic changes relieve this evil? In a paper recently read before the Social Science Association, Professor H. R. Seager mentions movements which tend in this direction. The law which ends the 'sweating' of home laborers may give a stimulus to factory labor and select the more capable of the discharged workers for transfer to that sphere. In the course of the transfer some workers may change their residence to better localities than the tene-' ment districts. It is not claimed that these influences will relieve those who are unable to make the transfers, or that they will act promptly enough to give immediate relief to any class.

The transfer from homes to factories and from the poorer factories to! the better ones is, indeed, the chief means which, in the future, may be counted on for gradually raising the general level of pay. Many factories are now so efficient as to afford higher wages than home labor and still compete successfully with it. And as time goes on they are destined to become more and more efficient, since it is in them that the influences which make industry progressive or, as the term is, 'dynamic,' operate most effectively. If the discharged workers were in a position to wait for such changes, they might have their recompense for suffering in the interim; but asking them to rely on this is asking that they satisfy the hunger of the present with the bread of the future; and the state that, with its eyes open to what it is doing, puts them in that position, incurs a

Mere need and helplessness give citizens a certain valid claim on the state, even though it has done nothing to cause their troubles. Privation that is traceable to social defects makes a more cogent claim. This, in fact, is the basis of the demand for minimumwage laws, since the ill-paid workers are regarded as victims of social arrangements. Curing the evil, however, by laws that throw any class into idleness is causing suffering by a direct and purposeful act; and this suffering is more intense, though probably less widespread, than that which it cures. If five dollars a week means privation for thousands, nothing per week would mean quick starvation for hundreds; and this might result from too radical a change of the minimum wage. If five dollars a week forces persons into vice, no wages at all would do it more surely and quickly; and here is a further claim. upon the state which no one can for a moment question. Emergency relief needs to accompany the minimum-wage/ law, and effective measures for it must be ready to act the moment the law is passed. It will not do to discharge the workers and then debate the question as to how best to give them work. Moreover, such employment as we furnish should be such as self-respecting persons may properly accept.

The amount of emergency relief which will be needed will vary with the extent of the rise in pay which the law requires. If the statute does nothing more than correct the harsh action of competition and establish a rate corresponding with the existing productive power of labor, it may be that not more persons will be thrown into idleness than the present agencies of relief can be made to care for. Even that implies some stimulating of these agencies to do more rapid and effect

far enough to make the required rate materially higher would demand a new and elaborate system of relief. Are we ready to establish it? If not, we are not justified in enacting the law that would require it. Moreover, although we might invent a system or borrow it from a foreign country, the question would arise whether we could introduce it without encountering strong opposition. Emergency employment has never been easy to provide. Keeping prisoners at work has often been difficult, and during a recent period of business depression, committees which met to devise measures of relief for idle workers found every proposal thwarted by some interest, and they ended by doing practically nothing.

Can we avoid this fate and so be justified in causing unemployment by our own action? A benevolent despot might conceivably do it. It looks much as though a democratic government could not do it without devising a system which would depart from all American precedents. The conditions call for something which, besides being very thorough-going, will be free from the objections which organized labor has offered to proposals heretofore made.

The situation, then, is briefly this: Minimum-wage laws are urgently demanded. If they greatly raise the present minimum, they will throw workers out of employment and make it far more difficult than it now is for them to find new places under private employers. Without efficient relief in readiness, the measure would amount to starving some of the workers in order) to avoid half-starving the remainder. The relief system will need to be more extensive than any which has ever been undertaken, and will need either to avoid or to overcome the opposition which has defeated efforts of this kind during business depressions.

The chance of securing competent management would be vastly greater than it would be if the whole burden of general industry were to be assumed and the direction of it were to be given to elected officers. The management of the little society could watch private shops and keep pace with them in improving its machinery. If they did not do it, an inference could be drawn as to what progress they would make without these examples to guide and incite them. Something which we greatly wish to know is whether state industry is naturally progressive whether it has within itself the springs of origination, and will be inventive and enterprising. A microcosm which will picture a collective state will reveal facts that we are profoundly interested in knowing, and throw light on an even larger problem than that of minimum wages. A confident Socialist should welcome it in order that he may see the claims of 'collective industry justified, and a confident opponent of Socialism should welcome it in order that he may see them refuted; but a candid inquirer should willingly consent to it in order that a vital question may be fairly decided.

There are not wanting several paradoxes and a certain grim humor in the situation that would face us if we should enact a law placing the minimum wage much above the market rate. This would involve some form of radical treatment of the problem of involuntary idleness. The whole policy would be judged largely by its relation to State Socialism. The proposed wage law leads logically to a bold assertion of the duty of the state to furnish employment for a helpless class, which, in this case, is a class made helpless by a still bolder public action. To relieve privation which already exists,

legal minimum of pay. It will proceed on ethical grounds, and undo an effect of demand and supply. In rescuing workers who are suffering under the influence of an economic law, it will forbid some of them to earn the living which they now get.

In order to undo the harm caused by this prohibition, the state will come to the rescue of its own victims. It will, perhaps, do an unprecedented thing and set up within the field of competitive industry a completely coöperative society. It will recognize, however, that this is an emergency measure, and will hope that no capable workers will long stay in public employment. To justify this hope, and guard against the danger of having greatly to enlarge the public workshops, the sponsors of the policy will resume an orthodox attitude and appeal from the state to a natural economic tendency, which they hope will turn the tide of unplaced labor toward private shops. In doing so they will single out what has been called a particularly cruel feature of a competitive system. They will cherish the hope that factories will grow larger and more efficient by natural selection, and that displaced laborers will later find places in them. We should thus be invited to pin our faith to the crushing of small shops by big ones, and of inefficient employers by efficient ones. It is the process which is now going on against many protests, and which furnishes the ground for sharp denunciation of the system which permits it. We should expect to give it a new impulse and to hope that it will act quickly and sweepingly.

We know that the legal raising of wages to the extent proposed will crush some employers who might have survived, and will hasten the crushing of those who are foredoomed to this fate; but after the state has forced wages

upward we have to trust to this sacrificing of the less capable, and to the increased growth of the large and successful shops, to provide for the workers whom the new statute displaces. Of the employers who will be driven from the field we are not thinking. We have workers only in view; and we say to the employers something akin to what Dickens makes the lawyer, Tulkinghorn, say to Lady Dedlock: "The sole consideration in the case is the workers. Under other conditions we should have been pleased to make you a consideration.' Our philanthropy has brought us to a reliance on the crushing of the unfit, and the survival of the fit among the captains of industry. It is, indeed, a sure reliance, though not a favorite. one with philanthropists.

Society certainly must secure more and more efficient production, and laborers particularly must have it. The sole hope for future comfort and modest luxury for the working class is dependence on the law of survival of productive methods and efficient managers. This tendency, whose remote effects give promise of translating all labor to a higher level of comfort, affords, by its nearer effects, the best promise of rescuing the workers who lose their places in consequence of the minimum

wage law. The action of it, however, is at best gradual, and we are forced again to appeal to the state and ask it to furnish emergency employment. The state must do this on a scale that will suffice to provide for the number of laborers whom its wage law will displace. If its policy is very conservative if it only legalizes a rate that a normal market would itself yield the relief measures may not need to be planned on any radically new lines. If the law itself prescribes no minimum, but creates a commission with power to prescribe it for each particular occupation, there is ground for thinking that this commission may proceed in such a conservative way that its action will displace relatively few persons. If so, the system may do an unexpected amount of good and avoid a grave danger.

To displace many laborers and count on taking them into public employment would be hazardous; but displacing them with no such provision would be an inhumanity outclassing that which critics find in the present condition. As between such a devil and a moderately deep sea of experiments in relief, the latter is preferable, but a wise conservatism will keep clear of perilous depths.