PRE-WAR PRINCIPLES AND METHODS 19

visionary advocate in pre-war years could not have anticipated
 in his wildest dreams.

THE “SuBsisTENCE MINIMUM”

Social and charitable workers were the first to see the
necessity for new conditions and to advocate the beginnings
 of their attainment. This was, as might have been
expected, for the reason that their work and daily activities
 brought them into immediate contact with the human
and social evils of the prevailing wage system. They soon
discovered that poverty, dependency, and delinquency were
the inevitable outgrowth of conditions then existing. As
they proceeded in their studies of the status of wageearners
 they found that among families in the lowest
industrial scale the requirements of physical life alone—
food, shelter, clothing, and fuel—necessitated a certain
minimum family income, and when the earnings of the
husband, or the collective earnings of husband, wife and
children, fell below the ability to satisfy these bare animal
necessities, the family became a public charge. The earnings
 of the head of the family, it was therefore concluded,
should never, under any conditions, be less than sufficient
to cover the requirements of minimum family subsistence.
The next step was to find out what wages and earnings
actually were, and to compare them with these minimum
requirements. This comparison developed the astounding
fact that, among the multitude of unskilled American
workers, average earnings were generally inadequate; in
other words, that the heads of families could not provide
their families with a bare physical subsistence. Equally
startling was the discovery also that even this was difficult
when the wages of the head of the family were supplemented
 by the earnings of children, who should have been
in school, and by the contributions of wives and mothers,