PRE-WAR PRINCIPLES AND METHODS 21 
wage-earners in all parts of the country. Included in this 
study was a very large proportion of native white and 
older immigrant families, and the average annual family 
income shown was $750. The object of the inquiry was to 
ascertain the cost of living of industrial workers, and 
no attempt was made to analyze the adequacy of the 
incomes earned or the standards of life based on these 
incomes.! 
The budgetary facts disclosed by this investigation, how- 
ever, were of great value to those which followed, prin- 
cipally under private auspices, for the direct purpose of 
showing the minimum cost of proper subsistence of wage- 
earners and their families. The most notable of these 
were those made by Louise Bolard More, of Columbia 
University, of 200 families in New York City during the 
years 1903-05 ; by Doctor R. C. Chapin, of 642 families in 
New York City in 1907, under the auspices of the Associ- 
ation for Improving the Condition of the Poor; by J. C. 
Kennedy and others of the University of Chicago, in 
1914, of 184 families of the Chicago Stockyards District; 
by Frank H. Streightoff in the same year for families in 
New York, Buffalo, Syracuse, Elmira and Albany, for 
the New York Factory Investigating Commission ; by the 
Bureau of Personal Service of New York City, in 1914; 
and by Esther L. Little and W. J. Henry Cotton, in 1914, 
of “A Suggested Budget for a Textile Worker’s Family 
in Philadelphia,” the investigators being graduate students 
in the University of Pennsylvania? ¢ 
The most exhaustive of these studies was that made by 
Doctor Chapin. His conclusion was that in 1907 “an 
income of $900 or over” for a wage-earner’s family 
1 Eighteenth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor on Cost of Liv- 
ing, Washington, Government Printing Office, 1901. 
2 Reprints of all these Budgetary Studies are to be found in Bulletin 7, 
“Standards of Living,”” Bureau of Applied Economics, Washington, 1920.