24. INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND WAGES 
and in all sections of the country, showed an average family 
income of only $720 per year. In iron and steel manu- 
facturing, the average family income was only $568, in 
bituminous coal mining $577, in anthracite coal mining, 
$618, in silk mills $635, in the woolen and worsted mills 
and in sugar refining only $681, and in leather manufactur- 
ing only $671. The Russell Sage Foundation in 1908 found 
the average annual income of steel workers in Homestead, 
Pennsylvania, to be only $349, and in 1909-1910 the Uni- 
versity of Chicago Settlement, in the Stockyards District, 
reported the families of workers, principally of races of 
recent immigration, to have a yearly income of only $442. 
The results of all these investigations, moreover, showed 
family incomes as the collective result of the earnings of 
husbands, wives, and children, and were not based on the 
earnings of the head of the family alone. 
But the amount of family income of industrial workers 
during this period is not the fact of primary importance. 
The significant point is that from the results of the pre- 
vailing method of determining wage-rates under the more 
or less unrestricted play of supply and demand, came the 
acute realization that some other principle should be 
invoked to check the evils of this method. The beginning 
of a new point of view was expressed in the claim that 
the wages of the unskilled workers—those on the danger 
line—should be sufficient to provide at least a subsistence 
level of living for themselves and their families. This 
was further elaborated by showing that it should be made 
possible for the wage-earner himself to earn this minimum 
income, so that his children might remain in school and 
his wife might follow her normal life as a wife and mother. 
Industries which did not have a wage scale in conformity 
with these minimum subsistence standards were denounced 
as parasitic and inimical to the public welfare.