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.