ACCEPTANCE OF NEW THEORY 105

THEODORE ROOSEVELT, TWENTY-SIXTH PRESIDENT OF
THE UNITED STATES!

We hold with Lincoln that labor deserves higher consideralion
 than capital. Therefore, we hold that labor has a right
to the means of life—that there must be a living wage.

FREDERIC ALMY, GENERAL SECRETARY, CHARITY
ORGANIZATION, BUFFALO, NEW YORK?
Fortunately the price of men is going up in America.
This is partly through organization and a higher standard
of living, but legislation can assist. It is no more against
freedom of contract to forbid a man to sell his labor for less
than a living wage, than to forbid him to sell money at
usury. Cheap men make cheap citizens, and it is just as much
against public policy to buy men too cheap as to sell money
too dear, no matter how much both parties may desire it.
Pope Leo XIII declared for a living wage in 1891 in his
encyclical “Rerum Novarum,” and so did the Federal Council
of the Protestant Churches of Christ in America in 1910.
Higher wages do not make higher living, but they make
higher living possible, and poor living is very costly to the
State, especially with universal suffrage.

MARGARET DREIER ROBINS, PRESIDENT, WOMEN’S
TRADE UNION LEAGUE?

To-day, however, thoughtful men and women everywhere
are realizing the individual and social menace of the low
wage and there is a general recognition of the fact that in
a great, rich, empty country able bodied men and- women
should find it possible to earn their living by their day’s
work. . "he right to live and the right to earn a living

! Message to the First Session of the Fifty-seventh Congress. “Addresses
ind Presidential Messages,” Putnam & Sons, New York, 1904, p. 298.
2 Letter to New York Factory Investigation Commission, Report 1915, Vol.
[, Appendix III, p. 682.
3 From Presidential Address to the Fourth Biennial Convention, National
Women's Trade Union League, St. Louis, June 2. 1913.