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 manufacturing,
 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 manufacturing
 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 University
 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 prevailing
 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.