be provided to sustain life and the ability to labor. But in truth necessary wages may be a great deal lower than that. It is found that, throughout countries comprising a large part of the human race, the wages given and taken not only provide subsistence so scanty and so little nourishing that the population become stunted and more or less deformed and ineffective in labor; but that even so, a large part of all who are born die in infancy and early childhood from the effects of privation. The horrible infant mortality of many districts is not accounted for solely by neglect of sanitary precautions, but is also largely due to the low diet of mothers and children.

But necessary wages may not only be so low as to require the death, under four years of age, of one half the persons born into the community: they may be so low as to require the phrase "to sustain life" to be very much qualified in respect to those who survive the period of childhood and attain the capacity to labor. In most countries, if we take civilized and semi-civilized together, no scale of wages is so necessary but that population will, in spite of an infant mortality aggravated almost to the proportions of a gen eral massacre, increase to the point of docking one quarter, one third, or one half from the natural term of the industrial force, for all those who come to man's estate. By this I mean that, if adequate and wholesome food, with simply decent and healthful conditions of life, would, with no regeneration of society or perfection of individual manhood, or even so much as the sanitary reformation of cities and dwellings, allow to persons attaining the age of 20 years a further term, upon the average, of 40 years, population is still capable of increasing, in spite of the principle of necessary wages, until food, clothing, and firing are so reduced, and dwellings become so crowded, that, instead of 40 years, an average term no longer than 30, or even 20 years, is allowed to those who attain manhood. Surely the phrase to "sustain life" needs to be qualified in such

cases, where life is, in fact, from want of food and ordinary comforts, sustained through but a fraction of its otherwise natural term.

We have thus reduced the scope of the principle of necessary wages by showing, first, that no wages at all are necessary unless some one sees it for his own interest to employ labor, and, secondly, that when wages are paid, it is not necessary that they should be sufficient to support more than two thirds or one half of the persons born into the world, or, in the case of those actually surviving to the age of labor, to "sustain life" through more than one half or three fourths of the natural term of labor.

But there is nevertheless a truth in the doctrine of necessary wages. There is a point below which if, in any community, wages go, the supply of labor will not be kept up; and hence if employers will have labor, they must pay for it up to this point.

But it is not in every community, it is not in most communities, perhaps it is not in any community, so long as employment is offered at all, that the minimum of wages. is fixed by the barest physical conditions of keeping up the supply of labor. Powerful as is the sexual passion,' it has not unresisted sway. Somewhere above the point we have indicated-it may be far above, it may be but a little way above this-men will cease bringing children into the world. They may-in many countries they do-increase to such an extent as to involve the frightful infant mortality we have noticed, and to reduce the term of adult life to very narrow limits. But they will not sink to prove the last possibilities of the case; they stop short of the bald, brutal demonstration of the inability to keep up the supply of labor upon scantier food, fire, and raiment; and stopping here, they do

1

Happily there is but one passion of the same nature; for if there were two there would not be a single man left in the universe who would be able to follow the truth."-An Eastern writer.

in fact give themselves some little margin of living. The Chinaman buys his precious drug; the East Indian gives months of every year to the service of his goggle-eyed divinity.

In Persia, Turkey, and other States of the East imperative custom requires the most lavish outlay in the period immediately before marriage, for which preparation or reparation has to be made during preceding or succeeding years of labor. "A man," writes Mr. Consul Taylor from Koordistan," one would not suppose to possess a penny, not unfrequently spends £30, raised on loan from his employer, that is dissipated during the seven days of riotous living preceding the ceremony.'

Here, then, we have the actual as distinguished from the theoretical minimum; in other words, the "necessary wages," the wages that must be paid to keep the supply of labor good, if, indeed, it is to be kept good; for that, we have seen, is not a necessity. All the way up from this low plane, through the scale of nations, we find points established which mark the minimum of wages for one community or another, those wages, namely, on which that community will consent to keep its numbers good. Such wages thus become the necessary wages for that community, necessary only in the sense that the habits of living among the people will not permit reproduction sufficient to repair the natural waste of labor, on any lower terms, with any thing less of the "necessaries, comforts, and luxuries” of life.

Now, since among most peoples food is the main object

1 Report on the Condition of the Industrial Classes, 1871, p. 800, cf. 721. In Koordistan the annual earnings of the artisan appear to range from £12 to £18.

"The eminent statistician, Dr. Engel, of Berlin, has given the following comparative statement as showing the average relative expenditure in Prussia of families of three classes, ranging from those of well-to-do artisans to those of persons in easy circumstances:

upon which wages are expended, economists have been very much in the way of grading the "necessary wages" of nations according to their habits respecting food, the princi

From this table Dr. Engel deduces the following proposition: While the proportion of the total outlay upon food increases as the family becomes poorer, the percentage of outlay for clothing is approximately, and that for lodging is invariably, the same in the three classes taken for consideration. Dr. Engel seems disposed to regard this very much as a law of expenditure. I am disposed to believe, however, that the apparent conformity has been reached by merging urban and rural communities which if considered separately would show very wide differences of expenditure on the several objects indicated; and, secondly, that the extension of the inquiry to other latitudes and other social conditions would develop great diversity in these respects. The Baron Riesbeck in his Travels in Germany (Pinkerton, vi. 147, 173), in 1780, notes the very marked differences existing between Southern and Northern Germany as to the scale of expenditure on dress. The lower orders among the Turks probably expend more of their earnings relatively upon dress than the higher classes. The same may probably be assumed respecting the ordinary Danish workman, who insists on passing himself off as a gentleman on Sundays. Again, the scale of expenditure on lodging varies greatly according to social conditions. In England, Mr. Clifford says, the agricultural laborer seldom pays, even for a good cottage, more than his income, and more commonly. The town laborer receiving 18 or 20

of

pal article in the diet of each being taken as indicating the wages which must there be paid to keep the supply of labor good. Thus it is said the Chinese will breed up to the point where a sufficiency of food of the meanest kind, even including much of what we call vermin, can be obtained to rear a constantly-increasing number of laborers of small stature and low vitality. The East Indians, again, are satisfied with rice;' and population in that country, accordingly, will increase on that diet, even in the face of the certainty of a famine on an average once in four or five years. The Irish, again, are satisfied with a potato diet, and will increase up to the limits of subsistence on that food, though at the constantly-imminent risk of a scarcity from the failure of that most uncertain crop. The Scotch,

2

shillings weekly will certainly not pay less than ; the artisan receiving 30, 35 shillings or £2 will pay and, including rates and taxes, probably .-Agricultural Lock-out of 1874, p. 246.

3

In France, Lord Brabazon reports: "Whilst at about the same period town workmen were earning wages 53.32 per cent higher than agricultural laborers, these latter were paying 40.45 per cent less rent."-Report on the Condition of the Industrial Classes, 1872, p. 49.

The well-known passion of the Netherlander for having a whole house, however small, to himself, must, I think, result in a larger proportional expenditure in this direction by common laborers than by the higher classes. I note also that Dr. Engel's computations do not agree very well with those given by Mr. Scott respecting the expenditures of families in Würtemburg. (Report on the Condition of the Industrial Classes, 1872, pp. 196, 197, 205.)

1 Mr. Brassey says of the Coolie laborers employed on the railways in India: “Their food consists of two pounds of rice a day, mixed with a little curry; and the cost of living on this, their usual diet, is only 18. a week."-Work and Wages, p. 88.

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2 “ No fewer than four great scarcities, amounting almost to famines,” since the mutiny, namely, 1861-2, 1865-6, 1868-9, 1873-4.-The Duke of Argyle, quoted by London Economist, May 9, 1874.

3" A laborer in Ireland will live and bring up a family on potatoes; a laborer in England will see the world unpeopled first."-General T. Perronet Thompson.

4 66 Three times the number of persons can be fed on an acre of potatoes who can be maintained on an acre of wheat in ordinary seasons."-Alison's History of Europe, 1815-51, xviii., p. 11.