Two main purposes appear somewhat intermingled in this legislation in limitation of hours.  The first purpose is to protect the public directly where the safety of others is dependent on the health and efficiency of the worker.  The second purpose is to protect directly the worker’s health and welfare, that policy being recognized to be in the long run the best likewise for the public welfare.  In legal reasoning it is being recognized that the individual wage-worker, even the adult male, is not in a position to judge the number of hours he ought, for his own good, to work, and is unable to fix the length of his own working day.  As a matter of economic theory, the usance of a child, a woman, or a man, is merely that kind and amount of service that can be given out by each without repressing the normal possibilities of growth, reducing the normal health and vigor, or shortening the normal period of healthy productive human existence.[8] It is becoming a general social policy to prevent the abnormal strains of industry that cause the unnatural deterioration of the human factor in industry.  A wage-worker may be permitted to sell his daily net fund of working power—­his usance—­but not his life.

Sec. 9. #Plan of the minimum wage.# Even more recent than the legislative regulation of hours downward is the attempt to regulate wages upward in the case of certain low-paid wage-workers.  The modern[9] movement for the minimum wage began in Victoria in 1896, and it soon extended to nearly all the other Australasian states.  Great Britain applied the plan in 1910 to industries in which wages were exceptionally low.  The plan was first adopted in the United States by Massachusetts in the year 1912, tho in an emasculated form, and spread so rapidly that at the end of 1915 it was found in at least 11 states.  Minimum wage laws usually lay down “a living wage” as the standard to be used, and either prescribe a flat rate of wages, or, more often, leave the decision in each case to the wage commission established to administer the law.

Generous sympathies have guided this movement of which much has been hoped and which, on the other hand, has always had its adverse critics.  The most that can be claimed for it by its friends after more than twenty years of experience, is that the “dire predictions” have not been verified.  In truth it would seem that the plan as yet has not been tried on a scale that could yield very large fruits either for good or for evil.  The persons whom it is sought to aid are only selected groups of the lowest paid workers, generally limited to minors and young women, who in many cases are those of immigrant families in urban districts.  A large volume of discussion on this subject has developed, mostly of an a priori nature, of which we may here touch only a few of the salient points.