standard of sanitariness into every room, where work is being done for wages, would involve an amount of inspection and interference with the domestic lives of hundreds of thousands of people which might create such unpopularity as to defeat its own object.  I do not say that nothing more should be attempted in that direction, quite the reverse; but I say that nothing which can be attempted in that direction really goes to the root of the evil, which is the insufficiency of the wage.  How can you possibly make it healthy for a woman, living in a single room, perhaps with children, but even without, to work twelve or fourteen hours a day for seven or eight shillings a week, and at the same time to do her own cooking, washing, and so on.  How much food is she likely to have?  How much time will be hers to keep the place clean and tidy?  An increase of wages would not make sanitary regulations unnecessary, but it would make their observance more possible.

An increase of wages then is the primary condition of any real improvement in the lives of the sweated workers.  So the point is this.  Can we do anything by law to screw up the remuneration of the worst-paid workers to the minimum necessary for tolerable human existence?  I know that many people think it impossible, but my answer is that the fixing of a limit below which wages shall not fall is already not the exception but the rule in this country.  That may seem a rather startling statement, but I believe I can prove it.  Take the case of the State, the greatest of all employers.  The State does not allow the rates of pay even of its humblest employes to be decided by the scramble for employment.  The State cannot afford, nor can any great municipality afford, to pay wages on which it is obviously impossible to live.  There would be an immediate outcry.  Here then you have a case of vast extent in which a downward limit of wages is fixed by public opinion.  Take, again, any of the great staple industries of the country, the cotton industry, the iron and steel industry, and many others.  In the case of these industries rates of remuneration are fixed in innumerable instances by agreement between the whole body of employers in a particular trade and district on the one hand and the whole body of employes on the other.  The result is to exclude unregulated competition and to secure the same wages for the same work.  No doubt there is an element—­and this is a point of great importance—­which enters into the determination of wages in these organised trades, but which does not enter in the same degree into the determination of the salaries paid by the State.  That element is the consideration of what the employers can afford to pay.  This question is constantly being threshed out between them and the workpeople, with resulting agreements.  The number of such agreements is very large, and the provisions contained in them often regulate the rate of remuneration for various classes of workers with the greatest minuteness.