it, but all they have been able to do, beyond giving a very general definition, has been to determine whether or not the matter under consideration in each specific case considered has been a proper exercise of the police power. They have, as intimated, repeatedly defined it in broad and general terms. The Supreme Court of the United States has said: "It may be said in a general way that the police power extends to all the great public needs. It may be put forth in aid of what is sanctioned by usage as held by the prevailing morality or strong preponderant opinion to be greatly and immediately necessary to the public welfare." Professor Tucker defines it thus: "Police power is the name given to the inherent sovereignty which it is the right and duty of the government or its agents to exercise whenever public policy, in a broad sense, demands for the benefit of society at large, regulations to guard its morals, safety, health, order or to insure in any respect such economic conditions as an advancing civilization of a highly complex character requires."

According to Professor Ernst Freund, the police power is one of the inherent functions of government; the restraining and compelling power of the government which is exercised for the protection and the furtherance of the public welfare, or the internal public policy. He classifies the interests embraced under the public welfare under three heads: first, the primary social interests of safety, order and morals; secondly, the economic interests; and thirdly, the non-material or ideal and political interests. Of these three spheres of activities, conditions and interests, the first is conceded to fall within the police power, the second is debatable, and the third exempt. If, then, minimum wage legislation can be brought within the first or second of these spheres of the internal public policy, such legislation clearly falls within the police power, being enacted in the interest of the public welfare.

Health and Safety: In all well ordered States the power and the duty of the government to take all proper and needful measures for the protection of the public health is no longèr seriously questioned; and, as the whole is no greater and no better than the sum of all its parts, it is clear that the health of the individual is affected with a public interest from which the

1 Nobel State Bank v. Haskell, 219 U.S., 104.

18 Cyc. 863, quoted by the Oregon Supreme Court in its opinion in Stettler v. O'Hara, delivered March 17, 1914, and upholding the Oregon minimum wage law.

Freund, Ernst, "The Police Power."

individual cannot even voluntarily dissociate himself. In the interest of the public health, the State has come more and more to interfere in the relations between the employer and the employee, even to the extent of protecting the individual worker against himself. The employer is required to take proper precautions for the safety and health of his employees; and, on the other hand, the employee is not allowed to labor in certain dangerous or responsible employments more than a prescribed number of hours each day. The public health is to be guarded with jealous care, and to this end the protection of the State shall extend even to the generations yet unborn. If, as Professor Freund says, a community may justly assume, under the police power, the guardianship of the health of the unborn generations by forbidding the marriage of persons of near kin, of inebriates, and of persons afflicted with diseases that are likely to affect their progeny, why should not such protection also forbid the maintenance of economic conditions that are seriously impairing the health of whole classes of laborers, and making them wholly unfit for parenthood? Low wages, in the first place, undermine the health of a very considerable number of female2 workers of the present generation. An insufficient wage means cheap and insufficient food and clothing, unsanitary lodgings, little if any recreation, and little or no medical aid however necessary it may be. Ill health is the inevitable result, and ill health leads to inefficiency, and inefficiency to still lower wages; and so these unfortunate women go the weary rounds of this vicious circle whose final stages too often are some public institution and a pauper's grave. And the mischief does not end here, no, not even with death, for the sins of society are visited upon posterity. Low wages, therefore, in the second place, affect the health of the next generation, for the health of the race is conditioned upon the preservation of the health of our potential mothers, the toilers of today but the mothers of tomorrow. Following are a few representative conclusions of social workers in different parts of the country.

"The wages paid to women workers in most occupations are miserably inadequate to meet the cost of living at the lowest

1 Holden v. Hardy,, 169 U. S., 397.

2 As American minimum wage legislation applies only to women and minors, the discussion is confined primarily to women workers.

See also Louis D. Brandeis' Appendix to the Briefs Filed on Behalf of the Respondents in the Case of Stettler v. O'Hara, in the Supreme Court of Oregon, p. 5-40.

standard consistent with the maintenance of the health and morals of the workers."

"Low wages means insufficient food, insufficient food unfitness for labor, so that the vicious circle is complete. The children of such parents have to share their privations, and even if healthy when born the lack of sufficient food soon tells upon them. Thus they often grow up weak and diseased and so tend to perpetuate the race of the unfit."

"For health's sake, the community cannot afford to permit its girl members to receive a wage too low for nutrition, or for the refreshment of exhausted strength. It reacts ultimately to the harm of society when a garment worker has weak coffee for breakfast, goes without lunch altogether, and eats two or three sandwiches for dinner, as her habitual diet. She may keep up through her working life, but in her domestic relations she leaves a heritage of weakness and inefficiency. We are all the sufferers when a shop girl continues at her work after vitality has ebbed because her wages are too low to permit treatment or rest."

The findings of these and other investigators more than bear out their conclusions. The Social Survey Committee of Oregon reports that $10 a week "is the very least on which the average self-supporting woman can live decently and keep herself in health in Portland." And yet the committee found that out of 4,523 wage schedules in the various industries of Portland, 2,573, or 56.8 per cent., received less than $10 a week; and information for 1,133 women wage earners in the various industries of twenty-six towns in Oregon, outside of Portland, shows that only the stenographers receive an average wage of $10 a week or more.5 Conditions in Washington are much the same as in Oregon. The Industrial Welfare Commission, which commenced work in July 1913 and reported in March 1914, found that "$10 a week is approximately the minimum for decent subsistence and that 67 per cent. get less than that amount." The data collected was taken from all parts of the State, and it was found that the average wage rate was approximately $8.00 per week, and that 55.6 per cent. of the mercantile store employees,

1 Report of the Social Survey Committee of the Consumer's League of Oregon, 6. B. S. Rowntree, in "Poverty-A Study of Town Life," p. 46. Elizabeth B. Butler, "Women and the Trades," p. 349.

Report of the Social Survey Committee of the Consumers' League

of Oregon, p. 67, 1913.

Ibid., p. 22-23.

Report of Industrial Welfare Commission of Washington, p. 77. 1914.

71.2 per cent. of the factory employees, and 72.4 per cent. of the laundry employees received less than $10 a week.1 According to the report of the Massachusetts Commission on Minimum Wage Boards for 1912, from $9 to $11 is believed to be the living minimum wage for women in that State. The average weekly earnings of the 1,694 women investigated in the candy industry were $5.40. Of the 1,218 women over eighteen years who reported both their earnings and their age, 41 per cent averaged less than $5 and 65 per cent. less than $6 a week. Of the 301 minors employed, 79.8 per cent. averaged less than $5 per week and 93 per cent. less than $6.3 Of the 2,861 women, over eighteen years, in the retail stores, who reported both their age and their earnings, 10.2 per cent. averaged less than $5 a week and 29.5 per cent. less than $6. Of the 467 minors, 66.4 per cent. averaged less than $4 a week and 96.3 per cent. less than $5.* In the laundries the average weekly earnings of the 1,636 women reported on was $6.52. 16 per cent. of the adults earned less than $5 a week; 24.7 per cent. from $5 to $5.99; 19.4 per cent. from $6 to $6.99; and 38.9 per cent. $7 or more." Of the 14,585 female operatives in the New England cotton mills, 40.2 per cent. received less than $6 a week, and 15.3 per cent. received between $6 and $6.99.o

In 1911 the Connecticut legislature appointed a commission to investigate the condition of women and children wage earners in Connecticut. The report of the commission, after pointing out that $7 a week is "barely a living wage" for a self-supporting woman or girl, proceeds to show that approximately one-half of the women employed in the cotton, metal, corset, rubber and silk industries receive less than $7 a week for their labor. The percentages given are as follows: cotton, 27.57 per cent.; metal, 46 per cent.; corset, 49.15 per cent.; rubber, 49.65 per cent.; and silk, 56.6 per cent. The National Civic Federation, after an investigation in New York City, made a report in April 1913, in which is found these significant figures. Having determined that $9 a week is the minimum for self-supporting girls in New York, the report goes on to say: "38.65 per cent., or 3,427 of the 8,867 saleswomen, and 51.33 per cent. or 10,073 of all the women em

1 Report of Industrial Welfare Commission of Washington, p. 17. 1914. 2 Report of the Commission on Minimum Wage Boards, Massachusetts, p. 220. 1912.

3 Ibid., p. 5.

4 Ibid., p. 113. 5 Ibid., p. 157. Ibid., p. 201.

7 Survey, Vol. 30, p 736.

ployees, totalling 19,627, in 17 New York stores get less than $8 a week. One store has none selling under $8 and only 64 under $9; while another having two at less than $8 has only five under $9. On the other hand, there are 654 of the total number of feminine employees receiving under $4 and 2,603 getting less than $5." In the District of Columbia, according to the testimony of Miss Obenauer, special agent of the Federal Bureau of Labor, the average weekly pay for saleswomen in department stores, as reported by the pay rolls covering 1,760 women, was $6.55. Cash girls received only $2.2 Lieutenant Governor Barrat O'Hara of Illinois, and Chairman of the Senate Vice Investigating Committee, issued the following statement on March 6, 1913. The first part is quoted. "The report of our investigators show that there are more than 50,000 girls and women in the city of Chicago who are receiving a salary of $5 a week or less. On this stipend these 50,000 women are struggling for existence with practically no advance or chance for relief in sight. These women are living in furnished rooms and are underfed, according to our investigators. It is safe to say that the great majority of them since they have become wage earners do not know what a full meal means. Half of them live on two meals a day and these meals of the ten or fifteen cent variety. Many of them have to depend for clothes on what more successful friends are willing to give them of cast off garments." Another investigator, Ester Packard, chose at random, from the payrolls of the factories and department stores all over the State of New York, three hundred girls who were receiving less than $10 a week. In her investigation, Miss Packard saw every one of these girls personally and individually. She summarizes her report as follows: "Just keep still," and "Trying to get along." It was this which the three hundred budgets revealed. To one girl, $6 meant "lack of food," to another "poor living quarters," and to yet another "no savings for the rainy day." But invariably it meant to all a cramped subnormal way of life-a mere existence, not a real living.*

1 Survey, Vol. 31, p. 50.

2 Ibid., Vol. 29, p. 659. "The Report on Condition of Women and Child Wage Earners in the United States (Vol. XVIII, page 23; Vol. I, pages 433 and 436; Vol. II, pages 365, 368; Vol. III, pages 525, 527; Vol. pages 259,261; Vol. V, pages 11,315 and 56) shows that of 86,000 women wage earners sixteen years of age and older, over 40 per cent, were receiving less than $6.00 a week and approximately three-fourths were receiving less than $8.00 per week."-Marie L. Obenauer, in Report by A. J. Porter, National Civic Federation, Sixteenth Annual Meeting, Washington, D. C., January 17, 1916. p. 31.

3 Chicago Daily Newspapers. Survey, February 6, 1915.