labor. Where the money cost of education is eliminated, the only cost remaining is the irksomeness of hard study. Those to whom this irksomeness is very slight will naturally be attracted into the more highly paid occupations. There may, however, be artificial restrictions in the way of entering certain wellpaid occupations. If a group of laborers in one of those few occupations where something resembling the apprenticeship still prevails, would limit the number of apprentices, that would of course limit the number of laborers who could acquire skill enough to follow the occupation. In other cases the policy of the closed shop might be carried to such an extreme as to reduce the supply of labor in the given occupation, and thus prevent the readjustment of the labor supply to meet the demand. The tendency of freedom, however, is to encourage the automatic readjustment of the supply of labor to the demand.

These are the principal factors which determine the excess in wages of the skilled trades and occupations and the learned professions over and above those paid in what are known as the unskilled occupations. By the unskilled occupations is meant, however, those which require a kind of skill which practically everybody can acquire without much special study. There is skill involved in the handling of a spade or a woodman's ax, as any inexperienced person will find if he tries to use one or the other effectively; but it is a kind of skill which large numbers of people acquire easily, and therefore the supply of such skill is so great as to keep wages down pretty close to what is known as the standard of living. We have, therefore, the problem of finding out what determines the wages of this general mass of unskilled labor. What is there here which corresponds to the cost of producing a material commodity or the cost of acquiring the skill required in one of the well-paid occupations? The factors which take the place of cost of production here are, first, the disinclination to work, and, second, the disinclination to multiply.

Scarcity of unskilled labor. Among the vigorous European and American stocks the disinclination to work is not so very great. Nevertheless, there is an appreciable quantity of labor which is chronically withdrawn from productive work by reason of this factor. That part of the leisure class which is made up of people who have inherited, married, or otherwise come into possession of sufficient wealth to enable them to live without work, show this disinclination rather clearly. There are also the chronic loafers, the tramps, and the nomadic element among us, who show a strong disinclination to work, and only do so under strong temptation.

The disinclination to multiply is unfortunately strongest among those who possess the most forethought. Those who live only in the present, who have no regrets for yesterday and no fears for to-morrow, generally give way to their primal impulses and multiply almost as rapidly as is physiologically

possible. Those, however, who look to the future, not only of themselves but of their children, who foresee the disadvantages which their children will suffer if they are insufficiently nourished or inadequately educated, generally have smaller families than are physiologically possible. The multiplication of numbers among such people becomes in part a moral process instead of a purely animal process. Family building takes the place of spawning. Marriages of those who take thought for the future are postponed until they are able to support and educate their children.

The group of motives and factors which serve to hold the procreative instincts in check are generally called by the name of the standard of living. This is a somewhat technical term in economics and requires some careful explanation.

Meaning of the standard of living. Technically the term standard of living means the number of desires which, in the average person of the class in question, take precedence over that group of desires which result in the multiplication of numbers. For purposes of discussion we will call the latter group of desires the domestic instincts. When the domestic instincts act powerfully and without opposing motives to hold them in check, the individual will undertake the support of a family before he is assured of a sufficient income to satisfy any but the most elementary desires. Under these conditions he is said to have a low standard of living. In his case there are very few other desires which take precedence over the domestic instincts. The individual of whom that is true will accordingly marry and undertake the support of a family as soon as he has sufficient income to satisfy that other small group of desires. In other cases a large number of other desires take precedence over the domestic instincts. An individual of whom that can be said will not marry and undertake the support of a family until he feels reasonably certain of being able to satisfy all these other desires. He is said to have a high standard of living; that is, an expensive standard.

If we can imagine a community to which immigrants from the outside do not come, and in which the average unskilled laborer has a high standard of living, we will have a community in which the average laborer will not marry and undertake the support of a family until he is sure of wages high enough to satisfy a large number of desires. If the average individual, however, has a low standard of living, he will marry and undertake the support of a family on low wages; that is, wages that are just high enough to secure him the means of satisfying a small group of desires. If the unskilled laborers of the community have a high standard of living, the average age of marriage will be a little higher and the average size of the family a little smaller, so that the rate of multiplication will be materially slower than would be the case if they had a low standard of living. The rate of multiplication being slower, the oncoming supply of labor is less, and in the succeeding generations laborers will thus be able, through the smaller supply, to continue to get high wages. If wages are low to begin with, they will refuse to marry or will defer marriage to such a late age as to reduce the supply of labor and thus force wages up to a level which will enable them to maintain their standard. If the standard of living, however, is low, and the rate of multiplication correspondingly high, wages tend to continue "low. Even if wages were temporarily high, unless the standard of living should rise quickly, the rate of multiplication would so increase through early marriages and large families as to oversupply the labor market and force wages down again until they were just sufficient to maintain the low standard of living.

Standard of living affects the price of labor as cost of production affects the price of a commodity. From the foregoing discussion it will be seen that the standard of living affects the wages of the general mass of unskilled labor precisely in the same way as the cost of producing a material commodity affects its price. Wages must be sufficient to overcome the disinclination to marry and produce families. This disinclination,

however, is the joint product of a number of conflicting desires. In an elementary sense there is a strong inclination to marry rather than a disinclination, but the inclination to marry is held in check by the desire of the individual for consumers' goods of his own. If he realizes that, with a family to support, he will have a little less money to spend on himself, or that, if his family is too large, he will have less for each one of them and may not be able to educate them, such considerations will create a disinclination which may more than balance the inclination toward marriage. A real safeguard against low wages, therefore, is a high standard of living, which will check somewhat the tendency toward early marriages and large families. How far this should go is always a serious question. No one advocates so low a standard as would cause multiplication to take place as rapidly as is physiologically possible. If that were the case, marriages would take place at the age of puberty, and women would be continually engaged in the functions of motherhood as long as childbearing was possible. Nobody would favor that. Everyone favors some kind of a standard of living and some postponement of marriage. It is only a question as to how high a standard and how much postponement is desirable.

The law of population. This brings us to the great law of population, which has generally been associated with the name of Malthus. The law which Malthus worked out and which has never been successfully refuted, though many attempts have been made, may be briefly stated as follows:

1. Every species of plant and animal has the physiological power to multiply faster than its means of subsistence will permit. Subsistence is the factor which actually limits numbers.

2. The physiological power of human increase is also so great that if it should operate without moral or social restraints of any kind, it would carry population to such limits that vice or misery or both would begin to thin out the surplus population and thus operate as a check upon further increase.