ABSTRACT
No general principle relating to a matter like wages will have any practical value unless we are able in any concrete cases to express its demands in terms of some definite pecuniary amount. The wage-earners, in losing their ownership of the means and materials of production, have increased their incomes as a whole, but the security of the individual income has been very considerably diminished. It includes man's spiritual or ideally moral impulses, whether these are associated with any definite religion or no. In the eyes, then, of moral justice the minimum wage of stability will represent, not merely the net advantage of one industrial system over another. The minimum lot, however, though the minimum wage is the foundation of it, is, as we shall see presently, not necessarily determinable by the minimum wage alone. Justice and self-interest alike will prescribe certain additions to its which, though closely connected with wages, belong to different categories.
