So, _from a business standpoint and on national grounds_, we regard the expenditure of a sum up to $30 as judicious, when the value of the infant to the country may be fifty times that sum.

Thus the small wage earner's wife and children are provided for, and his fear about being able to provide for a large family is decreased." (Italics mine.)[58] "I am of the opinion," declares Mr.Churchill, "that the State should increasingly assume the position of the reserve employer of labor," and that "the State must increasingly and earnestly concern itself with the care of the sick and aged, and, above all, of the children." He looks forward "to the universal establishment of the _minimum standards_ of life and labor, and their progressive elevation as the increasing energies of production may permit."[59] Mr.Churchill rejects the supposition that the government intends to stop with the extension of the eight-hour law to miners.

"I welcome and support this measure, not only for its own sake," he said, "but more because it is, I believe, simply the precursor of the general movement which is in progress, all over the world, and in other industries besides this, towards reconciling the conditions of labor with the well-ascertained laws of science and health."[60] It might be supposed that this measure would prove costly to employers, but this is only a short-sighted view.

In the first place, working for less hours, the miners will produce somewhat more per hour, but an even more important ultimate benefit comes from the fact that the most experienced miners, those who are most profitable, being subject to less overstrain, will have a longer working life.
Another measure already enacted towards establishing "a national minimum" applies to the wages in ready-made tailoring and some less important industries, to which shirt-waist making is soon to be added.
These are known as the "sweated" trades, "where the feebleness and ignorance of the workers and their isolation from each other render them an easy prey to the tyranny of bad masters and middlemen one step above them upon the lowest rungs of the ladder, and themselves held in the grip of the same relentless forces,"-- where "you have a condition not of progress but of progressive degeneration." Mr.Churchill asked Parliament to regard these industries as "sick and diseased," and "to deal with them in exactly the same mood and temper as we should deal with sick people," and accordingly boards were established for the purpose of setting up a minimum wage.[61] But if employers are forced to pay higher wages, it may be thought that they will lose from the law.

This Mr.Churchill effectively denies.
"In most instances," he says, "the best employers in the trade are already paying wages equal or superior to the probable minimum which the Trade Board will establish.