"To return to the annuity fund, apart from the assistance it gives to the wife and children if the father is sick, it also contributes the services of a medical man for a woman at childbirth, and the State pays $30 for that purpose. If all of this is not needed to pay the physician, the rest may be used for carrying on the home. This has all been done with the view to helping the birth rate and bringing into the world children under the most healthy conditions possible, so that they may have a free chance of attaining man's or woman's estate. "We assess the value of an adult in our country as $1500. 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.