We have 92,000,000 people in the United States. Perhaps there are a few thousand millionnaires among us, perhaps a few hundred thousand having an income of ten thousand dollars or more. But in contrast to them there are millions of individuals whose wage is _under_ a thousand. Look over the average yearly wages in our best-paid industries. Take the one which boasts of paying the highest wage—the United States Steel Trust. According to its last report the average wage of its 195,500 employees, _including_ its foremen and clerks and managers, whose salaries in some cases are $10,000 even $25,000 a year, was but $775. In 1905 the average yearly earnings of the men in the cotton industry was but $416. In 1907 the mule spinners in the Massachusetts woollen factories averaged $13.16 a week, the dyers averaged $8.58, the weavers $11.60. There are probably several millions of white families in the United States whose average wage is not over $500 a year. When one comes to examine industries generally, the surprise is not how _much_, but how _little_ the great body of wage-earners receive. People must live on small earnings in this country, as everywhere. In order to accumulate enough to provide against sickness and old age they are obliged to practise a thrift which frequently is hateful, it is so cruel. Moreover, genuine thrift requires so much training, intelligence, and self-denial that comparatively few are prepared to practise it, even with the best of intentions. This is the hard fact, and yet the Congress of the United States for fifty years has fixed taxes on the food and clothing and shelter of these people with no apparent consciousness of their condition. They were the “ultimate consumers”—terms in a problem—not suffering, struggling men and women.