The only real peril of a minimum wage-law is that it has a tendency to relegate the incompetent to beggary. It cannot, as some economists claim, discourage efficiency. Nothing can discourage efficiency, which scorns help and defies hindrance. But, by the same ruling, nothing can command more than it is worth in the markets of the world. We do wrong when we release the worker from any incentive to good work. We do wrong when we release her from a sense of personal responsibility. We do wrong when we give her a plausible excuse for following the line of least resistance, when we blight her courage by permitting her to think that her moral welfare lies in any hands but her own. The choice between poverty and dishonesty, the choice between poverty and prostitution is not an “open question.” It is closed, if human reason and human experience can speak authoritatively upon any subject in the world.
The injury done by loose thinking and loose talking is irremediable. When the State Senate Vice Investigating Committee of Illinois permitted and encouraged an expression of what it was pleased to call the “shop-girl’s philosophy,” it sowed the seeds of mischief deep enough to insure a heavy crop of evil. I quote a single episode, as it was reported in the newspapers of March 8th, 1913,—a report which, if inaccurate in detail, must be correct in substance. A young woman who had been in the employ of Sears, Roebuck & Co. was on the stand. She was questioned by Lieutenant-Governor O’Hara.
“‘If a girl were getting $8 a week, and had to support a widowed mother, would you blame that girl if she committed a crime?’
“The witness looked up frankly, and replied, ‘No, I wouldn’t.’
“‘Would you blame her if she killed herself?’
“‘No, I wouldn’t,’ came the emphatic reply.
“‘And would you blame her, if she committed a greater crime?’
“The young Lieutenant-Governor’s meaning was in his embarrassed tones and in his heightened colour. The girl was the more composed of the two. She paused a moment, and then repeated distinctly, ‘No, I wouldn’t.’
“The room had been painfully quiet, but at this there was a round of applause, led by the women spectators. It was the first general spontaneous outburst of the session. ‘Emily’ was then dismissed.”
Dismissed with the “round of applause” ringing in her ears, and in her mind the comfortable assurance that her theory of life was a sound one. Also that a warm-hearted public was prepared to exonerate her, should she find a virtuous life too onerous for endurance. Is it likely that this girl, and hundreds of other Emilys, thus encouraged to let down the walls of resistance, can be saved from the hopeless failure of nerve which will relegate them to the ranks of the defeated? Is it likely that the emotional hysteria of the applauding audience, and of hundreds of similar audiences, can be reduced to reason by such sober statistics as those furnished by the Bureau of Social Hygiene in New York, or by the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills? Less than three per cent of seven hundred girls examined at the Bedford Hills reformatory pleaded poverty, as a reason for their fall; and, of this three per cent, more than half had been temporarily out of work. On the other hand, twenty per cent were feeble-minded, were mentally incapacitated for self-control, and as much at the mercy of their instincts as so many animals. These are the blame-less unfortunates whom vice commissioners seem somewhat disposed to ignore. These are the women who should be protected from themselves, and from whose progeny the public should be protected.