ions we
have observed how the changes that have been occurring in modern times
have increased the uncertainties of the industrial life and of the
earning power of the mass of the workers.[1] It should be further
observed that in city conditions, a working family does not have, as
in agricultural conditions, the supplementary sources of income from
garden, field, forest, and stream, and it is not so possible to use
the earning power of children, of old people, and of the partially
disabled. The faster working pace of factories, the rapid fluctuations
of employment with changing fashions, inventions, shifts of
population, and waves of industrial prosperity and depression, all
have introduced new risks and problems into the worker's life. The
increasing payment of wages in money, and the more temporary nature
of employment of men in many kinds of factory work, have added to
the problem. With these changes have come a growing interest in
the welfare of the mass of the workers and a growing sense of
responsibility on the part of the public.

There is an appalling mass of misfortune in the United States
requiring social insurance for its relief, altho satisfactory
statistics of the various types of misfortune are still lacking. On
the basis of the experience of private industrial insurance companies
it appears that there are not less than 25.000 fatal industrial
accidents yearly, and 700,000 injuries causing disability for more
than four weeks, to say nothing of the enormous number of slight
injuries--if injuries, many of them very painful, disabling for a
period from one day to four weeks, should be called slight. As to loss
of time due to illness, the experience of Germany shows an average of
eight or nine days a year per worker, which figure, applied to those
gainfully employed in America, would mean nearly 300,000,000 days of
illness, or 1,000,000 one-man working years, causing a loss estimated
to be $750,000,000 annually.

It is estimated that one on eighteen of American wage-workers attains
the age of sixty-five with no financial provision for old age, and
that about 1,250,000 persons above the age of sixty-five are dependent
on their families or on charity, public or private, receiving
$250,000,000 yearly.

The losses and suffering to dependents due to the death of the
bread-winner are very partially accounted for by accidents, but no
estimate of much value can now be made of the other cases. Some notion
of the lo