Another fact to which attention should be called is the adjustment in family life required by contact with the modern industrial system. Some of the immigrant groups come from countries more developed in an industrial way than others, but none of the newer groups come from any country in which the factory system has become so prevalent as in the United States. In the old country the family still exercised productive functions as a unit. It had access to tillable land, and was an essential part of an industrial system that is still organically related to the stage of development of the country. It had, therefore, within itself, the sources of self-support and self-determination. The civilization of which it was a part may be a declining civilization; but the conditions of life were those to which the wife and mother were accustomed. She took them for granted, felt at home among them, and was not conscious of being overwhelmed by them.
In the modern American industrial community, however, the family as a whole is generally divorced from land. It is not a unit in relation to the industrial organization, but in its productive function is usually broken up by it. For the family must live, and yet its income is dependent, not upon its size nor the volume of its needs, but upon the wage-earning capacity of the man under the prevailing system of bargaining. That the resulting income has often been wholly inadequate, even according to the modest standards set by dietetic experts and by social investigators, is testified to by an enormous body of data gathered during the decade preceding the Great War.[7]
It is unnecessary to review these studies in detail, but attention may be called to the findings of the Immigration Commission. Of the foreign-born male heads of households studied, 4,506, or 34.1 per cent, earned less than four hundred dollars a year at a time when dietetic experts agreed that five hundred dollars was a minimum below which it was dangerous for families to fall. Seventy per cent earned less than six hundred dollars.
These figures may be said to come from "far away and long ago," but while there has not been time for widespread inquiry, there is a considerable body of evidence indicating that the same condition prevails to-day. Wages have increased greatly during the war, but with the increase in prices there is doubt as to whether real wages have increased or decreased. Certainly the increase has been irregular and uneven, affecting the workers in some industries much more than in others.