physician, knows what a hardship it is to a woman to be compelled to stand all day at a bench or behind a counter. Fortunately, in 33 States legislation has been enacted requiring employers to provide seats for females. Of these 33 States, 23 are are Repubiican and 10 are Democratic.

Sweatshop Legislation.

There is no greater menace to the health of the working people and nothing which tends more to lower and degrade human beings, than to crowd them together in small, filthy workshops, where they are often compelled to work, eat and sleep without regard to health or morals, and where the hours of labor are often so long that the victims, who are usually foreigners unacquainted with cur language, are shut out from all opportunities for education or betterment of any kind. The scenes observed in these shops by official investigators have been revolting beyond description. Long ago efforts have been made to regulate these sweatshops, and 12 States have enacted laws looking to this end. Of these 12 States 10 are Republican and 2 are Democratic.

Wage Payments.

In order to insure the prompt payment of workingmen's wages in cash when due, 22 States have enacted laws requiring employers to pay wages weekly or fortnightly, and in some instances prohibiting a longer interval than one month between pay-days. Of these 17 are Republican and 5 are Democratic.

Protection of Members of Labor Organizations.

Fifteen States have enacted laws, that are now in force, prohibiting employers from discharging persons on account of membership in labor organizations, or from compelling persons to agree not to become members of labor organizations as a condition of securing employment or continuing in their employ. Of these all but one are Republican States.

Protection of the Union Label.

Forty States have passed laws allowing trade unions to adopt labels or trade-marks to be used to designate products of the labor of their members, and prohibiting the counterfeiting or the use of such labels or trade-marks by unauthorized persons. Of these States 28 are Republican and 12 are Democratic.

This is an era of great combinations both of labor and of capital. In many ways these combinations have worked for good, but they must work under the law, and the laws concerning them must be just and wise or they will inevitably do evil; and this applies as much to the richest corporation as to the most powerful labor union.-President Roosevelt at Charleston, S. C., April 9, 1902.

That whenever the need arises there should be a readjustment of the tariff schedules is undoubted; but such changes can with safety be made only by those whose devotion to the principle of a protective tariff is beyond question, for otherwise the charges would amount not to readjustment but to repeal. The readjustment when made must maintain and not destroy the protective principle.-President Roosevelt's speech accepting 1904 nomination.

Efficient regulation is the very antidote and preventive of socialism and government ownership. The railroads, until now, have been permitted to wield without any real control the enormously important franchise of furnishing transportation to the entire country. In certain respects they have done a marvelous work and have afforded transportation at a cheaper rate per ton, per mile, and per passenger, than in any country in the world. They have, however, many of them, shamefully violated the trust obligation they have been under to the public of furnishing equal facilities at the same price to all shippers. They have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. The remedy for the evils must be radica! to be effective. If it is not so. then we may certainly expect that the movement toward government ownership will become a formidable one that cannot be stayed.-Hon. Wm. H. Taft, at Columbus, Ohio.

HON. WILLIAM H. TAFT'S RELATIONS

TO UNION LABOR.

No class of citizens is more deeply interested in the records of presidential candidates than union workmen. They want the simple facts with regard to each man, and it is especially incumbent upon them not to form opinions on insufficient evidence, and to consider whether a candidate's record is one of achievement or only of promise. Actions may not be more eloquent than words, but they are more convincing. Trade unionists, like other people, will never know their friends until they put them upon trial; and when a man is tried he should be judged by his whole course of action, and not by one isolated event over which there may be a difference of opinion even among trade uniònists. If the candidate has had opportunity to do things, has he done them? And in the doing, has he been fearless and fair towards all classes of citizens? For trade unionists want neither charity nor favor; they want opportunity and justice.

Next to the churches and the schools, trade unionism has done much to raise the standard of American citizenship. It has said: "Suffer little children to come into the school house and the church and not into the factory and mine," and it has given to their progenitors higher wages, shorter hours, more sanitary conditions of living and greater security to life and limb-all of which have been shared by union and non-union workers; that is to say, the union workers have fought the battles, carried the burdens and made the sacrifices, and society as a whole has benefitted. It has said: "The laborer is worthy of his hire, even though the laborer be a woman." It has at times been led by bad men, but the organization that is composed of saints has not yet taken out its charter. It has made mistakes, but the man or the institution that does not make mistakes does not make anything. This is no argument, however, in favor of the making of heedless blunders, and a blunder would be made if one who has successfully met many public trusts and discharged duties of a high national and international significance, and who has ever been prompted by motives of the highest regard for the welfare of the producing people of this nation, should be credited by organized labor as being now, or ever having been, inimical to their interests. Secretary Taft's whole public career, and it is an extensive one, contains no incident in which he has ever. by word or act, arrayed himself against the principles of trade unionism. On the contrary, he has been its consistent friend and advocate. His record shows that not only were his sympathies with the organization, but that his actions were those of a friend many years before either he or the American people had thought of him as a Presidential possibility.

Misquoted and Unjustly Judged.

Probably no judge has ever been more misquoted and unjustly judged by trades unionists than Judge Taft. His many decisions in favor of labor organizations have been minimized to such an extent that one is prompted to inquire if those who have exploited his record before labor organizations were not more interested in the welfare of some political party than in the interests of their labor organizations. Trade unionists should stand together, without regard to party, in contending for everything that will legitimately advance their principles, and should credit an honest judge with doing his duty, even though his decisions be adverse to them, so long as they are in accordance with the law of the land. His decisions, of course, may not voice the opinion of the judge; he does not make the law. On the other hand, there is no decision by Judge Taft that can be cited that indicates personal antipathy or a personal unfriendliness on his part to labor organizations.

Some of the Public Actions of William H. Taft Especially Helpful to Organized Labor.

The words of Judge Taft in the Arthur and Phelan cases, in 1893-4, setting forth the rights of labor organizations under the law, were invoked and applied in favor of labor unions in the case of the strike on the Wabash Railroad in 1903, and an injunction against the union dissolved.

In 1894, in adjudging Phelan guilty of contempt for disobeying the injunction secured to prevent interference with the operation of the Cincinnati-Southern Railway and to keep open interstate commerce, Judge Taft, in determining the limits of labor organizations, made a notable statement of the extent of the rights of labor which has since been frequently and successfully quoted by those contending in the interests of union labor.

In 1899 Judge Taft became the champion of the cause of union labor in the Narramore case, and as a judge of the U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals, reversed the decision of the court below and wrote an opinion that has finally become, in spirit and in letter, the established law not only of Ohio, but of the nation. He took an impregnable position against precedents and numerous decisions which had declared, in effect, that, where an employer was violating the law with regard to the use of safety appliances, an injured workman could not recover damages because he was supposed to know of the violation, and to assume all risks consequent thereto.

As Governor-General of the Philippines, he encouraged the organization of workmen into unions that should be organized on American lines, and pardoned a labor leader who had been convicted under an old Spanish law for "conspiring to raise the wages of labor."

As Governor-General Mr. Taft refused to accede to the demands of corporations and other employers to permit the introduction of cheap Chinese labor into the islands, and unequivocally declared himself against bringing the workmen of our new denendencies or those in our own land, into competition with the cheaper labor of the civilizations lower than our own.

Mr. Taft's Decisions Relative to Labor.

Frederick N. Judson, the attorney for the Railroad Brotherhood in the Wabash case, says:

"There is no foundation, therefore, for the 'suggestion that the decisions of Judge Taft were in any sense unfriendly to labor."

One should read in the Review of Reviews for August, 1907, what Mr. Judson says of the whole series of Judge Taft's labor decisions. The first of these decisions was delivered by Judge Taft in 1890 in the case of Moores vs. Bricklayers' Union et al. This case involved the application of the law to what is known as a secondary boycott; that is, a boycott not against an employer, but against a third party dealing with an employer, who is a stranger to the controversy between the employer and the employee.

Moores had sold lime to the employer, Parker Brothers, who had been boycotted by the union. Parker Brothers had been boycotted because of their refusal to pay a fine imposed upon one of their employees and to reinstate a discharged apprentice. Moores, the plaintiffs, had been awarded damages by the jury on account of this secondary boycott, and it was this judgment of damages that was affirmed on appeal in an opinion by Judge Taft. This decision has been accepted as the correct exposition of the law; and the secondary boycott, that is, a boycott against a stranger to the trade dispute, has been practically abandoned by intelligent labor unionists as an unreasonable weapon. other words, it has been conceded by the ablest labor leaders that it is not good policy to punish one's friends-employers who are running union shops-for the purpose of defeating one's enemies.

In

The labor decisions of Judge Taft while on the Federal bench related directly to the Federal character of such controversies, involving the power of the Federal Government to protect interstate commerce. There were only two such cases decided by him. The first of these was decided April 3, 1893, and was in the matter of the strike of the engineers of the Toledo and Ann Arbor Railroad. The engineers on strike refused to handle cars from complainants' road as long as the strike of the engineers on that road was unsettled. It is obvious that this action involved a paralysis of the business of interstate commerce. The Toledo

road thereupon applied for an injunction against the connecting roads, alleging a combination violative of the interstate commerce act. The engineers of the defendant company had no grievances of their own; and their refusal to handle the freight of complainant's company was in no sense a strike for the betterment of their own conditions of service. Judge Taft's decision sustaining the injunction was accepted by the Railroad Brotherhood as a fair statement of the law under the peculiar conditions of the railroad service.

In the following year, 1894, came the great railroad strike inspired by the American Railroad Union, growing out of the strike of the Pullman employees at Pullman, Illinois. The offieials of the union demanded all railroads to boycott Pullman cars and to declare a strike of employees on any railroad on their refusal to declare such a boycott. The Cincinnati Southern, an interstate railway, was in the hands of a receiver, and it applied to the court for protection against one Phelan (a Socialist), an official of the American Railway Union, who was engaged in inciting a strike among the employees of the road. There was no complaint by the employees of this road. The demand was that all traffic should be suspended and business paralyzed, union shops closed, and union industries destroyed, if necessary, until all the roads should consent not to carry Pullman cars. The purpose was to starve the public into compelling the Pullman Company to do something which the public had no right to compel it to do, and in the doing of this to inflict irreparable injury upon many industries employing union workmen and working union hours. If the unions had won in this strife, would not the price have been too great for the object attained? Phelan had used language defying the order of the court. After a hearing he was adjudged guilty of contempt in an opinion by Judge Taft, who at the same time emphasized the fact that employees had the right to quit their employment, but that they had no right to combine to injure their employer in order to compel him to withdraw from a mutually profitable relation with a third party for the purpose of injuring the third party, when the relation thus sought to be broken had no effect upon the character or reward of their services. But as the purpose of the combination was to tie up interstate railroads, not as the incidental result of a lawful strike for the betterment of the employees' own condition, but as a means of injuring a third party, it was an unlawful combination violative of the anti-trust act of 1890. Thus, if Phelan had urged a strike for higher wages, or to prevent the lowering of wages, he would not have been liable for contempt, but he had no right to incite men to quit when they had no grievance of their own to redress, for it was then essentially a boycott and not a strike.

The words of Judge Taft in the Phelan case, setting forth the rights of labor organizations under the law, were invoked and applied in favor of the labor unions in a notable case, that of a strike on the Wabash Railroad by the Brotherhoods of Railroad Trainmen and Firemen in 1903. The two brotherhoods, after failing to secure the advance wages and betterment of conditions demanded, had called a strike, and thereupon an injunction was filed by the railroad company against the officers of these brotherhoods. The rights of organization and of representation, as set forth by Judge Taft, were made the basis of the argument by the attorney representing the brotherhoods, and the injunction was dissolved. It was said in the opinion rendered by Judge Adams that on the subject of the organization of labor and the rights of labor unions no one had spoken more clearly and acceptably than Judge Taft.

The "Assumed Risk" Decision.

One of the most notable services that Judge Taft rendered to organized labor while presiding over a court was with relation to "assumed risk" and "contributory negligence" on the part of a workman attempting to recover damages from an employer for injuries received while in the service of the latter. In 1895 the Supreme Court of Ohio, consisting of six judges, decided that Morgan, a coal miner, could not recover damages for injuries