the demand of the steamship companies for a system of tolls. The Alaska conservation question is bound to come up, and it will provoke acrimonious discussion. Congress will be asked to consider banking legislation, but with a presidential election near, it will be in no mood to take affirmative action. These are only the principal questions that will knock at the door. The army and navy will ask recognition for reforms of reorganization. The form of the amendment to the Constitution dealing with the election of Senators has not been determined. Pension bills will intrude and may be troublesome. The fight for economy will be fought out bitterly to gain partisan advantage. And of course there will be a long wrangle over appropriations. The Senate will have to dispose of the Lorimer and Stephenson investigations, and it can't be done in a day or without much bickering and dickering.

Persia's Vain Hope

WILLIAM MORGAN SHUSTER'S

stand in Persia has called forth the universal admiration of the American press. This young American who was engaged several months ago to set Persia's house in financial order, says the Minneapolis Journal, "has exhibited among the indirections of Old World diplomacy the directness of the American mind, which hits the truth as a bullet does the target."

"Mr. Shuster has conferred honor upon the American people," says the New York American. "And if he shall be exiled from the country he has served so well, his own people should see to it that before he goes the nations responsible for his going shall be completely unmasked, that the world may recognize them for what they are, not what they pretend to be." "Shuster's largest offense," points out the Seattle Post Intelligencer, "was that he dared enforce the laws against political conspirators presumed to be secretly in the employ of Russia."

The trouble in Persia, as pointed out by the news dispatches, has arisen over Mr. Shuster's attempt to rehabilitate the Oriental country's money affairs. When Persia applied to the United States for a financial adviser, that country was without a farthing in the cash drawer and there was a desperate deficit. Drafts upon the government were gone to protest, servants of the state could not collect their pay, and the government owed the Russian government a debt of 3,300,000 pounds sterling, the Bank of Russia 1,160,000 pounds, and the Bank of England 690,000 pounds.

The New York Press outlines the man

ner in which Mr. Shuster attacked this problem:

He began to cut down expenses and graft. He began to pay the salaries of the servants of the state. He began to meet all obligations. He began to put in modern improvements-schools, sanitary equipment, good roads, railway, harbors. He began to stimulate industry so that an ancient race, once formidable in the world's arena, could be self-supporting. And to cap the climax of his wrongdoing, he began, as a sure means of carrying on this work, to pile up a surplus in the treasury.

There was the crime of William Morgan Shuster, the young American Treasurer-General engaged to take Persia out of the degradation and misery of being in perpetual pawn. So long as Persia could be kept in pawn, she could be fed upon by the foreign powers, Russia chief of the vampires, till she should. become carrion fit only for vultures, with the plain' upon which bleached her national bones seized and held by foreign land grabbers. Keep Persia in pawn! The old, old cry of the greedy Powers. Drain the life blood out of Persia by making her always pay, never permitting her to have done with paying! Close no flooding wounds! Open new ones! Bleed Persia to death, and hold as the enemy of enlightened Europe any physician that would minister to that sick nation!

The Los Angeles Lesson

"IF

F a sincere attempt to inaugurate the principles of the Golden Rule in practice could be made to date from the day the. McNamara brothers confessed their guilt,” says the Los Angeles Express, "that day of disgrace and shame might yet prove to be the beginning of a movement that should work out the redemption of mankind." This editorial, written immediately after the confession, while perhaps showing the direct influence of Mr. Lincoln Steffens' plea, is, nevertheless, representative of the attitude assumed by many editorial writers in an effort to pull something out of the horrors of the Los Angeles atrocity upon which to build.

"Possibly it required some such stunning blow as this to make the rank and file realize their responsibilities," remarks the St. Paul Pioneer Press, "to make men who think right, who want only justice and are willing to do justice, who love peace and obey the law, assert themselves in union labor councils." The Augusta Chronicle believes that the crime will emphasize the need to "provide the means of promptly adjusting industrial troubles." The Seattle Post Intelligencer declares that while “organized labor has received the most staggering blow in its history, it will recover

The new Diogenes searches in vain for an honest friend

from this blow, be all the better and stronger for it, if it will see that arbitration must ever be the watchword, and that unionism will inevitably wane if it gives countenance to acts of violence." The Detroit Journal

is also convinced that "in the highest sense the crime will prove a benefit to union labor."

It is "like an excruciating operation without anesthetics," this paper continues. "It is a blow to some things in unionism, to some kinds of leader

ship, and some

kinds of leaders.

event may cause

AN INSULTING QUESTION

From the Berlin

Kladderadatsch

NOT UP TO EXPEC

TURKEY "Great Allah! I don't think the German umbrella is quite water-tight!"

labor unions to suffer for a time, but they will emerge to new health and strength and sanity."

Again referring to the editorial pages of the Los Angeles Express, we find a remarkable editorial which has been widely quoted in part by the press. First of all," says the Express, "organized labor must face the facts:

That an overwhelming majority of the members of the trades unions of America are loyal, peaceful, law-abiding citizens we conceive to be a fact none will dispute save those gone rabid with hatred of unionism. Never

theless, it has been clearly proved that leaders of organized labor, in order to establish unionism, have resorted to crimes of violence of a hideous nature. The McNamara brothers are but a type of leaders of that character, who stand out conspicuously from among their fellows only because they have made confession. Proofs of other sort presented in the past have been rejected by labor on one ground of disbelief or another, but these confessions are proofs that are not to be rejected. Labor must accept them, and, indeed, labor does accept them. Whatever else, then, is certain or uncertain, this now is wholly certain-dynamite has been used by leaders of organized labor in a war on capital waged in behalf of unionism.

Such leaders must be flung out of the councils of labor:

Resolved to maintain and advance their cause, union labor men the country over must spurn and repudiate every advocate of violence, every stirrer up of strife, every apostle falsely preaching in labor's name the gospel of hate. And thereupon, organized labor should prepare itself to deal with capital on a basis of coöperative conciliation and recognized mutuality of interest.

The task that confronts the people, however, is not one to be achieved by labor alone, nor is any plan of industrial regeneration to be made successfully operative if concessions are to be rendered exclusively by those who toil:

Capital must do its part, and great indeed is the part it must, in full good faith, perform. Precisely as labor must repudiate its McNamaras, so must capital dismiss from its councils the evil, selfish men who have scorned to recognize the existence of absolute human rights. Neither the apostles of violence nor the apostles of plutocratic greed should hereafter have influence over the destinies of the men and women of the nation.

The capitalistic principle that would grind the very flesh and blood of toilers in the wheels of greed, converting their sufferings and privations into profit, must forever be abandoned and replaced with a truly humanitarian rule of conduct. It is as wicked and indefensible in its outrageously inhuman cruelties as are the acts of physical violence those cruelties teach and prompt. We have condemned labor's violence. We shall not condone capital's injustice.

Looking over the Socialistic press, we find one editorial in the New York Call that is of more than passing interest. "The conviction of the McNamaras is not a

calamity," we read. "There is nothing which would have been more timely and fortunate. It is a warning, it is a chance to get on the right road, and it comes at the very period when the unions are in desperate need of understanding what is the right road:

They have tried to compromise and tried to terrorize. They have failed in both. Individual lead ́ers have been successful, through the friendship of capital and labor. But the more they succeed, the more detrimental they become to the working class.

Now, there must be a reorganization and reconstruc tion. Either the unions are to remain what a few of them are to-day, close, limited bodies, that try to be "fair" to both sides and yet are inevitably impelled to reactionary onslaughts, or else they will line up as the economic fighting force of the working class, and they will use their numbers, their might, and the justice of their cause politically through the Socialist party.

Chaotic China

settlement of the revolution in China. UT little progress has been made toward

At Shanghai, Wu Ting-fang, former minister to the United States, reiterates the opinion that so far as South China is concerned, the only acceptable solution of the present problem is to be found in the establishment of a federal republic. This state of affairs leads many of the newspaper commentators to predict the disruption of the empire through the acceptance of a constitutional monarchy by the northern provinces and the erection of a republic by the provinces within and below the Yangste Valley. Yangste Valley. The Philadelphia Inquirer thinks that it is too early to despair of finding some way out of the present difficulties. It sees in the conciliatory attitude assumed by certain revolutionary leaders an opportunity for the reëstablishment of peace and order. To quote:

General Li is willing to acquiesce in the establishment of a limited monarchy with Yuan Shi-kai, or some other equally satisfactory Chinese, as the chief executive, and stranger things than that have happened. In the meanwhile, Yuan has scored again in Prince Chun's abdication of the Regency. It was Prince Chun who, shortly after the death of the Dowager Empress, dismissed Yuan Shi-kai from the Imperial Council and sent him into exile. The latter's position will naturally be strengthened by the elimination of his most influential enemy.

What Yuan wants more than anything else just now, however, is money, and if it is true that the powers are inclining to sanction a loan, his chances of success will be improved materially.

T

HE immediate birth of a new civilization and a new democracy may be the result of woman suffrage, if we are to believe the facts set forth by Ralph W. Crosman in the Twentieth Century Magazine (December). Mr. Crosman, with his ear to the ground, hears the steady tread of the women of the nation, equipped with the ballot, marching to the scene of conflict with no uncertain purpose, the purpose of routing the "vast masses of men" who have stood in the way of the democratic ideal.

After a careful consideration of all the possibilities, the writer is convinced that the women will not join either of the regular political parties. "All signs indicate," he declares, "that they will plunge into the sea of political sovereignty through the channel of pure democracy." And if they do, "all the ancient barriers of conservative republicanism-aye, even the seasoned and sacred bulwarks of the Constitution so far as they bar the way to fundamental human rights and justice, will go down and out the runways of the world, as the toy dam goes out before the mountain torrent of a spring freshet." To quote further:

More than seven million women are workingwomen, competing with men in the industrial world. There are three hundred thousand in New York City alone. This is more than the majority of the whole female electorate. And the workingmen and women of the nation are the body and soul of the new democracy.

That fact alone-the fact that more than half of the coming tide of women's political power is headed straight for the industrial world-would settle the question (if there be a question) as to whether the women will throw their vote for a purer demccracy

or a reactionary republicanism. The male friends of democracy see this; socialists and labor leaders and organizations throughout the world have declared unequivocally for woman suffrage. These men and organizations are the very incarnation of the new democracy, and they are quick readers of the signs of the times. That they universally favor woman suffrage, is highly significant.

What of the results in states where women vote? Have they shown democratic or anti-democratic tendencies?

In the first place, the very fact that woman suffrage and the new democracy are springing most vigorously from the same soil in the far West is a strong indication that both movements are identical or related in nature; and an actual analysis of the

legislation for which women are responsible in these

states bears out the indication. The women of the state of Washington have consistently voted right on the referendum and the recall.

Judge Lindsey, of Colorado, says in this connection: "We have the most advanced laws of any state in the Union for the care and protection of the home, the very foundation of the Republic. We owe this more to woman suffrage than to any other one cause." It might be said that it is natural for women to exert their political power in matters relating to the home, and that the fact that they do so does not indicate that they would vote along progressively democratic lines. But nothing could be more democratic than questions dealing with the safety of the home and the protection of the weak. This is the essence and aim of all the new, broad movements for a purer democracy. It is because our half-enfranchised, our weak (because longdrawn-out) representative system of government allows vicious and special interests to prey upon the home, directly or indirectly, by permitting unequal distribution of the results of labor and unequal opportunity, that the spirit of a purer democracy is asserting itself. And it is because it is natural for women to exert their political power on forces and conditions centering in the home, that they will easily and at once become the inspiring and resistless champions of the new democracy.

IF you have been in the habit of regarding

IT

the manufacturer's plea," Beware of imitations!" as a more or less supererogatory warning, you will find some disquieting revelations in Mr. Isaac Russell's article on label-faking, Pearson's Magazine (December). The practice of label-faking, according to Mr. Russell, has sprung up within the last few years as a result of a growing tendency on the part of the American people to refuse to accept mere fair words and specious promises as a guarantee of quality, and to put their trust only in the labels of manufacturers who have proved themselves reliable. No longer able to foist their goods upon the public under labels of their own, the manufacturers of inferior articles have been forced to devise other methods of getting rid of their products, and the practice of label-faking has been the result.

Although still an infant industry, labelfaking as a business has, nevertheless, already attained fair proportions. "From a single manufacturer," writes Mr. Russell, "one who puts out vast quantities of goods used on the table of the average householder-I learned that his experts figured that if the company itself sold 60 per cent. of the goods consumed under its label and trademark, then the company could consider itself lucky." And the following passage gives an idea of the comparative openness with which the business is carried on:

An enterprising young manufacturer of the Middle West has built up within the past five years a thriving business in four articles, one of which is a little slip of paper containing the familiar words, "The contents of this bottle are fully guaranteed under the Pure Food and Drugs Act." The other three articles are labels, made after the fashion of any desired manufacturer of bottled goods, corks branded with the maker's name, if so branded in the originals, and "capsules" to fit over the corks, as a final "hall-mark" of trade sincerity.

The price for his goods was two dollars the dozen for "outfits"-composed of labels, capsules, pure food law guarantees and corks. Thus, at a very

modest outlay, any person in any dark cellar of the country might easily become his own manufacturer, with a stock of goods ranging from high-priced brandies to Hostetter's bitters and Martell's cognac.

Articles of food and drink and cigars have come in for the largest share of the labelfaker's attention, but he has not confined his operations to these fields.

A certain New York department store has held bargain sales for Worth and Drecoll gowns in its day, and many a girl from an inland city has taken one home, firm in the belief that she has purchased a genuine article. To back up her faith she has found stitched into the waistband of the petticoat a well-made silk ribbon on which the name of "Worth" has been printed in gilt color, or the name of "Drecoll" has been woven in.

"

And the disillusionment-which has probably not reached most American buyers of "imported' gowns comes when the solemn figures of the New York Custom House have been produced, showing that more "Worth" and "Drecoll" gowns have been up for sale at single bargain-counter offerings than the importations amounted to for the whole year for all American buyers.

"A trade custom as old as trade," was the plea of the merchants when they were caught at this particular practice, and the East Side weavers who made their "Drecoll" ribbons up for them by the roll were ready to give testimony. "Settle it out of court," was the instruction given to their American representatives by the European tailors concerned when the doubtful opportunities of a civil suit were outlined to them.

This "Settle it out of court" is, in Mr. Russell's opinion, the most discouraging phase of the situation. It means that the manufacturer whose reputation has been used to protect inferior articles is not so much interested in bringing the practice of label-faking to the attention of the consuming public and insisting upon drastic measures to stamp it out as he is in protecting his own individual trademark and receiving compensation for his own individual loss. The result is that no systematic attempt is being made to check the practice. Certain states have, to be sure, passed laws against it, but, as Mr. Russell points out, state laws cannot meet the situation. "No state law can protect the whole country by striking