by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations begun at a distinguished period and pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security. -Declaration of Independence. THE pressure of economic condi tions has an enormous influence in producing certain types of crime. Insanitary housing and working conditions, unemployment, wages inadequate to maintain human standards of living, inevitably produce the crushed or distorted bodies and minds from which the army of crime is recruited. The crime problem is not merely a question of police and courts; it leads to the broader problems of public sanitation, education, home care, a living wage, and industrial democracy. -Chicago Commission on Crime. * WE can protest loudly, burn red fire, wear buttons, march in parades, elect our candidates, hold our ratification meetings, install our representatives, and pass our laws. But after the noise has subsided and the people back on their jobs again satisfied with an election won, very quietly the supreme court judges by a vote of five to four have the will of the people, set aside. -H. H. Broach. THE HE arbitrary suppression of violence by force produces only resentment, which will rekindle into greater violence when opportunity offers. Violence can be prevented only by removing the causes of violence; industrial peace can rest only upon industrial justice. -U. S. Commission on Industria' Relations, 1915. DURING 1917 when the roads were under private operation, the railroad owners spent $690,000,000 for maintenance of equipment. In 1918 when the roads were under Federal control, the government spent for maintenance of equipment $1,110,000,000-an increase of 60 per cent. In 1919 under Federal control, the government spent $1,215,000,000 for the same purposes-an increase of nearly 80 per cent over the amount spent by railroads under private control. And it must be remembered that all of these expenditures were made at the direction and under supervision of the same men who operated the railroads under private control. THE scales of justice have in the past swung far in one direction— legislatures, courts, and administrative officers under the domination of corporations have grievously wronged the workers. There is grave danger that if the workers assert their collective power and secure control of government by the massing of their numbers, the scales may swing equally far in the other direction and every act of injustice every drop of blood, every moment of anguish, be repaid in full, not upon some obscure and humble worker, but upon those who now glory in the sense of boundless power and security. -U. S. Commission on Industrial Relations, 1915. THE strike of the six shop crafts oc curred, July 1, 1922, after the Labor Board had abolished overtime pay for Sundays and holidays, enjoyed for 30 years even on unorganized roads; after it established a rate of pay at $800.00 a year, though the Department of Labor fixed the bare cost of living at over $1,400.00 and a minimum comfort budget at over $2,300.00; and after 92 railroads had violated transportation acts or decisions of Labor Board and in 104 cases, these involved not only contracting out work in shops but also wage decreases, interpretations of rules and the right of employees to elect their own representatives. After the passage of the transportation act the railroads had refused to establish national boards of adjustment described in the Labor Board's provision as the central part of the machinery to decide disputes between the carriers and their employers. The roads made the negotiations merely formal, thus throwing on the Board an impossible burden of arbitration. -H. H. Broach. THE rich are 2 per cent of the peo ple and own 60 per cent of the wealth. The middle class, 33 per cent of the people and own 35 per cent of the wealth. The poor, 65 per cent of the people and own 5 per cent of the wealth. -Prof. Willard L. King. THE wife of a typical tenant farmer, the mother of 11 children, stated in her testimony before the commission that in addition to the rearing of children, making their clothes, and doing the work of the house, she always helped with the crops, working up to within three or four months before children were born, and that during all the years of her married life she had had no ready-made dresses and only three hats. The investigations of this commission in that rich and generally prosperous section of the country only confirm and accentuate the statements of the Federal Industrial Commission which reported in 1902. -U. S. Commission on Industrial Relations. * IN the war just finished, according to Historians, about nineteen millions died in battle or of wounds; probably 5 to 7 millions were permanently disabled. Yet we were killing only by "retail" where in the next war, we shall, according to the words of authorities, kill by the "wholesale." At the time of the Armistice we were manufacturing for the campaign of 1919 our Lewisite Gas. It was invisible, a sinking gas, which would search out the refugees of dug-outs and cellars; if breathed it killed at once. Wherever it settled on the skin, it produced a poison which brought almost instant death. Masks alone were of no use against it. It had 55 times the "spread" of any poison gas used in the war. -Will Irwin. PROTESTS, denunciations, condemnations and investigations will not enable us to obtain permanently the best articles which we use in every day life for just price. There is nothing that will accomplish this purpose except organization, and the co-operative movement is the organization that is designed to protect the workers in their relations with the merchants and the business men in the same sense that the trade union movement protects them from the employers. The two movements are twin remedies. If we had a thorough co-operative movement throughout America, comprising in its membership the workers thereof, there would be less need for official governmental food control agencies. -Committee Report Adopted by 1917 Convention of A. F. of L. THE ordinary stockholder in a large corporation actually occupies a less direct relationship to the corporation in which he is interested, has less knowledge of its actual operations, and less control over its management than the ordinary citizen has over local, State, and National Governments. -U. S. Commission on Industrial Relations, 1915. HUS the man who uses a deadly THUS weapon to protect himself or his home against the aggression of hired thugs has set in motion against him the whole machinery of the State, while the corporation which enlisted, equipped, and paid a private armed force, formed and used not for the maintenance of peace or the protection of property but solely as an economic weapon, is lauded as a conservator of peace, law, and order. Our laws deal strictly and effectively with those who contribute to the delinquency of an individual but the hirelings of a corporation may debauch a State of their own economic gain and receive only laudation from those who "sit in the seats of the mighty." upon the Esch-Cummins law. When the workers protest against the rulings of this Board and threaten to disobey its judgment, they are told they are fighting the Government. When the railroad managers decline to observe the Board's rulings and definitely set their will at variance with that of this august body, then the Labor Board bows its head and humbly repents its decision by ordering another investigation. -Anonymous. CONCERNING one successor of Lewisite Gas, an expert has said: "You burst a container carrying a minute quantity of the substance which makes the gas, at the foot of a tree. You do not see the fumes rise; it is invisible. But within a few seconds you see the leaves begin to shrivel." In the next war-unless we discover meantime some more effective method of killing-clouds of such gas will sweep over hundreds of square miles, not only eliminating all unprotected life, animal and vegetable; but sterilizing the soil for about seven years. We can reasonably feel that Lewisite and the gas beyond are probably no longer the exclusive secret of the U. S. Government. We had allies in the war: doubtless they learned the formula. Even if not, once science knows that a formula exists, its rediscovery is only a matter of time. And search is quietly going on in the laboratories of Europe, men studying new ways to destroy life. ΑΝ -Thomas Paine. N intensive study of wasteful methods in industry was made in 1921 by a group of distinguished engineers for the Federated American Engineering Societies. They did not attempt to set up ideal standards, but they did roughly assess the responsibility for preventable waste in six important industries as between management, labor, and outside contracts of firms. Unions exist in each of the industries studied. The engineers estimated that the responsibility of management was ranged between 50 per cent and 81 per cent, according to the industry. The responsibility of labor as large as one-third that of management. The engineers, of course, took into consideration strikes and lock outs; union rules and practices do not deserve a major share of public attention. -George Soule. ALL this run of national pretensions, wrangles, dominion, aggrandisement, chicane, and ill-will, is nothing more than the old familiar trading stock of the diplomatic brokers who do business in dynastic force and fraud-also called Real-politik. -Thorstein Veblen. BUT the most of the trouble lies in the conditions of labour. It is an idle dream to imagine that out of that soulless subdivision of labor which governs our mechanical methods of production, the old handicrafts can ever be developed again. Short of some catastrophic depopulation which shall restore the mediaeval relation between the area of the soil and the numbers that occupy it, the subdivision of labour will have to stand, and so long as it stands no man will complete his job from start to finish-he will only do a section of it; at best, and assuming the highest mechanical development, it will be a work of supervision. But mindless and soulless work no man can do with any joy. The terrible fact about the mechanization of industry is that productive work, the elementary condition of life, the very form of existence, which fills more than half of each man's waking day, is by it made hated and hateful. It degrades the industrious man, thrilling with energy, into a worker-shy slacker-for what else does it mean that all social conflicts culminate in the demand for a shortening of the hours of work? For the peasant, the research-worker, the artist, the working day is never long enough: for the artisan, who calls himself par excellence a "worker," it can never be too short. -Walter Rathenau. THE whole industrial arrangement is carried on without the force of productive intention; it is carried forward against a disinclination to produce. I have said that industry was shorn of adventure for the common man. Adventure in industrial enterprise is the business man's great monopoly. His impetus is not due to his desire to create wealth but to exploit it, and he THE the "open" shop is one which has been more confused in the public mind than any other having to do with labor. The confusion is partly due to a careless definition of the terms and to calculated misuse of them. It is also partly due to a statement of the issue as one of conflicting legal "rights." When a writer defends the open shop as one in which a non-union man may work, although collective bargaining with unions is practised, he is defending a situation which exists, with the full consent of the unions, on the union railroads and in other unionized industries. But he is not describing the situation which is desired by the anti-union employer who declares for the open shop because he does not want to make contracts with unions and wishes to keep organized labor from exercising any measure of control in his establishment. Many an open shop, though perhaps not closed to union members, is closed to union influence. To say that employees may organize but may not exercise their power to achieve the main object of organization-the regulation of hours, wages, and working conditions by collective agreement with the employer-is to make a meaningless concession. To say that the legal right of any man to make an individual contract of employment must be protected, while admitting that employees have a right to organize and bargain collectively, is to state two rights which cannot be reconciled if either is to be universally exercised. -George Soule. HE new order has brought the THE machine industry, corporation finance, big business, and the world market. Under the new order in business and industry, business controls industry. Invested wealth in large holdings controls the country's industrial system, directly by ownership of the plant, as in the mechanical industries, or indirectly through the market, as in farming. So that population of these civilized countries now falls into two main classes: those who own wealth invested in large holdings and who thereby control the conditions of life for the rest; and those who do not own wealth in sufficiently large holdings and whose conditions of life are therefore controlled by these others. -Thorstein Veblen. THE SONG OF THE WAGE SLAVE* By Robert W. Service WHEN the long, long day is over, and the Big Boss gives me my pay, I hope that it won't be hell-fire, as some of the parsons say. And I hope that it won't be heaven, with some of the parsons I've met All I want is just quiet, just to rest and forget. Look at my face, toil-furrowed; look at my calloused hands; Master, I've done Thy bidding, wrought in Thy many landsWrought for the little masters, big bellied they be, and rich; I've done their desire for a daily hire, and I die like a dog in a ditch— . . . I, the primitive toiler, half naked and grimmed to the eyes, Sweating it deep in their ditches, swining it stark in their styes; Hurling down forests before me, spanning tumultuous streams; |