of Roman Catholic missions and those of several other religious organizations to get at the magnitude of American Christian Foreign Missions, and make still further additions to get at the amount of missionary activity carried on in the name and prompted by the impulse of religion. Notwithstanding the limitations of the figures presented by the Conference Committee of the Ecumenical Congress, they point to a social fact of such magnitude and to the direction that so large a fund of our social activity takes that they cannot fail to interest many and stimulate efforts to get more complete data. We reproduce the more important summaries as follows:

STATISTICAL SUMMARY OF FOREIGN MISSIONS
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD.
EVANGELISTIC.

Statistics of the Income, Staff, and Evangelistic Returns of Missionary Societies.

COMBINED TOTALS OF CLASSES I, II AND III.

WOMEN'S SOCIETIES.

(Special Summaries representing Woman's Share in the World Totals given above.)

Number of societies

Income from home and foreign

sources. . . . .

FOREIGN MISSIONARIES.

Ordained missionaries.

Physicians-Men.

Married women not physicians.
Unmarried women not physicians

Total of foreign missionaries

357 1,629 2,251

1 If the number of women's auxiliary societies (88), not included in the total (449) of societies given above under Classes I, II, III, be added to that number, the grand total of all the missionary societies of the world, both independent and auxiliary, will reach 537, but all other data in the "Combined Totals of Classes I, II, and III," remain as given above.

2 In reducing the income of European societies to United States currency, the English pound sterling has been estimated at $4.90, the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish crown at 26 cents, the Dutch florin at 40 cents, the German mark at 24 cents, the Finnish mark at 19 cents, and the French franc at 20 cents. Indian rupess have been reckoned at three to the dollar.

EDUCATIONAL

Statistics of Elementary, Academic, Medical, and Industrial

Instruction.

1 In the absence of definite information in the returns as to the sex of pupils in kindergartens, it has been estimated that about one-half are boys.

1 The following Hospitals and Dispensaries included in the 355 and 753 mentioned above failed to report statistics:

Hospitals. Dispensaries.

The Legal Status of Labor Organizations.-An important event in the labor world has been the recent opinion of Judge Truax in the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court, in dissolving an injunction which had been secured by the National Protective Association of Steam Fitters restraining the Enterprise Association of Steam Fitters and other organizations from interfering with members of the first mentioned organization in securing and retaining work. The court said that every workman has the unquestioned right to say for whom and with whom he will work, and that the employer has a similar right to say whom he will employ. The right, if it exists at all, is reciprocal, and if it is once destroyed, personal liberty is destroyed also. The implication of this principle is declared to be that neither employer nor employed, if possessed of this right of free action and free choice in their individual capacities, can lose it when acting with others clothed with an equal right. Employers may therefore refuse to employ members of labor organizations, and laborers, on their part, decline to work for employers who engage non-union men. As between two labor organizations, the opinion continued, it was entirely competent for one to secure the discharge of members of the other, in order to obtain places for its own members. The court did not follow out this line of reasoning to its logical end, and by judicial opinion confirm the legality of the black list. Such, however, is the plain implication of its statement that employers may refuse to employ men either as individuals or as members of a labor organization. Labor circles are not a little agitated over this decision, which, although enlarging the field of privilege for the unions, is, in their opinion, fraught with the most sinister significance in its enunciation of similar rights as belonging to the employer. If the rule of logic is to guide the decisions of our courts, we may expect to see the trade union dissolved as being a combination in restraint of trade, and as such plainly offending against the letter and spirit of anti-monopoly legislation. It is not at all certain that the unions whose restrictions as to membership and conditions of employment are burdensome and offensive not only to the majority of outside workers but also to many of their own members, would be able without substantial modification of their regulations in the direction of greater liberality, to secure sufficient popular support, to resist successfully such a direct attack by the judiciary upon their right to exist in their present form.

National Supremacy and the Tendency to Consolidation in the Iron and Steel Industry.-An interesting development in the steel industry has been the increasing vogue of open-hearth steel, which bids fair to surpass the Bessemer product in the world's produc

tion. In general, Bessemer steel is preferred for rails, wire, hoops, bars and sheets, where rigidity instead of tensile strength is the quality sought for. Open-hearth steel, on the other hand, is chiefly desired for its greater tensile strength and more uniform quality, and is therefore in demand for ship building. Until recently, although openhearth steel was produced in large amounts in Great Britain, the process was little used in the United States, as compared with the Bessemer process, the reason being the abundance of Bessemer ores in this country, and the greater cost of the acid open-hearth process, which could not extract the impurities from low-grade ore. The introduction of the basic process into open-hearth working, however, is rapidly changing these conditions. This enables the use of scrap and of pig iron of a poorer grade than is possible in the basic process, in which the excess of phosphorus passes into the slag.

The steel made by the open-hearth process, as just remarked, is more uniform in quality than Bessemer steel, to which indeed, for many purposes, on account of its lack of uniformity in texture, wrought iron is preferred. The deposits of low grade ore, especially in the South, are of immense extent, while the day of diminishing returns in the Bessemer mines of the Superior district is already in sight. For this reason the basic open-hearth process has, in recent years, made remarkable progress in the United States. The Iron Age remarks of the situation as follows: "It now stands so high in favor that new open-hearth plants are numerous and important additions are being made to old ones. The only addition to Bessemer capacity in a long time is the plant of the Republic Iron and Steel Company, at Youngstown, Ohio, now approaching completion, and even that is not strictly a new plant, but rather the re-location of an old works. The great demand for steel in the past year, which led to much activity in the erection of open-hearth furnaces, could not restore vitality to quite a number of Bessemer works which had been laid off during the previous depression." The decreasing demand for steel rails is doubtless an important factor in the substitution of the open-hearth process.

This remarkable change in the methods of the steel industry may result in certain readjustments of location and advantage which have not been generally noted. The field for the open-hearth process lies in the South where coal, lime and low grade ore can be more cheaply assembled than at Pittsburg or the lake ports. It will be nothing strange if Birmingham shall in time wrest the supremacy from the northern iron centres. Our international advantage in the iron trade is also lessened by this fact. Spain and Sweden are being rapidly depleted of their Bessemer ores, but the deposits of low grade ores are very