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constant control of their servants. How can this principle be applied to large cities? The trades unions, with the American Federation at their head, have already blazed the way by their use and advocacy of direct legislation through the initiative and the refer

endum.

If the referendum was in force, no ordinance, contract or other measure, after passing the city council, would go into effect under a reasonable time, which, in my opinion, should not be less than thirty nor more than sixty days for a city matter. If, during that time, a reasonable minority of the people should petition for its reference to a poll of the people, it would be voted on by the people after a fit time for discussion, and a majority against would prevent its passage. The percentage petitioning should be of such a size as to shut out merely crank petitions and to show that there was a need of investigating the matter, but it would be better to run the risk of an occasional unnecessary reference to the people than to make the percentage so large that it would be almost impossible to get a petition signed. In my opinion 5 per cent is about right.

This will stop boodling and the lobby, as the aldermen cannot be sure of delivering the goods. It will draw a better class of people into the common council, because they will then be above suspicion. They cannot sell a franchise or a privilege unless the people are satisfied with the conditions.

The referendum is negative, preventive. The posiative, constructive part of direct legislation is the inititive. If the initiative was in force a suitable minority of the voters could petition for any matter, and this petition would go before the common council, taking precedence of other matters. They would have to vote on it. If they did not pass it in a reasonable time, which, in my opinion, should not be less than thirty nor more than sixty days, it would go to a poll of the people. I think the same percentage should govern initiating petitions as referendary ones, that is 5 per cent. But these are matters of detail to be settled by local conditions.

The referendum alone would be of incalculable value but is incomplete without the initiative. As constructive is vastly superior to preventive work, the initiative is vastly more important than the referendum.

No legislation can be more direct than that of the New England town meeting. The initiative and referendum, by allowing the people to group and regroup, approving or rejecting any individual measure, applies the direct legislation of the New England town meeting in a perfectly feasible manner, to large populations. It would not often need to be used, as the fact that it could be used at any time would prevent the introduction of bad measures. The officials would be true servants of the people and not rulers.

The principle back of it is not new. The declaration of independence says all governments should be "by the consent of the governed." Direct legislation is a method of applying the very bed-rock principle of our government, the rule of the majority.

The plutocracy, which is rapidly gaining control, knows full well that it must advocate high and noble principles and then not carry them into effect. It is strong in opposing methods because they are not practical, or unconstitutional, or for any other reason than that it is the principle they oppose. It behooves all true patriots and lovers of their kind to go beyond the principle, to make sure of the methods in season and out, till they get them.

In conclusion, our city governments are rotten.

The life of the republic depends on our municipal governments. Democracy is not a failure in cities. Delegated responsibility is a failure. Democracy can be applied to cities, states and the nation by the initiative and the referendum, known together as direct legislation. Push the method.

The Situation To-day.

BY P. J. MAAS.

My country 'tis of thee,
Dark land of tyranny,

Of thee I sing.

Land where all hope is fled,

Land where they lack for bread,

Hang down thy guilty head,

Shylock is king.

This is the situation to-day. What is the cause of it? What is the remedy? It is as if a hypnotic spell had been put upon the very wheels of industry and paralyzed them to inaction. The cause of it all lies deeper than the majority of even intelligent people imagine. The remedy is certainly not in soup houses and charity wood sawing. There is a radical wrong when such panics as the present one recur at intervals of every fifteen or twenty years. To say that they are necessary accompaniments of civilization is foolishness, and wickedness as well. To say there is no remedy for them is still greater foolishness. There never was an evil that man by his intellect and conscience could not find a remedy for.

The Americans, above all other people on the globe, should have occasion to be proud of their civilization, their progress in the arts and their marvelous increase in population and wealth. God never gave a people so much to be proud of. But our civilization must not be judged by the splendor of our Carnegies, our Vanderbilts and our Yerkes, but by the average intelligence, comfort and well-being of the great people itself, in field, in mine and in the factory. The progress of civilization is to be gauged by the admission of an even larger and larger proportion of the population to that degree of prosperity which will allow them to live decent-laborious but yet comfortable-lives, and not to be crushed into mere soulless machines of toil. It is the many who toil and starve and suffer whose lot the labor union has at heart; it is the poor, the small, who cannot rise and assert their rights-it is those the labor unions assist; and I believe that the country is the strongest, the greatest and the most civilized which is covered with millions of modest but contented homes; not that in which the splendor of a

few hundred palaces is supported by the wretchedness of a million hovels.

Our extended domain, with its varied products and capabilities, is the wonder and admiration and envy of all the rest of the world. Every variety of soil adapted to the full development of all useful animals, with a climate suited to the growth of all cereals, fruits and vegetables; with an inexhaustible supply of coal, iron, ore, copper, lead, silver and gold, oil, gas and every other product which an advanced civilization may need. There is absolutely no limit to our material wealth. While no nation can be absolutely independent of all others, the United States comes the nearest of all to being self-sustaining. If all other countries were blotted out or were inaccessible to this country, we could still live and prosper. Our forests abound with timber, our rivers with fish, our pastures with useful animals, our fields with cotton and other textiles, water power on every stream, and other advantages which cannot be enumerated because of their great number. We boast of the best government ever instituted, schools, colleges, seminaries of learning, hospitals and infirmaries for the sick, disabled and the insane, churches of every faith and having equal rights and protection.

This young democracy, only past its first centennial, owes to labor its freedom, its progress, its independence. To labor it intrusts its future; on labor it relied to win its liberties; to labor it turned to defend them against foreign aggression. Labor overcame armed resistance to its laws. Labor pays its revenues. Labor perpetuates its glory. Labor extends the area of its agriculture. Labor sweats before its forges that its metals shall make it first among nations. Labor delves in its mines that fuel may be ready for the forge. Labor plans, devises, invents, constructs; to it more than to all other influences combined are the United States indebted for their stability and peace, and so it has gone on, making this country what it is the empire of modern times, the envy of the old lands.

Instead of fostering and developing our vast resources for the benefit of all mankind, and giving the man who toils an opportunity to enjoy the beautiful gifts of our common mother earth, without paying usury to those whose only claim is possession, and whose possession is maintained by a purchaseable law, our civilization has been made a gorgeous shell, a mere mockery, a sham, outwardly fair and lovely, but inwardly full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. Mankind is cultured and polished and capable of good, and yet above all is cruelty, craft and destruction, and below all is suffering, wretchedness, sin and shame. Toil, toil, toil from early morn until late at night; when home they swarm, tumble into their wretched beds, snatch a few hours of disturbed sleep battling with vermin in a polluted atmosphere, and then up again to work; and so on and on in endless, mirthless, hopeless round, until in a few years, consumed with diseases, mere rotten masses of painful wretchedness, they die. Such is the situation to-day.

The natural resources of this earth are the bountiful

supplies of the Father's table for all his children. The trouble that we see in the world, which is manifested by the superabundant wealth of the few and the grinding poverty of the many, is due to the fact that the Father's table, with its bounteous supplies, has been seized upon by the few to the exclusion of the many; and that the many, in order to get access to the supplies which the Father has provided in abundance for all, are obliged to work their lives away in paying tribute to the few who have appropriated the table and its supplies.

What the trades unions seek to bring about is, not an equal distribution of wealth, but an equal distribution of the opportunities for producing wealth. An equal distribution of wealth would accomplish very little good, and the same methods which have caused the present unequal distribution would very speedily reproduce the inequality, and, in the double transition, much wealth and energy would be wasted. If, on the other hand, the natural opportunities for producing wealth were opened upon equal terms to all mankind, labor would be free to produce what it needs, and thrift can be relied upon to preserve what it requires labor to produce. When the Creator placed man upon the earth he gave him the raw materials of all wealth, freely and bountifully stored up in the earth, but he made labor the condition of their procurement, and he made labor free to procure them at will. This was nature's plan of human happiness, and it is better than any plan that human ingenuity has ever sought to substitute for it.

There is incalculable undeveloped and remunerative employment for all in Uncle Sam's domain to-day. Why then should we be

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Industrial Education.

BY CLARE DE GRAFFENRIED.

Industrial education, as I understand it, violates no trades union principle and does not replace the apprenticeship system. On the other hand it helps, pieces out, rounds and finishes that practical instruction which lads get in the shop; opens new fields, creates new interests, refreshes and vitalizes book-learning, enables a young worker-or an old one, for that matter-to become more efficient, and multiplies his chances for employment.

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The children of laboring people as a rule go very little to school after their twelfth year. Of course exceptionally well situated sons and daughters are able to complete the grammar grades and enter the high school generally because some good mother works her fingers to the bone in order to educate her darling. But we all grant that eighty per cent. of the offspring of our working population gets very little schooling after the first communion," or in Protestant families after the twelfth to the fourteenth year. What then happens? The girls are launched into a shirt or a shoe factory, the boys into mills or iron establishments, to learn, not a trade-would that they could!—but a scrap of a trade at best, each little creature becoming a mere machine, doing automatically one thing only, and doing but that one thing to the end of their days or until the hard conditions of toil disable them. The girl sews up long seams by steampower machine. She cannot cut, nor baste, nor hem, nor make any garment complete. She is as helpless for other gainful pursuits as when she entered the factory; and, moreover, she soon forgets what booklearning she once had. Many of the illiterate young women whom I know at one time could read and write, but, sad to say, have forgotten how from disuse or because they were put to work too young.

And what becomes of the boy? He is not so apt to lapse into illiteracy as his sister is, because his life is more active and he touches the world at more points. But often he does forget the rudiments he once acquired, for he has nothing to improve or interest him after the day's toil is over. Soon his routine shop occupation is distateful or worse, a dreaded nightmare. He grows indifferent, stays away from work, drifts into bad company and, perhaps, becomes that sad object, a young tough, without ambition or reverence, soon finding an ignominious place beside hundreds of other misguided young fellows under twenty-five—in prison.

Whose fault? Partly that of society, which denied to him and his sister a truly useful training, and offered only the barren, unscientific methods of many of our public schools.

My plan would be to instruct both boys and girls to use their hands as well as their brains, from the kindergarten straight on; to instruct them to sew, to cook, to handle simple tools, above all, to draw. They should be helped to become creative and productive, not for money but for the effect on character. I would not teach either sex a trade in the usual sense, but

would teach them mechanic arts for educational purposes, for discipline. To develop faculty, reasoning powers, observation and accuracy, it would answer almost as well to let the males cook and sew-heaven knows they often need such skill in after life!—and the females hammer and plane, my object being to have the child do, as well as memorize; become an allaround being, not a little parrot chirping off by rote disconnected facts in geography and history.

Often parents would make a sacrifice to keep their child from work and at school if they felt that the child was really learning something useful, learning to be self-supporting. To encourage this tendency, I would have regular industrial classes open to boys and girls leaving the public schools, if we can't have those classes connected with our free schools. If no such instruction is to be provided, why keep the children out of the mills? Why pass radical labor laws forbidding young persons to work before the age of sixteen ? If they must not work, must they be reduced to the alternative of being idle and a burden, or of pursuing studies that will not help but will rather hurt their future career? Why not establish schools expressly to train children from twelve to sixteen, like the technical schools abroad and the girls' professional schools in Paris and in Brussels—all over Belgium, in fact? There the girls acquire, besides a moderate amount of book-knowledge, the arts of dressmaking, millinery, corset-making, laundry work, upholstery, embroidery, artificial flowers, metal and enamel work, inlaying, carving, china painting. With what result? First, just so many young girls are kept from competing in gainful pursuits with adults, thus raising wages. Second, just that many females are better prepared for any walk in life, whether marriage and home-making or to enter a trade. They are not ready to forego practical shop apprenticeship, but are only carried over the early years of unproductive drudgery—a time usually spent in running errands. Moreover, having learned to use their heads and hands in many ways, if one opening fails the young would-be wage earner, she can seize another.

Our boy of thirteen is forced, on quitting school, to help support a widowed mother. He enters an iron establishment's blacksmith shop as a boy-of-allwork, and in time becomes a helper. Unless of rare pluck and energy, he will be only a blacksmith's helper for many years, his small store of book-learning rusting from disuse. But suppose that, near where he lives or is employed, we open a school for drawing and wood and iron work, with a chance to see models and experiment at forges, and to hear about improved machinery. The classes are open at night and on Sunday. He goes there three or four times a week, instead of running the streets; he becomes interested, finds somebody to explain things, learns to draw and apply his drawings to what is being made at his shop, to sketch parts of machinery wanted for repairs, to draw new machines, perhaps learning the use of every part. He discovers that he must have some more arithmetic, picks up physics, and another winter enters the wood

turning class and makes his own simple tools. In every way, he improves as a worker. When he becomes a machinist's helper, he is efficient; when he gets to be a machinist, he is not a bad one, botching his task and dragging down his fellows, but a clever artisan, with all sorts of aptitudes besides, which gives him interest after working hours and makes him a happier man and a better citizen.

The so-called trade school at the Young Men's Christian Association in London, or "Poly," as it is termed, being housed in the old Polytechnic Institute building, aims to help a youth to supply deficiencies in his trade training; it does not aim to teach him a trade, any more than do the classes at the People's Palace. No young men go there at night professedly to learn a trade, in rivalry with the trades unions. But any young man, tied to an uncongenial trade, yet obliged to earn his living by it, may meanwhile test other occupations there, or may go and perfect himself in the pursuit he follows. Perhaps in his place of employment he has to handle a new tool, a new device; or he would be given higher-grade work if he understood certain principles. At night, he goes to the "Poly,” experiments with the new implement or gets himself taught the desired process; and soon he is advanced to better occupation. Besides, a boy coming for one kind of instruction sees other youths learning other branches, literature, chemistry, photography or engraving. Into one of these he plunges with delight. His evenings are henceforth all busy. Is such a lad, with such opportunities, likely to degenerate into a tough? Nowhere are industrial schools more needed than in small towns, where the mechanic arts are neglected, so that, to learn a good trade, a youth must leave his home, must be an exile. Or, if he practices any trade there successfully and that industry declines, having learned to do but one thing and the demand for that ceasing, he becomes unemployed, or else drops into the ranks of unskilled labor-in either case dragging down other workers. Manual training in the rudiments of several trades would enable him in such times of need to pick up quickly any one that offers.

In Belgium, some crafts support trade schools. The old guilds use their hoarded accumulations from mediæval times to maintain industrial classes. The typesetters started a school of their own, because they found that the workers of their craft were becoming more and more inefficient, and were unable to pass simple examinations. Wages were falling in consequence, skilled labor was being imported from other countries. Now, after a four-year's course in this night school, any young compositor who can pass certain examinations is entitled to journeyman's wages. Apprentices working in the printing offices by day attend this school at night.

Whoever would see how far ahead of us France and Belgium are in affording practical industrial training for their working classes, need only read the "Eighth Annual Report of the United States Commissioner of Labor."

Against Patent Rights.

BY C. CLAUS.

My object in this letter is to show that in my opinion all the people have a right to the benefits of inventions and machinery, even to the extent that they should be owned and operated collectively by the people. Inventions and machinery, singly or in conjunction, tend to displace manual labor.

Let us take the shoe-making industry for an illustration. Several years ago a large majority of shoemakers learned the trade in all its details by giving three or four years of the best part of their lives to become proficient at the business. Then every shoemaker was prosperous, and tramp crispins were unknown. The system of government suddenly changed and a capitalistic form was ushered in. The men who controlled the new government marked the epoch by giving the inventors of machines to make boots and shoes a 66 'patent right" on those machines for fifteen or twenty years. This, by all the powers of government, prevented any one else from using the inachine, and to that extent a monopoly of the shoe industry was forced and another nucleus formed for the propagation of capitalistic doctrine, the chief aim of which will be to secure a renewal of the patent right so as to perpetuate its glory.

If it is good to protect individual inventors by governmental process, why not protect the shoe workers by government who are thrown out of employment by the invention ? That men are thus, slowly but surely, thrown out of employment thousands of "tramps" in America to-day will attest. This illustration, although applied to the shoe trade, covers the case of nearly all skilled and unskilled labor, either in a direct or in a remote degree. Yet organized and unorganized labor, whether skilled or unskilled, by its vote supports both wings of the capitalistic class. The democratic party and the republican party are but factions of the capitalist form of government, who prate about protection or free trade on the stump so as to keep the ranks of labor divided. In one part of the country they are both for a gold standard, yet in another part of this same country they are both for free coinage of silver, showing conclusively that their purpose is to keep the ranks of labor divided and the masses in a contumely on side issues.

Under such conditions it is about time that the advanced wing of trades unionism enter the political arena and make a stand for the co-operative commonwealth.

There are other reasons why the people should own conjointly the machinery of production and distribution. When man invents machines to produce shoes, clothes, or any necessity which sustains life, or is in any way useful to supply the demand of the human family, he depends for the success of the machine upon the great public, of which the toilers constitute three-fourths, and without whom this machine would be a useless thing. Just to the extent that machinery displaces labor have the public a right to own it col

lectively, for the success of one depends upon the other. If this were done a reduction of the hours of labor would follow in proportion to the demand for work.

Some writers claim that we could not get along without capitalists. I deny the statement. If all the socalled capitalists in America were to leave we would get along without them, and in a short time, by a co-partnership of labor and land all the wants of our people would be supplied-a condition which would be a blessing to hundreds of families at the present time.

Not until labor owns and controls land and capital collectively will we have an end to strikes, boycotts, lockouts and want of employment in a world of plenty. To bring this about labor must become united in one grand labor party in every country, and all together form one great international movement which will make possible the complete emancipation of the masses in so-called civilized countries, or wherever wage slavery abounds.

Trained Rascals.

BY F. A. MYERS.

The moral perception of life is this: To help others. The commercial theory is this: To rob others. "In the busy haunts of men" the moral side of life too frequently gets a black eye. The vagueness with which the moral features of existence are treated in the business world and the loose impressions that are made on the minds of the rising captains of industry are matters for serious consideration. One whose moral habits are weakened by a false economical training is not only trained to be a rascal himself, but is qualified for abusing the rights of others. To such a moral dwarf there are no rights belonging to others; there are no rights but those that contribute to his own aggrandizement.

"Give full measure when you measure aught, and weigh with a just balance." This advice is given even in the koran. The moral is far older than Mohammed. In the outset of life, it is reasonable to suppose, the majority of young men are equipped with this golden commercial principle, but in practice they soon find it convenient to put the axiom away for future use. All the immoralities and outrages committed in the marts of civilized commerce finally fall upon the laboring man, as the chief consumer of the products of toil. A dealer may be honest in his intentions but dishonest in his practices, due to an imperfect set of moral rules upon the dusty shelves of his mind. He hesitates not in taking full money for an article, because he gives the buyer full quantity, but he is not self-condemned because he imposes on his customer an article inferior in quality. The man doing that is either a trained rascal or is naturally depraved. He fulfils the letter of the law as to quantity and clubs his conscience into insensibility as to quality. Of the two he commits the greater evil. In every line of trade it seems to be a cardinal rule to 'puff up" the goods for sale and to deceive the pur

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chaser into buying. In the fierce competition it is declared that this is necessary. But who suffers from

the rascality? The laboring man every time. As a mechanic, as a moral agent, and as an element of the business world he is injured. Perhaps the greatest commercial crime is this very common one of misrepresentation of goods. (We use the word “goods" here in the sense of a purchase of an article, a securing of a position, or a leasing of labor or of capital, or a promising to perform.) The clerks or agents may mean to be honest personally, but they are working for their employer's interests, and feel it no crime to misrepresent in order to secure his approbation and hold their job. The purchaser might, with a little stretch of imagination, read over every office door he enters this legend: All manner of deception practiced here for gain, the plain corollary of which is confidential robbery." There are men who think they are fulfilling every requirement of honesty when they balance the scales a little on the side of the dealer, but who neglect the greater consideration of quality. Their conscience, dwarfed, abused and stultified, "has no kick coming when they sell an inferior article for one of a higher grade. They praise their own shrewdness at being able to sell a poor article at a good figure. To "talk up a thing, and make a customer buy whether he wants to or not, is the work of a fine salesman. Thus, through the presentation of the good qualities only and an omission of the bad, men are induced into a venture, or a business, or a trade, or an exchange, or a pursuit, the evil qualities of which they discover to their sorrow are the losing side. Whatever else you may term this, it is swindling. The nomenclature diminishes not the evil. It is a conscious misrepresentation for gain. This commercial attitude has set every man on his guard, and reversing the old legal axiom he regards every man a villain till proved innocent. Can good come out of such a condition of mind? No, neither to the business man himself, who is weakened and dwarfed in his better nature, or to the laborers around him, who are imposed on through his moral deformity.

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There is no law to prevent this evil, but there ought to be. It is idle to say as an argument to this that you can't legislate morality into people. You can. It is done. All laws, in a sense, are moral checks against the animal in man. Then the question is justified: Is the government sparing the rod and spoiling the citizen? Is the moral element in character stupefied and left untrained? Is this due to the surroundings of the individual, or to the lack of proper home training, or to both? Is the education imperfect and bad, or is it neglected and allowed to take its own course and become choked out by the corrupting practices of every-day affairs, as weeds "take" the crop in the soil? In truth, these questions have been already answered.

Now, in view of this lamentable fact, the pessimist asks whether our boasted civilization is not a failure. He says that instead of being a nation helping one another we are a nation of commercial robbers, and

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