wim gamung facilities. In such crowded quarters families consisting of father, mother and from Eve to eight children are compelled to live. . . Fall 30 per or of fuil sumber di strikers are minors, many of them boys and girls under 17 gears, in many cases entire families are employed in the same mill. Most of these Cren receive less than $3 a week."

Prof. Scott Nearing's work, fresh from the press just before the Lawrence strike, shows that half the adult female industrial workers of Massachusetts earn less than $366 a year; three-quarters earn less than $459, while only one in fifty earn more than $686.

The employers' pay-book investigator and personally conducted visitor to model tenements is a worthy companion to the traditional "car window observer." What would a weekly "average of $9.24 for men, women, and children" entered in the account books of a single mill signify? Averages are mightily strengthened by counting in the salaries of the best paid employes. Unemployment counts for nothing in the book figures. The mill itself might be representative of the more skilled class of workmen. How as to fines, suspensions, discharges, all of which reduce net annual earnings? Professor Nearing has computed that 12 per cent must be deducted from average weekly earnings for unemployment alone. If, then, there are lopped off the exceptional experts, fore-workers, and supervisors, and all the other due allowances made which experience at the end of every worker's year shows to be necessary, one would not be far from the strikers' own stated average of $5 to $0 a week. A correspondent of the Survey saw fifty envelopes of Italian operatives. Only two of them showed more than $7 a week. They mostly averaged about $6. A committee of the National Association of Wool Manufacturers recently prepared a table of statistics from figures furnished by the manufacturers, for the familiar purpose of comparing high wages in this country with low wages paid in England and on the continent. In the worsted spinning mills the greatest percentage of the employes are spinners, doffers, sweepers, and twisters. The average weekly pay of doffers and sweepers, places filled by boys and girls, is respectively $4.50 and $4. Spinners, men and women, receive from $6 to $7 a week, and twisters $7.50.

Says John Martin: "Truly, anybody who has seen the underfed, ill-clad, stunted masses in Lawrence must laugh aloud at the argument that a high tariff protects labor in America against the pauper labor of Europe. The paupers have been imported, and at pauper rates are driving Americans out of the mills. Only about one eighth of the woolen and worsted operatives today are native Americans."

Here are some of the weighty facts regarding the Lawrence situation that need emphasizing: The bulk of the striking force are of the poorest class of recent immigrants-proof that Americans and Americanized foreigners will not work for the wages and under the conditions usual in the mills. The advertisements of stock sales announce that the Washington Mill has for twelve years paid 8 per cent dividends, rebuilt its plant and accumulated a surplus equal to $80 for each share of its capital stock, and that the Pacific Mill during ten years has declared an average dividend of

14.8 per cent and accumulated a gain in assets averaging a million dollars a year. In face of these comprehensive facts the mill-owners talk about the mills being unable to "pay the fifty-six-hour scale for the new fifty-fourhour week on account of dull business and unfavorable prospects.'

Points in the employers' game of bluff were the following: Dynamite was found attached to a freight train that had passed through Lawrence some days before. It was discovered in Philadelphia! In Lawrence, talk of dynamite being found here and there was started-just in time to get big. headlines in the Sunday papers. Even the daily papers, especially of Boston, found these canards too rank. Every few days during the strike the press announced the fact, as coming from the employers, that the mills had a full complement of hands-or almost so, or would have in a day or two. The mill-owners were hereafter to bar Italians, an announcement intended to throw the poor lavoratore into a panic. Among the "publicity" points in defense of the employers was the statement that they already had had two reductions in hours of labor without reducing wages. Whereon it was shown that they had reduced wages four times. As a matter of course, the conservative press had yards of ponderous editorials groaning over the losses of the strike-to the operatives.

The Outlook gives recognition to these views of the strike:

"It is said that the use of the militia was invoked, not for the purpose of suppressing disorder, but for the purpose of suppressing the strike; that the forces of government have been used to prevent the right of free speech; that the arrest and incarceration of Ettor can be explained only on the ground that it was thought desirable to put a dangerous man out of the way; and that arrests have been made without specific charges and without reference to overt acts, for the sake of creating an atmosphere of intimidation."

To which is to be added that the certainties are that henceforth strikers will send their children where they please; that few truth-tellers will be able to assert that our infant industries foster American labor; that the use of the militia as strike-breakers will be backed by a much weakened public opinion; that the workers, skilled and unskilled, will organize more thoroughly than ever, and that employers, as at Lawrence, may at times unwittingly help in this highly meritorious and humane work.

"I grant to the wise his meed,

But his poke I will not brook;

For God taught me to read,

And gave me the world for a book.”

-Jean Ingelow.

OFFICIAL ADVICE ANTICIPATED BY TRADE UNIONISM.

ASQUALA di Fratta, who a year ago became Italy's Commissioner

General of Emigration, announced recently (on the occasion of the opening of the normal department for training emigrant school teachers) the government's policy with respect to its half million emigrants who, to find work, go annually northward in Europe or set sail for Africa or North or South America. The Commissioner blocked out large plans of education for the working classes in Italy, including special methods of instructions for intending emigrants. Passing then to the life and customs of the Italian wage workers when abroad, he gave this advice:

"Emigrants ought not to go to those places where the labor supply is already abundant. They ought not to accept unfair conditions of work. They ought not to accept wages lower than the prevailing rate. They ought to mingle in the life of the country that welcomes them, respect its authority, obey its laws. They ought to unite and organize instead of living and working apart. Above all, they ought to join local trade unions, because by so doing they will most effectively remove the objections that are urged against them, and create a feeling of mutual respect and sympathy. And this would be the strongest form of protection."

This counsel embodies sound theory and good sentiment. Can it, to any appreciable extent, be carried out by Italy's State authorities? Or is it already being acted upon by other agencies? The fact that the Commissioner puts his counsel in the form that he does, suggests that he seeks to correct a long-standing neglect on the part of his government rather than to approve a course of recognized actions on its part.

Italian immigration to this country has been over-encouraged by our large industrial employers. The contract labor clause in our laws relating to immigrants has been notoriously violated. The newcomers seeking "unskilled positions" have been induced by the thousands to go to points. where there was little need of labor but where dividend seeking managers were bent on substituting the most docile and poorest paid labor for comparatively independent and well-paid labor.

This process went on until the channels of employment were choked up, the fact of unemployment a good part of the year becoming a feature of the immigrant's experience, and to thousands the struggle to make a bare living was but little less difficult than in the backward countries of Europe from which they had come.

It was in these conditions that our Italian immigrants among those of other nationalities learned one important lesson in self-protection. They began to organize in trade unions. They have been moving faster in this direction than their employers expected. Today some of them are exhibiting the spirit of unnecessary and reckless belligerency, and to some degree unreason, that often characterizes a mass of workers suddenly transferred from conditions of abject weakness, to the state of strength, their newly discovered power, found in organization.

It is a severe trial of moral fiber when men who one day are ordered about and otherwise treated as serfs find themselves the next day able through their joint will to confront, with equal force, their tyrannical masters. Through this stage the Italian wage-workers in several of our American States are now passing. They are of themselves and with the tuition of their fellow-workers learning the lesson practically which Italy's Emigration Commissioner says they should be taught theoretically. His advice on this point they may recognize as correct, even though it be somewhat belated.

The conversion in our country of our poorest class of South European laborers from serfdom to freedom is a social phenomenon in America most encouraging to all of our wage-workers. It teaches that there is to be no permanently degraded class of laborers in this country. The civilization of our masses forbids the thought. That civilization is practically expressed by them in the institution of trade unionism. In every place where the immigrant goes to work he finds that it is the trade union which establishes standards of wages and living conditions, which assimilates the foreigner in American life, and which sanctions and nourishes in the working class, thoughts of independence, mutual protection, and a democratic citizenship making for the common uplift.

THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST

THE MOLDERS' UNION.

OSSESSION of court records has enabled the International Molders' Journal (March) to be certain of the facts contained in an article it publishes charging criminal conspiracy to slug union molders against the Allis Chalmers Company in Milwaukee and the National Foundrymen's Association.

On February 19, 1907, Peter J. Cramer, of Milwaukee, a member of a strike committee of the iron molders' union, was murderously assaulted by private guards and strike-breakers in the employ of the Allis-Chalmers Company. As a result of his injuries he died December 10, following. Previous to his death, suit for damages on his behalf was entered against the company and various parties to the assault upon him. Through the facts brought out in the court trying the case, a wide-spread conspiracy, extending over a year or more, was shown to exist, having for its purpose the beating up of striking molders, the intimidation of persons friendly to the molders, and the creation of disturbances to be used as grounds for injunctions against the union men. After Mr. Cramer's death his widow continued the suit.

The company, realizing the weight of evidence against it and its agents, made settlement out of court, and efforts were made to prevent the records from becoming public.

A representative of the International Molders' Union was sent to Milwaukee to conduct an examination of the court records in the Cramer case and to investigate the many cases of serious assault on members of the local union who had gone on strike May 1, 1906, the most prominent shop concerned being that of the Allis Chalmers Company.

The union attorney's books showed that the number of assaults upon union molders was more than two hundred. In most cases the professional sluggers and gun men left the city immediately after attacking union men, the circumstances of their leaving suggesting collusion with the local authorities, but the attorney for the union succeeded in obtaining arrests and convictions of more than forty of them for unlawful acts. These included assaults of various guards on union men up to the murderous attack on Mr. Cramer. Two men who had been imported from Chicago by a strike-breaking firm testified that they received $20 a day for their services, their only work being to beat up union molders. They had been taken about Milwaukee so that the union men to be assaulted might be shown them. They were arrested with lists of union men's names in their possession who were to be slugged. They were deported by the city authorities. Many attacks of a cowardly and brutal nature were made by several strike-breakers on union men caught singly and defenseless.

The Molders' Journal prints columns of the testimony in court supporting its charges in many such cases and others. Its article concludes with the following passages:

With a solid foundation of evidence taken from the court records connecting the National Founders' Association, the Allis-Chalmers Company, and other foundrymen of Milwaukee, Wis., with the numerous and long-continued acts of violence toward union molders, it is necessary to take a wider grasp of the situation which had led to attempted murder, and a general reign of lawlessness for more than a year on the part of the private detectives and strike-breakers employed by the foundrymen, many of whom were also contract men with the National Founders' Association.

Previous to the Milwaukee strike, which began May 1, 1906, the National Founders' Association had adopted a spirit of bitter antagonism toward the International Molders' Union. This association had organized a secret service corps, and employed private detective agencies, as indicated by Herr's testimony, and borne out in the President's report to the association's annual conventions, in which at each recurring convention he boasted of the effectiveness of this feature of the association's activities. The National Founders' Association had also recruited a corps of strike-breakers, entering into individual contracts with them, which specified the wages to be paid for the period of one year, and requiring the strike-breaker to go from foundry to foundry as directed by the officers of the association.

These men were shipped to localities where there was a molders' strike, and used partly to fill the strikers' places, partly to intimidate union molders, and partly to furnish indications of lawlessness, which would enable the foundrymen to secure injunctions restraining the strikers from doing anything which might advance their interests.

In the winter of 1905-6 the association's Secretary, a man named Briggs, had issued a circular to all members of the National Founders' Association, copies also being sent to other foundrymen, informing them that the molders would probably ask for an