of the child, who is to be the future citizen of our city, state and country, should be the controlling factor in the determining by your honorable board of the necessity of a change in text books and the kind and quality of books to be used, with this qualification that, other things being equal, the independent publisher should have the preference over any so-called trust.

"The one feature of this question, which we feel called upon to comment on, is the insistence of the labor union element upon the use of the insignia of their organization, and the carrying of their fight against a so-called unfair publisher into the field of public business. Union labor in the city of Cleveland, which is the field of your jurisdiction, is a small per cent of the total working population, and therefore represents a very small portion of the people interested in this question, inasmuch as their judgment is biased by their union labor ideas, we do not believe their opinion should be taken as seriously as the opinion of a like number of unbiased citizens.

"Your honorable body is exercising a governmental function for the benefit of all the people of Cleveland, and a stipulation in your advertisements for bids on public work, which contained a provision that union-made goods bearing union labels only would be bought, would be illegal and render any contract entered into under such specifications enjoinable by any interested citizen. In other words, the business of furnishing supplies to the government, of which your honorable body is but an arm or branch, must be kept open to the whole public, and we stand for absolute equality and justice before the law for all comers.

"We hope you will be sufficiently possessed of the courage of your convictions to decide a question of this nature upon its merits, with the benefit of the public only as your guide, rather than the placating of a very limited number, as against the whole public, who are but seeking the furtherance of their self-interest and the spreading of their propaganda."

MUNICIPAL ICE Schenectady Patterns After Cleveland and Indianapolis --- Injunction

An avowedly Socialistic city administration in Schenectady, N. Y., is doing the very thing in connection with ice that the Cleveland, O., city administration has been doing as fish, and that in Indianapolis, Ind., as to potatoes; selling it cheap through a semi-municipal ice company in competition with private business. In Schenectady the attempt at Socialism has been met by a court restraining order.

Norton T. Horr, attorney, Cleveland, O., in the August number of THE AMERICAN EMPLOYER in an article entitled "Danger in Municipal Competition", pointed out that this sort of thing is "illogical, idle and foolish", to say nothing of its unfairness to business men and taxpayers of a municipality, and that it is opposed to the system of government in this country. Mr. Horr was discussing what had been done in Cleveland and in Indianapolis.

The Schenectady transaction was told as follows in a press dispatch:

"Claiming that the sale of ice by the municipal administration is for the 'purpose of advertising the Socialist administration,' and that its sale by the city is illegal, wrongful and unauthorized by the second class cities law, David V. Maxwell, a groceryman and ice dealer of this city, yesterday obtained an order restraining Mayor George R. Lunn and the city officials from selling or authorizing the sale of ice by the city.

"The Socialist administration put in a large supply of ice last winter, with the understanding that it was to be sold to the poor at cost of harvesting. However, since the hot weather arrived, the city is peddling to every one at 25 cents per hundred pounds.

"In his injunction suit, Maxwell swears that public moneys are wasted for the purpose of advertising the Socialist administration of the city.

"He asks that John L. Meyers, controller, and Phillip Andres, city treasurer, be compelled to pay back $1,500, paid out in connection with the ice business."

Organization

There was a story in the Saturday Evening Post of June 29, 1912, that every employer of labor ought to have read. Its title was "The Rise of the Junior Partner". Edward Mott Woolley was the author. The story was about a department store, but it applied to factories just as well, because it told the fundamentally necessary tale of effective business organization; how the business man can get results out of the men and women who work for him.

The junior partner went to work in the department store when quite a boy. He drifted along on small salaries until he was 23 years old. Then he woke up and in one day or another made himself so useful that in course of time he became a partner and a man of moderate wealth. The secret of his success was that he organized the store so that the business got the best that there was in every man and woman in it.

In every business there are the men who try to keep newcomers down. Here is what a co-worker said to the junior partner early in his clerkship

days:

"I seen you showin' that new kid how to do things," said Freckled Squint threateningly. "Don't you know you're cuttin' your own throat? If you learn the new kid he'll get your job away from you. Never learn nobody nothin'! That ain't the way to play the game. Just learn yourself, then the old man can't fire you, 'cause there won't be nobody 'cept you to handle stock. See?"

In the August number of THE AMERICAN EMPLOYER was an article by Mr. J. H. Smith, president of the Corporations Auxiliary, Co. of Cleveland, O., entitled "Business Waste is

Hard to Detect", which told among other things, how employes withhold information that would be of benefit to their employers. In confirmation of this, read about Miss Birdie McNulty, of the toilet goods department, in the junior partner's story:

"One day a morning newspaper had an article in its beauty column, advocating the use of a face brush with bristles of a certain material. A brisk demand sprang up that day for brushes of this sort, but there wasn't one in stock. 'If the old man was wise to it,' remarked Birdie to me with a wink, 'he'd get in a lot of those brushes on the double quick. I could have sold a hundred of them todaybut you can bet your last cent I'll never tell him.'

"It was evident, you see, that the toilet goods section wasn't paying as well as it might, and never would so long as Birdie McNulty and her satellites were there-and so long as the 'old man' was in charge of it. This old man was the department manager; in reality he was a young snip of a chap who clapped his hands loudly at the girls and went about like a peacock. Everybody hated him and he hated everybody. You see, he was getting only a hundred and twentyfive dollars a month and was always looking for a better job, which he couldn't find."

"Well, I've told you this incident of the face brushes merely because it was a typical one. Birdie McNulty, you see, had a concrete selling idea, but she kept it carefully concealed. She knew how the store might sell a certain lot of goods, but the store never had the advantage of her knowledge. This was happening right along all through the establishment. Every

day a thousand forces were operating within our own organization to hold the business down and counteract a thousand outside forces that struggling to make it grow.

were

"The singular part of this situation, as I look back upon it, lay in the fact that it existed without the proprietors of the business knowing it. However, the same situation exists today in many a business. The poor organization is the one that doesn't get the knowledge and ability of the men and women who compose it. The greatest thing in business, as I look at it, is the organization that works shoulder to shoulder to boost things along."

The junior partner, when he did. wake up, seemed to be inspired with the true genius of business organization understanding. Here are some

of the things he says:

"I was just coming into that wide, keen vision that was destined to show the way to success. Sometimes an employe becomes broader than his boss; that's the best time to hunt a new job."

"When a merchant has a stock that lacks life of itself, he should use the oxygen treatment upon it. If necessary, he must use artificial respiration until it breathes. A successful business, like a successful book, must have a peculiar faculty of gripping the human mind. If you punch a man in the side when you pass him on the street, he'll stop short; so, if you punch a customer with a selling idea he'll slow down in his race for your competitor's store and shy round into yours."

"Once I spent half a day with a friend, who was stage manager for a forthcoming spectacular musical show. I stood in the empty pit of the theater and watched the first rehearsals. The thing was all a jumble. Afterward I saw the finished production, in which each person knew his or her part; and the whole moved like an automatic machine. I know a great many business houses today that are only rehearsing. Their organizations are mere jumbles, in which few of the actors know the right steps or fig

ures.

Worst of all, their stage man

agers don't know the turkey-trot from the manual of arms."

"Almost everywhere I go I see men and women out of place in their jobs. Once a young man applied to me for a position as elevator conductor in our store. He had worked three years in that capacity in a large wholesale establishment. I was struck with his pleasant atmosphere, and his clear, convincing manner of talking. 'You

don't belong in an elevator,' I told him, and gave him a salesman's job in the shoe department. Today he is the manager there. The wholesale house might have made a high-class. salesman of him, but it kept him out of the running and, I have no doubt, sent out more than one road man who ought to have been in an elevator. In building an organization the thing to do first is to pick your raw material intelligently and put that material where it can do its best work."

"I put in a new manager because there was not hope for the old one. There isn't any use trying to make a club-footed man toe out."

"The ideas that remain on ice in the brains of the average business will surprise you if you get the sawdust cleared away. Some business men try to club out the ideas with a bludgeon, but the modern organization manager gets them coming naturally."

"You know that in many business establishments the chief weakness lies in the sales force. The goods may have all sorts of fine qualities, but if the salesman isn't able to talk intelligently the initiative of the factory is largely wasted. So, too, is the splendid selling machinery one often sees in establishments where the human element is 'way below par. I often think of this when I go into business houses and see the fine buildings, the attractive fixtures, the smooth running elevators-and the human organization that isn't half organized."

Sympathizers

In connection with the street railway strike in Boston, June 30, rioting attributed to "sympathizers" resulted in the death of one man and the minor injuries to a dozen more.

UNIQUE STRIKE Workers on Chicago Newspapers Trouble

some--- Newsboys Join

a

One of the most unique features of a newspaper strike, which is, in sense, still on in Chicago, was the fact that the newsboys and corner boys joined the strike and served. notice on the Chicago local of the American Newspaper Publishers' Association, that they intended to regulate the price they should pay for papers and other matters connected with their dealings with the eight large daily newspapers of the "Windy City".

The funny part of it is that the boys have no business with a union under the rules of the American Federation of Labor, with which the printing trades are associated, because they are merchants. The newspaper publishers of Chicago are ignorant to this moment whether the Chicago labor federation authorized the formation of the boys' union, but they laughed at the boys when they presented their claim and seriously informed them that if the matter got up to Samuel Gompers, Esq., that learned laborite would have to turn them down, because the federation rules strictly forbade merchants forming unions.

Of the eight Chicago newspapers connected with the Chicago local, two are owned owned by William Randolph Hearst. Hearst's contracts with the various unions with which newspapers have to deal differed a little from the other contracts and expired at a separate time, to wit, May 1, 1912.

The trouble began with the pressmen on the Hearst papers. Hearst submitted to the association that he had a right to the same contract with the men the other papers did and the association agreed with his viewpoint. There was some dickering between the publishers and the pressmen up to May 1, but the thing culminated, when, at midnight of April 30, Manager Lawrence, of the Hearst papers, went down into his press room, told the pressmen that he was standing on the same sort of a contract that the other Chicago papers had, his contract having expired. The association had,

meanwhile, vetoed a number of the pressmen's demands. Lawrence was very reasonable and had three or four suggestions to make to the pressmen as to how he could keep all the men at work one way or another, but the men walked out.

The Publishers' Association took the position that pressmen having struck in one plant had struck in all. This gave rise to the cry later on that the Howpressmen had been locked out. ever, the publishers assert that they just struck.

Following this, the stereotypers gave The . notice of strike, and struck. stereotypers have an agreement with the publishers, one clause of which says, that the agreement may be declared null and void in case of a strike or a lockout of another union affiliated with the Chicago Allied Printing Trades Council, and the stereotypers stood on this, although a later sentence in the same section shows that any such matter shall be referred to arbitration at the request of either party. The publishers claim, therefore, that the stereotypers have violated their contract.

They

Following this, the drivers struck. There were over 100 of them. had absolutely no grievance, the publishers say, declaring that the strike was purely sympathetic on the part of the drivers. One of the members of the Publishers' Association told a representative of THE AMERICAN EMPLOYER that of the 100 or more drivers, who walked out, 40 were known thieves and that the union, habitually, when a driver would be dismissed for theft by one paper, would turn him over to another paper that had called for a driver.

The strike of the newsboy's and corner boys followed. In Chicago, at many important street corners the news venders set up wooden stands and go away from time to time, deserting stands and allowing a passerby to take up a paper and lay down. a penny, showing how thoroughly these boys trust the business men of Chicago.

For a week or so, the newspaper publishers of Chicago printed their papers with the utmost difficulty, issu