Northwestern States; No. 6, Southwestern States; No. 7, Inter-mountain States; No. 8, Pacific Coast States.

A team of workers for each district shall be supplied from the national and international organizations and the organizers of the American Federation of Labor. Each national and international shall forward to the officers of the American Federation of Labor, or such person or persons as the Executive Council may select for the management of the national campaign, a list of the organizers or speakers available for each district. The committee appointed for the national campaign shall add to these lists organizers of the American Federation of Labor available for the various districts. In addition speakers from sympathetic organizations promoting the same general purposes that supplement or coincide with ours, might be added to the teams. For instance, powerful and influential organizations have inaugurated for this year a nation-wide campaign for One-Day-In-Seven for all workers in industry and might be glad to assist in our movement, furnishing speakers on that topic. There are also many men in our country well known for their active participations in the movement to uplift humanity, protect children and the weaker ones. These no doubt would welcome the Labor Forward Movement and gladly give their assistance.

State. The work of inaugurating the State campaigns within the divisions shall be entrusted to the president of each State Federation of Labor, who shall send out circulars of the plan of campaign, with invitations to participate and circulars of information to the various city central bodies and local unions. The State president shall, from replies sent in, outline the State campaign route and shall co-operate with the national committee as to schedule and itinerary of the national teams through his State. The State president shall secure from his own State a State team or teams. It is suggested that he will find available material among State labor officials, labor men of State reputation, and factory inspectors. Perhaps the State superintendent of education might be glad of the opportunity to speak on compulsory education, or there might be some one interested in industrial education; some specialist on prison labor might be secured. Doctors, specialists in social and industrial diseases might contribute talks on the influence of labor on child development, on social hygiene, prevention of diseases, the care of the body to secure and maintain the best working capacity, etc.

The State president shall use every endeavor to arouse interest and enthusiasm in his State through personal presentation and appeals, through representatives and correspondence.

Local. When the central labor body, after careful consideration, shall determine to participate in the Labor Forward Movement, it shall appoint a local committee to work up interest and arrange for the campaign. This committee shall be made up of representatives from all the local trade unions, and shall in a body visit each local and invite it to participate in the city campaign. This committee must create and stimulate interest and enthusiasm.

In preparation for the campaign, let the city be divided into districts. The committee shall make arrangements for suitable rooms or halls in each

district. Expenses may be decreased by securing school buildings, churches, public assembly halls, local union rooms, etc. The Minneapolis plan for meeting expenses by the sale of buttons is most feasible.

The interest aroused by the personal visit of the committee to each local should be followed by subsequent information concerning the progress of the movement. The meetings should be well advertised not only through the press and placards placed in street cars and public places, but personal cards and invitations should be circulated. There is a value in having one card contain a list of the topics to be discussed at all meetings and the addresses of the meeting places so that each worker may choose the place most convenient or the topic of greatest personal interest. A certain psychological value is obtained by community of interest and conversation-centering attention and thought on one common interest-a mass psychology little understood but of great power. In addition to stimulating general interest and enthusiasm, each union should carefully plan for the rousing of trade enthusiasm and the extension of trade membership. Membership committees should plan for special activity.

All the unions should have cards or circulars printed containing general information of the advantages to workers which the trade union movement has secured. Committees of secretaries of the unions should be in a prominent position prepared to receive applications for membership. Blank cards should be furnished each member of the local unions, to be circulated among the audience requesting those who do not belong to the union to fill in their names, trades, and addresses. The cards should be gathered up during the meeting or deposited with collectors at the door. Organizers at meetings should request those workers who are not members of unions to remain afterwards for the purpose of organizing either a trade union or a federal labor union.

To interest the general public, announcement should be made through the press, and sent to organizations likely to be sympathetic. Invitations to co-operate, attend meetings, or give a hearing to some particular speaker should be sent to civic clubs, women's clubs, ministerial associations, etc.

The local committees may find available local speakers interested in some special phase of our work, such as educators, truant officers, juvenile court officials, physicians and other citizens interested in sanitation, housing, etc., settlement workers who know the needs of the toilers.

Each central body might follow up its own revival by selecting some convenient field not well organized as the object of special endeavor, send several workers to stir up interest, and then hold a series of meetings for trade union extension in that field.

It would be well for the division teams to begin in the South and West, and work toward the North and East. Each division campaign should end with a mass meeting in one of the largest cities of the divisions, where reports of progress could be made. This would stimulate a friendly spirit of rivalry. Perhaps a big central rally in New York City would be a most fitting climax and would focus the Nation's attention upon the Labor Forward Movement.

A FEATURE

OF JUDICIAL
INEFFICIENCY.

In one of the magazines now giving a qualified support to the recall of judges is laid down this principle: "There are two, and only two, just reasons for the removal of a judge-corruption and inefficiency." That assertion might be amplified, to the general benefit. As to the limits of inefficiency, there may be uncertainty. Is it inefficiency when a judge follows the narrow and technical interpretation of the letter of the constitution, in passing judgment upon modern social questions, instead of following the broader implications concerning the general welfare of the people, as based upon the spirit of the constitution?

All observers who have followed the involved new social legislation, in contradistinction to the simple old social legislation, and the litigation consequent on the former, can feel quite confident in forecasting as adverse the decisions of certain judges on latter-day social questions. Are these reactionary judges inefficient? Certainly, in their decrees they have shown themselves either incapable of understanding or intentionally set against the modern conceptions of the social duties of the State. In bringing their antiquated principles to the test of judgment on particular statutes they exhibit a stubborn adherence to the ancient and outworn, a course which marks a break with the spirit of the present times. Their narrow judgment, restricted views, and stubborn spirit may, in the opinion of our contemporary, be regarded as inefficiency. Their disqualifications might therefore form sufficient reason for the people living in the present to inquire into the efficiency of the recall.

Mr. Richard S. Childs, the secretary of the Short Ballot Organization, explains in Equity why the Ohio Constitutional Convention rejected the short ballot. He says:

"SHORT BALLOT'S"

SHORT-COMINGS.

"There were three distinct sources of opposition to the shortening of the State ticket, which should have left on the ballot only the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and State Auditor. The first of these elements was a group of prospective office-holders who were not willing to take their chances of appointment by the Governor. They preferred to go upon the ballot and trust to the obscurity thereof to slide them into office. Secondly, the labor delegates were opposed to the program without the Recall. The third party in opposition consisted of the farmers, who insisted that the State Dairy and Food Commissioner remain on the elective list."

Mr. Childs gives to the first of these "three distinct sources of opposition" a weight wholly beyond its deserts. That the Constitutional Convention of Ohio, which in the course of its labors brought to the front a sufficient number of propositions of a radical nature to bring upon it the condemnation of the conservatives, was seriously influenced by what could only be a corporal's guard of office-seekers is an assertion that needs much exposition to become credible. That the third "element," the farmers, were unwilling to so shorten the ballot as to deprive themselves of a direct

control of an office of the first importance to them is a fact which ought to convey its lesson to the short-ballot propagandists.

But it is with Mr. Childs' second "element," the "labor delegates," that we are concerned. If our information is correct, the Short Ballot secretary has assigned a totally inadequate reason for their opposition. The fact is the whole trade union "element" of the country has been paying due attention to the "short ballot" catch-phrase and has decided not to be caught by it.

That, in State, county, and city or town elections more offices may be put on the tickets than are logical or necessary to a well-organized lawmaking or administrative force, is a truth to which we all may readily bear witness. But from that truism to the proposition that a "short ballot" is as Mr. Childs and his associates seem to believe, very little short of a social panacea, is a leap in belief too great for the average voter to make. In their discussions, the labor men of the United States have been brought to the conviction that they need to hold a permanent, unremitting, and immediate control over certain officials, to the fullest extent of their voting power. The proposal that they shall give up that control, or cease demanding it where they have not yet acquired it, is to them not a reform in politics but a cheat and a snare-whatever the theory of its advocates.

In this magazine have already been given reasons, and sound ones, we believe, for Labor to retain in its hands at all times, and in all circumstances, the full force of its voting power over every official. The time is coming, it may be confidently asserted, when in all of our industrial communities, Labor will rule, just as it will in every farming community to the extent that the farmers in the Ohio convention protected themselves in the instance above cited. Labor does not intend, if we interpret its aspirations aright, to rule merely through having a certain proportion of labor men in office. It seeks to give effect to the wishes of the mass on every question important enough to warrant a referendum on it or an initiative to bring it to a vote.

A list of the offices which should at all times be under the control of the people has been printed in these columns. No reasons have been educed for shortening that list. Mr. Childs has had his opportunity to show, in reply, why those offices should be appointive and not elective. He has not done so. His article evaded this fundamental point.

In many of the proposed changes in government, which from time to time are advocated, there is a "something in it" to which most men assent. An unfortunate circumstance is that propagandists of any particular change. usually claim too much for its efficacy. They become mere propagandists, not judicial seekers of pure truth. At times, unconsciously, they go ahead stubbornly maintaining crudely formed propositions, not seeing the corrections of them suggested by their well-wishers, or at least of men devoted to reform as much as they themselves could possibly be. One of the merits of an interested public is that, on questions of government, which so long as not settled right must pester men, it lops off the unessentials of proposed change and gets down to the possible and the practical.

In this connection, we may assure the Short Ballot organization of the co-operation of organized labor, up to the point to which it offers a fair idea to the country. But the facts of its case lead us to suggest it has asked impossibilities of the voters at the very time the voters are insisting that they shall be the one source of power, continual and immediate. They have passed beyond the stage where they were only occasionally the source of power, with vague and indirect influence on law-makers and law-administrators. They will not allow their servants to be shielded from their vote.

CONVICT LABOR

From yet another source comes formal endorsement of a policy organized labor has been advocating and promoting. At its last conference the National Committee on Prison Labor adopted the following resolution:

AND

PENAL SERVITUDE.

"After one year of study, the National Committee on Prison Labor found the preponderance of evidence to be in favor of the State use system. After a second year of study and further investigation, the committee is in a position to declare as prejudicial to the welfare of the prisoner, the prisoner's family and the public, the contract system of prison labor. The committee therefore declares itself opposed to the contract system of prison labor and to every other system which exploits his labor to the detriment of the prisoner."

The material upon which the committee based its resolution has been summarized by Mr. E. Stagg Whitin in his book Penal Servitude. The author views the convict labor problem from these various angles: Economic, political, institutional, productive, distributive, educational, and remedial. The first sentence, "Will you buy me, sah?" a wail from an Alabama boy of eighteen, rouses the reader to keener perceptions of the fundamental evil inherent in convict labor-the slavery element. He says:

"The status of the convict is that of one in penal servitude-the last surviving vestige of the old slave system. With its sanction in the common law, its regulation in the acts of Legislatures and its implied recognition in the Constitution of the United States, it continues unchallenged and without question, as a basic institution, supposedly necessary to the continued stability of our social structure.

"Slavery was conceived as necessary to the stability of society until it was done away with. The world progress has been said to be based upon the conquest of the weak and uncivilized by the strong and supposedly virtuous. Plato could depict no state of ideal justice without a slave class. Justice today can conceive of no state without penal servitude, yet those same forces which overthrew the black slavery of a generation ago are today tending unperceived to limit and to change this penal form of slavery till it too may soon be considered with the historic past."

Changes in penal servitude have ever shaped themselves to conform to economic conditions, for "the economic value of labor of the wayward individual has ever directly effected the method of punishment." Offenders could not be banished or put to death when labor was needed for the galley, mine, or colony. Demand for cheap labor in manufacturing provided new industrial uses for the convict. In the United States, humanitarian public opinion rebelled against the death penalty for slight offense, against the promiscuous huddling of convicts, and demanded that the State should