to the poorhouse, ought to have $5,000 damages. If we can get a few more decisions like this, perhaps railroad men will have the same liberty to work that printers, carpenters and other mechanics have. What would the world think of an agreement between master builders that made it impossible for a carpenter to ever secure employment at his trade again if once discharged by a master builder ?

Old Age Insurance in Holland.

From an official report issued by the Netherlands authorities, it is learned that a royal commission appointed in Holland by a decree dated July 31, 1895, has just reported on the question whether it is desirable that legislation should be enacted conferring a claim to pecuniary help upon workpeople who are permanently unfitted, owing to old age or invalidity, to provide for their own support, The commission has reported in favor of a system under which all wage-earners (including clerks, etc., and domestic servants) of sixteen years of age and upwards earning less than 1,000 guilders ($402) per annum, should be under legal compulsion to insure against invalidity and old age.

Without drawing up any scheme in the form of a legislative proposal, the commission agreed upon the main features of the insurance, and these may be outlined as follows:

The cost of the insurance should be borne equally by employers and employed, but during the first years of the operation of the law, the state should provide a certain amount of assistance. The old age pension should become payable at the age of sixty-five, after the payment of at least 1,000 weekly contributions in at least twenty different years. A pension for invalidity

(which is defined) should be obtainable after at least 150 weekly contributions had been made in not less than three different years, the waiting time for old age, but not for invalidity pensions to be reduced for the earlier years of the operation of the law. The rates of contribution and pension should vary according to the wage-class to which the insured person belonged, five wage classes being proposed, viz.: persons receiving (1) 250 guilders ($100.50) per annum or less; (2) over 250 guilders up to 400 guilders ($100.50 to $160.80); (3) over 400 guilders up to 600 guilders ($160.80 to $241.20); (4) over 600 guilders up to 800 guilders ($241.20 to $321,60), and (5) over 800 guilders up to 1,000 guilders ($320.60 to $402.00). It is proposed that there be a certain insurance institution for the administering of the laws.

Expansion and Consumption.

It seems that the Manufacturing interests of the United States do not advocate imperialism and expansion because these radical departures from the principles of the American Government are intrinsically good, not because they are tired of a purely republican form of government, but because "we have greater power to manufacture than to consume." The natural conclusion of an uninformed person upon hearing such a statement would be that the American people are surfeited with the good things of lifethat they manufacture more goods than they (the American people) can consume, and therefore other nations will be seized and held by force of our naval and military strength, so that they will be compelled, by laws of our own making, to use some of the overflow from the homes of the Americans.

Two of the leading advocates of the imperialistic policy of expansion, leading citizens of New York City, have recently written a joint letter to President Gompers, of the American Federation of Labor, in reply to his arguments against the adoption of a policy which Mr. Gompers believes will degrade American labor. In the American Federationist for December, Mr. Gompers answers the theory they advance that the greater the expansion the greater the consumption of American goods:

I am astounded at your statement that

"we

because of the enormous increase in our productive capacity, which steam, electricity and machinery have given us, have greater power to manufacture than we have to consume." If you are really of that opinion, I would suggest that you go to the East Side" or the other tenement districts of New York City and of all the large cities of our country, to the industrial towns, the mining districts, and see the squalor and misery resulting from the poverty there existing; see the men, women and children poring over their work long hours every day; go to our textile centers and see their women and children working, while husbands and fathers are walking the streets in idleness; see the numbers of idle, hungry and ragged men walking the streets and the highways and byways of the country. Ask the Chief of Police of New York, who recently ordered the arrest of the city's idle and poverty-stricken homeless people; ask the uniformed clubbers, who brutally maltreated and maimed a half hundred hungry men for the heinous offense of partaking the charity of a cup of black coffee and a piece of stale bread; ask the Organized Charities whether the people have reached the limit of their power to consume the product of our manufactures; and then, if you receive an affirmative answer from all, you will have some semblance of reason for your statement that "we have a greater power to manufacture than we have to consume."

I realize that we are not living in an altrurian age, and that commercialism requires expansion in trade; nor are we op

posed to such expansion. But, I insist that it is not necessary for us to violate the founded; to throw to the winds the declaraprinciples upon which our Government is tion that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed; that it is not necessary that we shall become a nation of conquerors; a nation founded

upon physical force; that it is not necessary that we shall subjugate by the force of arms any other people in order to obtain that expansion of trade. That trade does not always follow the flag is borne out by the evidences right at our hands; the flag of England floats over Canada, that of Spain did, until recently, over Cuba, the South American Republics are paractically our wards, and in each of these instances

the reverse of the proposition that "trade follows the flag " prevails.

The Wages We Will Annex.

Mr. Charles A. Whittier, Collector of Customs at Manila, in an official report to the United States Treasury Department says of the Filipinos, with whom American workingmen are to be brought into competition by the bosses. who control or mold public opinion:

The inhabitants are unique; the natives clean and clever; the Chinese more active and persevering; all beasts of burden accustomed to little in the way of pay or food or shelter; we pay a house servant who works most satisfactorily ten dollars a month, equaling four dollars and seventy cents of our money, he furnishing his own food. The irruption of our army raised wages temporarily to the great disturbance of the merchants here, but things are about restored to their normal basis, and should continue so unless some ill-considered change of the prevailing currency oc

curs.

The custom house receipts during our incumbency, twenty-four working days, amount to $606,000. With the increase of industries contingent upon our occupancy. they should amount within two years to $8,000,000 a year at least.

Mining explorations and ventures promise very well, especially in coal and iron. Capital may be profitably employed in the

The Great Paris Strike.

The Bulletin de l'Office du Travail, the French official labor report, makes the following statement concerning the great strike in the City of Paris in September:

The di pute began on September 13th, when 1,200 men, employed on the Western Railway Company's new line from Courcelles to the Champ-de-Mars, struck for increased wages. The movement rapidly extended to other quarters of Paris and suburbs, so that on September 15th the strikers numbered some 15,000, They demanded payment at the rate laid down in the Paris Wage-list of 1882, viz., sixty centimes (twelve cents) per hour, instead of fifty centimes (ten cents), the rate they were receiving. They also demanded the abolition of the system under which they were required, when being engaged, to sign an agreement signifying their acceptance of the rate of wages offered them. The reason why employers required such an agreement was, that the Council of Prud'hommes* when deciding a dispute between an employer and a workman as to the wages due to the latter, always obliged the employer to pay at the rate fixed by the Paris Wagelist of 1882, unless the workman had agreed to accept some other rate.

On September 17th, and again on September 23d, an invitation to the parties to discuss the matter in a conciliation board was issued by a justice of the peace. The workmen on each occasion accepted the proposal; but the employers gave no reply. On October 2d the workmen were officially informed that the employers had agreed to conciliation, but the men now refused the proposal. From October 3rd the strike extended to various other classes of work

The French Court of Arbitration, selected from employers and employes.

men, chiefly connected with the building trades, their main object being to show sympathy with the navvies.

On October 8th the Paris Municipal Council passed a resolution inviting the Prefect of the Seine Department to call on the city contractors to resume work within twenty-four hours, and failing in doing so, threatened to take over, at the contractor's risk, all the works not resumed. As a result of this decision all except two of these contractors, agreed to pay the wage detion of work began to take place from Ocmanded by the men, and a gradual resumptober 10th.

Since October 15th the workmen employed in the other building trades are reported to have practically gone to work, the last to do so being the joiners and plumbers.

Sailor Laws.

There's a screw loose somewhere in that part of the world which masquer ades as " civilized" and Christian" in order that it may gobble up everything that is uncivilized and un-Christian. The marine law is one of the loosest screws in the whole fabric. The following press dispatch from Philadelphia under date of December 9th is suggestive:

With a majority of his crew in irons, having mutinied. the British ship Jack Burrill, Capt. Robertson, hence for Sands, with 3,006 tons of coal, passed seaward. While outward bound the Burrill anchored at Brandwine Shoals, and while there began to leak slightly. All hands were set to work to pump her out, and while thus engaged decided to protest against going in the ship, on the ground that she was unseaworthy. After a most thorough survey, the ship was pronounced seaworthy. This was told the crew; but still they protested. Capt. Robertson faced the issue squarely. He sent to Philadelphia for a sufficient number of men to work the ship clear of the Capes, and went out. The crew, to a man, were in mutiny.

If the Christian nations insist on such laws for their own people, God pity the uncivilized tribes that fall into their grasp. Here is an old tub about to sink in

a harbor, and because the crew protest against going to sea in her, they are "put in irons" and taken back home to be punished for mutiny Should those sailors scuttle the ship before she was out of sight of land and save themselves by taking to their life-boats, they would be no worse than the people who make such laws-and this means the United States as well as England.

Settling the Labor Question. The United Mine Workers' Journal gives an interesting account of how the mine owners and other good people in the town of Providence, Webster County, Kentucky, settled the labor question. President Kissinger, of District 21, of the Mine Workers' Union, made a trip down in the state" where the meadow grass is blue," and this is what they did to him:

There has been a strike at one of the local mines in that locality for some four or five weeks. A strike that is justifiable to everyone acquainted with the circumstances connected with the case. The company is at present paying sixteen cents per ton less than scale rates, a rate that many of their direct competitors are paying, and concede to be fair. President Kissinger went there in the performance of his duties as the executive of the district, and after having a meeting at night retired to the home of the president of the local union. About midnight they were rudely awakened by the crash of bullets from rifles and shotguns into the frame of the house, a number of which had sufficient force to pass clear through the walls, and were found on the floor of the room in which Brother Kissinger had been sleeping. On arising in the morning they found the notice printed below:

To "Kitsenger"

Enclosed find our compliments. You are hereby commanded to shake dust of Providence off your feet, and if ever in the future you are found in the town of Providence you will surely meet violence in the roughest form from our hands.

"REGULATORS."

President Kissinger disregarded the notice, stayed and transacted his business before leaving, and it is encouraging and refreshing to know that had the gang of assassins come back the second night the reception would have been of the warmest, and by the same weapons as they carried themselves. The U. M. W. of A. means to transact its business in a peaceful, law-abiding manner. They are citizens, and as such are amenable to the laws of the United States. They have fully demonstrated their loyalty to its constitution. They wish to remain so. But if any authority neglects to do its duty by allowing armed and hired assassins to intimidate or bulldoze them from their duty and rights, then there is only one remedy left in all such cases, and that the extermination of the lawless gang.

Progressive Printers.

The members of the International

Typographical Union are, above all things, progressive, more progressive along some lines than is safe in most trades unions. It has been accepted by most labor unions that the working men have not yet become sufficiently advanced to permit of a discussion of "politics" in their meetings. The "politics" might affect the very existence of their organization, the issue drawn between political parties may affect the liberty of working menyet working men dare not discuss such issue, "for fear it will disrupt the union." It has been said that few working men know where they stand on such questions until after their party has met in convention and has instructed them what to think, and thereafter they will resent any criticism of the position of their party. The printers have decided to be bound no longer by such ideas, and at their recent convention at Syracuse, N. Y., the following resolution was adopted:

WHEREAS, An intelligent investigation of social and political phenomena is not only a duty imposed upon all mankind, but an