year or two after the first semaphore

signals had been erected on British railways, in 1841, a signalman was charged with the manipulation of two of them. To save himself the trouble of walking back and forth between the signal posts, he attached wires to both signals and led the wires into his hut, where he dis charged his duty with a minimum of labor and a maximum of comfort. It is related that he got a wigging from the higher-ups, but was afterward more fittingly rewarded. His idea speedily took shape on all the railroads in the centralized control, first of signals, and then of both signals and switches. This innovation led, however, to difficulties. The more switches and signals a man had to manage, the greater were the chances of disastrous mistakes. Wherever there were many interconnected and busy tracks it took an alert brain and an exceptional memory to avoid setting up conflicting routes, and thereby sending trains crashing into each other.

The principle of "interlocking," which mechanically prevents such conflicts, was first applied to signals at Bricklayers Arms railway station in London by Sir Charles Gregory about 1844.

Union Switch and Signal Company

same station, in 1856, John Saxby installed the first interlocking machine approximating the design of those used to-day, governing switches as well as signals. These machines were common in England before 1874, when the system was introduced in the United States

OR Americans, regarding the prob

lem from a distance, it is hard to think of the "doles" granted in Britain except as an endowment of idleness by the State, of which the effect at once upon character and upon commerce is to be deplored. Not only for the student of economics, but for the citizen who pays taxes, there is here obviously an issue of far-reaching importance, in the decision of which Britain has been either very right or very wrong. And it is possible that in some cases an opinion has been formed without a full knowledge of the facts. For instance, it is not true that the schemes of which unemployment benefit is a part were adopted as a result of the war.

For a generation imperial Germany

'An editorial on this subject appears elsewhere in this issue.

by Ashbel Welch, chief engineer of the United New Jersey Canal and Railroad Company, who was also the American pioneer in the matter of block-signaling. In later years, however, Americans took the lead in the improvement of interlock

The Doles

By P. W. WILSON

had applied a thrifty system of insuring workers against the vicissitudes of health and industry. And in Britain a similar insurance had been provided to a minority of wage-earners by trade unions and friendly societies. It was this insurance, hitherto unassisted by the state, that Lloyd George, by his famous Budget of 1909, co-ordinated and exBudget of 1909, co-ordinated and extended to the nation. His plan was at the outset limited in scope. But if there had been no war at all, it would have been extended and perfected in detail. The notion that acute unemployment began with the Armistice may be dismissed. What has happened is that since the Armistice the unemployed have refrained from riots.

In the United States the workers have been encouraged, especially since the placing of Liberty Bonds, to invest their

ing machinery; especially in the addition. of power devices-electric and pneumatic -which alone make possible the operation of our great terminal yards with facility, economy, and safety.-Scheherezade please take notice.

savings in industrial securities. It is assumed that among the weekly wageearners there is a margin for such savings. The entire situation in Britain is dominated by the fact that employers have fought hard for low wages. Into the merits of this policy we need not enter. It is enough to say that the family budget was arranged on a scale which precluded the possibility of providing for the future or even for adequate medical attention where disease is actual and present. The poor have been unable, without starvation, to put by money, and, while the Post Office Savings Bank holds a sum of about $1,250,000,000 on behalf of 11,000,000 depositors, many of these depositors are children of the middle class. The blunt truth is that out of 430,990 adults who died in 1922 only 98,902 that is fewer than a quarter

owned as much as $500 worth of property, all told. It is arguable that Britain ought to suspend her Drink Bill of $1,500,000,000, much of which is of course taxation. But, on the other hand, this Drink Bill, in so far as it falls. on the workers, may be set off, surely, against what American families of modest means spend on motor cars and icecream. Years ago Bernard Shaw announced that what the British workingman needed was merely more money. The inescapable actuality is that he lives and dies penniless.

Of this poverty private agencies have failed to furnish an amelioration. In the anxiety to avoid a pauper's grave the workers by the million contribute weekly dues to insurance companies for policies payable at death. Yet, owing to the uncertainties of employment, many policies lapse. And of the revenues, amounting to $125,000,000 annually collected,

are compulsory on all employed persons, from early youth to advanced age. Broadly, the insurance covers 11,000,000 men and 5,000,000 women. For many of the benefits the state, the employer, and the worker make joint contributions. And the tendency will be, undoubtedly, to extend the range of this partnership. But in the meantime the state bears the whole cost of destitution, under the poor law, of war pensions and-until this year of old-age pensions. Indeed, in principle it does not matter very much whether the state does or does not bear the entire cost. For a contribution by employer or employed, when enforced by law, is, after all, only a tax to the state under another name. An insurance stamp on a worker's card is no different from a revenue stamp on a check.

The Community Takes Charge

holders as benefits. It cannot be pretended that this is a satisfactory situation. Yet it represents the utmost that private enterprise has been able hitherto to offer as an inducement to well-considered thrift.

America and Great Britain

TH

Compared

HE American replies that in the year 1921 the United States endured a spell of acute unemployment. Estimates. of the number forced into idleness by deflation varied from 2,000,000 to 6,000,000, yet no doles were granted. One factor that helped matters was, I am told, prohibition, which has contributed, it is said, twenty per cent to the efficiency of labor. But it must also be borne in mind that the country happens to be in a position unique among nations. In 1900 the estimated wealth of the United States was $80,000,000,000-eighty billions. To-day the estimate is three hundred and twenty billions, or four times the previous sum. No community that is quadrupling its resources in twenty-five years can be considered normal in its handling of men and women out of work. A square mile of the United States has only to support thirty-five persons. A British mile has to support six hundred persons. And when trade is depressed there are no wide open spaces available for the absorption of the displaced wage

earners.

Presumably, a scheme of national insurance, as applied in Britain, would be unconstitutional in this country of State's rights. If, then, it were to be adopted, a Twentieth Amendment-one might recall the case of the income tax-would have to be a preliminary. For it is of the essence of the British schemes that they

munity as a community has accepted wholly unprecedented responsibilities for the maintenance of the individual home. Never before has a nation, ancient or modern, guaranteed by law financial or other assistance to the sick, the aged, the tuberculous, to the wife in childbirth, to

the widow, and to her orphan children. Let us suppose that it is all a mistake. About some mistakes there is a certain undeniable splendor of idealism.

With the conduct of industry there is no interference. Business continues to be, as hitherto, privately owned and managed. The insurance, taken as a whole, represents a kind of neighborly debenture on which an annual charge must be met. If we add together the contributions made by the state, the local authorities, the employers, and the employed persons, the total expenditure involved in these schemes cannot be less than $1,250,000,000-a billion and a quarter. It far exceeds the entire national Budget of Britain before the war. Britain contains 8,000,000 inhabited houses. Each of these homes is involved to the extent of $3 a week, on the average.

The number of persons affected by the benefits at any particular time is startling. There are, to begin with, about 2,000,000 grants and pensions to war veterans and dependents of soldiers and sailors, dead and wounded. The unemployed number 1,250,000. The oldage pensions, men and women over seventy years of age, have been 800,000, but, with the age reduced to sixty-five years, will be increased to 1,500,000. And the number of "paupers"-that is, of destitute persons-in receipt of indoor or outdoor relief is still no less than 1,500,000. 1,500,000. These figures add up to 6,250,000, and, even so, do not include

the temporary benefits, paid at any given date, to the sick, nor the maternity benefit of $8. That there should be from 6,000,000 to 7,000,000 grants from the state during any average week in a country with 8,000,000 homes is a fact eloquent of the scope now covered by the social policy adopted. Of this policy, the provision for the unemployed is, after all, no more than an important detail.

social policy adopted.

In considering the problem we must not be deceived by big totals. The grant made in each particular case is small. For instance, a widow's pension is no more than $2.50 per week, with $1.25 for her eldest child under fourteen years, and 75 cents for every younger child. By this scale a family of five would receive $6 a week. For sickness the allowance is $3.75 for men and $3 for women. For unemployment a man has $3.75 and a woman $3. Nor must we suppose that the doles go singly-one to a home. What really happens is that the generally prosperous home receives nothing at all, while the home that is out of luck becomes eligible for several benefits.

The Effect of the Doles THE HERE remains the question whether the doles do or do not perpetuate unemployment. In the case of young men discharged from the army whose minds and whose nerves have been, it is to be feared, permanently affected by the unsettling tragedies, comedies, miseries, and heroism of war, there is evidence that the dole has emphasized their disinclination to settle down to steady work. But in other cases it has not been the dole that has depreciated character, but the unemployment itself. And this unemployment has been too often exaggerated and misunderstood. In the last ten years Britain has added about two million to her population. The number of her emigrants has been reduced. And to-day she is employing more people on industries, productive and unproductive, than ever before in her history. This despite the fact that, owing to high taxation, the number of domestic servants has been reduced by 500,000. With Russia under Bolshevism, Germany emerging from bankruptcy, China in chaos, and the world in general still disturbed, it is no wonder that a larger population in Britain, swollen by young men and women who before the war would have been butlers and housemaids, yields an abnormal unemployment. Broadly, the usual half million who used to be out of a job have become a million and a quarter, while nearly another million are on short time.

The real cure for unemployment is mobility of labor. It is really absurd

J

by experience what is the anxiety of living without resources on a weekly wage which may stop at any time and for reasons wholly outside the control of the worker affected. The evil to be grappled worker affected. The evil to be grappled with is not the dole. It is the obstinate refusal of the unions and of the workers within the unions to do the work which wants doing when that work lies outside their own accepted industry. Analyses of the unemployed show, moreover, that a large majority of them were once boys and girls whom their parents removed from school at too early an age. It is not only the professions, it is the trades also, that to-day require a minimum of education. The money paid in doles is the money saved on schools-with compound interest.

A word should be added on the medi

cal aspect of the case. At first the doctors violently opposed the idea of substituting an annual grant per patient for the occasional fees, hitherto more or less collectable. It meant, in effect, the Chinese plan of paying a doctor to keep you in health instead of paying him only when you are ill. Beyond dispute, the scheme has worked. The nation enjoys better health, probably, than ever before. Its mind is devoted, as never before, to the prevention of disease instead of cure. There are those-Mr. Lloyd George is, I think, one of them-who would welcome the establishment of a state medical service outright. The "panel system" of doctors is a compromise, which enables the physician to serve the state while he still retains his private practice.

OHN PHILIP SOUSA says of the composition of a good band, "Give me seven or nine musicians, and the rest of the sixty can toot." Thirtyfive or forty stalwart citizens set the municipal tune in the big Minneapolis orchestra. The rest of the 425,435 toot -generally in accord.

Minneapolis, in contradistinction to its Twin City, has generally been an oligarchy, a benevolent government by the few; some of the time primarily for the few, but most of the time for the many. It has been throughout its history a good

By GEORGE MARVIN

enough Sousa kind of band, dominated by a few real musicians. Over in St. Paul old J. J. Hill was a soloist. During his lifetime the rest of his city listened. He was so big that he was alone. In Minneapolis nobody is as big as Hill was, but nearly twoscore Minneapolitans have attained sufficient stature to raise them into positions of admitted leadership without giving one another cause for apprehension or alarm.

One thing distinguishes these musicians from the great, the near-great, and the prominent in other American metrop

olises. Nearly all of them walk to work every day. And they have been walking to work-some of them-for thirty or forty years. They walk because they want to walk, because they like to walk, not because they have to walk as leading citizens of some other municipalities are compelled to do if they want to get anywhere through the motor-traffic congestion. And maybe this is one reason why at threescore years and over most of them are hale and hearty enough to constitute an oligarchy, sound-winded enough to dominate and determine the

municipal melody. Almost any fine morning you can see them in couples or open-order squads, between eight and nine o'clock, stepping cheerfully along to their offices on Nicollet or Marquette Avenue or Fifth Street from their breakfasts, one mile, a mile and a half, or two miles away. They deploy by neighborhoods on schedule: Mr. McMillan, for instance, will get under way from his house at 8 A.M., pick up Mr. Andrews at 8:02, and Mr. Campbell waiting on his front-door step at 8:04. Farther on their way the head of the big Dayton store falls into line, then the President of the First National Bank, and so on until a squad of eight or nine plutocrats go swinging along in step after the manner of our forefathers in the quaint old days before it became unfashionable to use the human hind legs for transportation. Along another line of march Mr. Hovey Clarke has formed a squad of lumber magnates and flour potentates. They are friendly groups, all on a first-name basis: "Good-morning, Alec," "Hello, George," "What's the good word, John?" A good many of them meet together daily for luncheon at the Minneapolis Club. They function on the same boards of directors and form the backbone of the various civic and commercial associations. And the friendly relationship they have for so long a time borne to one another permeates their munici

They

Nicollet Hotel is just behind the gateway pality. Minneapolis is a friendly town. It is also a very neighborly town. The "musicians" are not by any means the only folks who walk to work. Hundreds and thousands of men and women in Minneapolis walk every day to business or to market or for the sheer fun of walking, because it is in Minneapolis so extraordinarily convenient to get from pleasant abiding-places to points of daily duty or necessity. Thirty per cent of the population live within ten minutes' ride of their jobs; seventy-five per cent are within a twenty-minute radius by tram car or by bus. Doubling this time will approximate the corresponding walking interval. Urban and suburban dovetail here together. Fifteen minutes in a motor car will put you on the shores of lakes that look a thousand miles away from the fret of big cities. In the Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis thirteen of these lakes are the centers of parks and residential districts, and these parks and residential districts, and these areas are among the Twins' greatest assets. This great metropolis of more than 700,000 doesn't have to pack up and go somewhere and spend a lot of money for recreation. It plays right in its own front or back yard. Winter carnival sports, now spreading like a healthy epidemic over the States of the northern East, were born on the lakes and hills of St. Paul in the late eighties, almost two generations ago. Champion ski runners

The new

and jumpers and fast skaters have for many years come from the Scandinavian population of Minneapolis. In summer argosies of canoes are launched every evening, and the whole family goes swimming. In the Indian lands of the Minnesota lakes people never get "sick for the sky-blue water."

That two communities so mortised into each other physically as the Twin Cities of Minnesota, and with so many mutual interests, should remain distinct is at first sight baffling. The situation, however, does not escape analysis. St. Paul historically is the older community. The original settlers, creeping up the Mississippi to the head of navigation, established here their outpost for trading with the Indians. St. Paul remains today at heart a trading post. As the capital of the State and the center of the railroad systems that grew into and out of Minnesota, it held, until the late nineties, undisputed leadership. For a long time it bought more 4 per cent bonds than its younger neighbor.

But upstart Minneapolis has forged to the front from behind, until now it exceeds the capital in population by 150,000. Its origins are different. When New England ran out of timber sixty years or more ago, the Lorings and the Pillsburys and the Washburns and the rest of the pioneers migrated into the still heavily wooded States of Michigan

and Minnesota. And they found in the falls of St. Anthony, above the furtrading post of St. Paul, the power to turn the water-wheels of their sawmills. Minneapolis has always been a mill town. For a long time it was lumber. Then, as the timber was cleared away and grain sprouted over the Northwest, it became a city founded on flour. The lumber has gone and the flour is going going farther East-and the city in its industries is beginning to readjust itself to the big economic changes which transpire beyond the control of States or municipalities. But it is at heart still a mill town. And, as a matter of distinctive personality, the pioneer spirit and some of the pioneers themselves still express it.

In this integrity of purpose the second generation joins to a remarkable degree. It is perhaps not too much to say that in no other city of the same or larger population have the sons of the original captains of industry followed so faithfully where their fathers trod. Keeping up with the Joneses in Minneapolis involves hard work. There is no local chapter of the Sons of Rest, and neither lounge lizards nor movie sheiks flourish in the land. "An idle man," says the hardworking young president of the largest flour mill in the world, "would die lonely here." A friend of his father's, himself

at seventy the active partner in one of the largest lumber companies of the Northwest, spoke of this "Gold Medal" president as an example of how the native sons "all turned out well." Other specific examples-the sons-in-law of the Peaveys, the Crosby boys, the sons of the Pillsburys, the Daytons, the Bells, and the Bowmans-keep this statement from being a generality. Devotion to family and to family undertakings would seem to be in Minneapolis almost Japanese in its strength.

So it happens that the mill city, younger than the trading post, is nevertheless more mature in character, less impulsive. The men who sit around the long lunch table at the Minneapolis Club are older than those who gather at the Minnesota Club over in St. Paul. Back of the industries and beneath the figures stand the men. J. J. Hill, the biggest single force the community has produced, thought in terms of the State and the Northwest. Setting one point of a draughtsman's dividers on the Twin Cities and the other on Jacksonville, Florida, he traced with that same radius the arc of a circle that came east of Spokane, Washington. The territory that formed the segment to the north and west he believed to be the rightful trade area of the Twin Cities. He was an empire builder. He saw clear over

the internecine strife of the related communities to their greater joint future. From his hill in St. Paul he approved the establishment of the Federal Bank in Minneapolis. Men of lesser vision now, old and young, fill the air with recriminations as they tug-of-war over the location of industrial plants that cannot fail to benefit both localities. St. Paul lands Henry Ford, and then blocks the building of a bridge which will permit some of Henry's fourteen thousand (estimated) employees to live on the Minneapolis side of the river. And Minneapolis comes back by prying loose the Minnesota Creameries from their warehouses in St. Paul, with their constituent 475 creameries, their cohorts of dairy farmers, and their 80,000,000 annual pounds of butter, to a new location at the Minneapolis end of the community.

Together the two cities share the biggest State fair in the United States, and together they profit by the close neighborhood of Fort Snelling, headquarters of the Seventh Corps area and training grounds for the citizen army of the Northwest. A great many of the new and larger plants which have more recently come to the neighborhood occupy sites along University Avenue, on the older conservative side of the river in a district which used to be generally, and still is by some Minneapolitans, called