Chicago's Public Safety Commission commends the plan, instituted a few months ago, of putting on coroners' juries only men who are out of employment. The fee for the service is small, but it encourages the needy. "The distress relieved is not alone financial," says the Commission; more than twenty men who admitted that they were desperate and on the verge of suicide before they sat on the jury were saved by the plan. The sight of the remains of those who had killed themselves and the grief of relatives at the inquests banished from their minds all thoughts of self-destruction."

"Another million bushels of wheat were snapped up by Europeans yesterday," says the market report. And as a result wheat went that day to its highest price in sixteen years. This is good news to wheat-raisers, but how about the people who have to buy bread? Even if they were to follow the advice attributed to Marie Antoinette and "eat cake" instead, they would undoubtedly find that higher too-for sugar also has gone up since the war began.

A breeches buoy cableway apparatus invented by Mr. Spencer Miller, says Shipping Illustrated," has been adopted by the United States revenue cutter service. By its use a ship can rescue passengers from another ship in the heaviest sea. Mr. Miller is also the inventor of a marine cableway that has made it possible to transport coal from ship to ship under headway at sea. Mr. Miller, says the journal quoted, has by his clever mechanical devices practically solved the problem of fueling ships at sea-a vital desideratum of a navy in warfare.

Canada is carrying on great harbor improvements in her seaports, East and West. At Halifax facilities are under construction which will cost $10,000,000, while $8,000,000 is being expended at St. John, N. B.; Levis, opposite Quebec, is building the largest dry dock on the American continent; and extensive improvements are under way at Vancouver, Victoria, and Prince Rupert on the Pacific coast, Fort William and Port Arthur on the Great Lakes, and at Port Nelson on Hudson Bay.

The people's right to the sea beaches has just been affirmed by the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court. Henceforth, unless some legal obstacle intervenes, Coney Island's visitors may walk without interference by obstructing fences along the water-front of the beach. Nearly 600 feet of the beach has heretofore been closed to the public by private encroachments.

has been substituted for the pulp. The outside of the skin is covered with shellac, and when the tiny roots force their way through this they are carefully cut off. The paring off of the roots, it is claimed, stunts the tree.

The popular dance, the "fox-trot," it may not be generally known, is an accomplishment of the well-educated saddle-horse as well as of "society" people. The "Rider and Driver," answering a question as to what an American saddle-horse is trained to do, mentions five gaits in which he should be proficient-" walk, trot, canter, single foot or fox-trot, and pace."

The President of the Long Island Railroad, Ralph Peters, spent two busy days just preceding Christmas. He shook hands with over a thousand men, employees of the road, calling a large proportion of them by name. The receptions at which this greeting took place were held at three principal stations of the railway. Each employee received a Christmas souvenir of the occasion as well as a verbal expression of good will.

The American steamship Pathfinder left Galveston December 25 for Bremen, with a cargo of cotton, 6,650 bales, the first cotton to go to The Germany since the beginning of the war. freight rate on this cotton, $3 per 100 lbs., is said to be the highest ever paid at the port of Galveston. A year ago the current rate was about 35 cents per 100 lbs.

"A few days ago," says the Chicago "Tribune in commenting on the ways of children, a little friend of ours, three years old, stopped for her daily visit, but as we had other company we did not pay much attention to her chatter until she said that she would go home. I asked her to come over again, and she answered doubtfully, 'Well, if you'd like to have me, I'll stay now!'"

A useful little craft was recently presented to the Seamen's Church Institute of New York City by Louis Gordon Hamersley, a Harvard undergraduate, in memory of his father. The boat, which will accommodate a hundred sailors and their dunnage, will be used by the Institute in extending a welcome to sailors of incoming ships who might otherwise fall into the hands of boarding-house sharks.

Napoleon could get along very well with four hours' sleep a night during his campaigns; but apparently the present commander-in-chief of the French forces, General Joffre, does still better, for an English paper says that most of his sleeping is done in a motor car, which he finds more restful than a camp bed, and that he sleeps while he travels at night, seldom making less than forty miles an hour on his journeys.

HAMILTON W. MABIE, Associate Editor

THE INDUSTRIAL

COMMISSION HEARINGS

"A Federal Forum" would be a fit title for the hearings which have been taking place in New York City before the United States Commission on Industrial Relations. Whatever the import or value of the Commission's findings may be, the expression of opinion brought out before it is not only readable matter but is of momentous interest to all who are involved in the relations between capital and labor in the United States.

was:

One question addressed to each witness summoned before the Commission "What do you consider the chief cause of the present industrial unrest?" The answers received to this general question merited attention, but the real interest of the daily proceedings has lain in the incidental remarks volunteered by the men testifying as to their social, economic, and political theories.

Perhaps the chief interest of the week centered around Mr. Henry Ford, automobile manufacturer, famous for establishing a minimum wage of $5 a day for all adult workers in his factory. Probably Mr. Ford's guarantee "to take every man out of Sing Sing [prison] and make a man of him" aroused the greatest enthusiasm. The warning of the Chairman against applause may have served to forestall equally emphatic approval for another statement by Mr. Ford, that “ can bring up a family and hope to own a home on the ordinary rate of wages, or can do good work mentally and physically for more than eight hours a day."

no man

In a later interview with a reporter of the New York " Sun," along the lines of his testimony before the Commission, Mr. Ford. said:

The greatest help in starting ex-convicts on the right road is for the public to abandon its suspicious attitude toward them, give them good jobs, pay them decent wages, and treat them as men.

A real man will give the other fellow a chance. Why shouldn't he? The convicts will make good if they have a chance. They have sowed

their wild oats and realize the value of work. We have men in our plant who have seen twenty-six years of prison life. They have made good. I could take the roughest fellow they've got in Sing Sing, give him a good job, and get him to be a man.

Out in Detroit we don't pay any attention to a man's record. That's the fault with society. It points its finger at ex-convicts. We don't. And we get after the police too if they hound the men. Besides, if a man says he doesn't want to work alongside of an ex-convict, the thing for him to do is to get out, not the exconvict. If a man's too good to work beside a man out of prison, he's too good for us. don't want him.

We

A typical example of Mr. Ford's attitude towards others is to be found in the story of a young man who came to Detroit, posed as Mr. Ford's son, and ran up a large bill at a hotel. In response to a query as to his present fate, Mr. Ford replied casually:

Oh, yes, we have him working for us. He has been in the hospital twice for two opera tions. He's a good fellow now. I was talking with him the day before I came here.

INDUSTRIAL UNREST

Among other witnesses before the Commission, Mr. Samuel Untermyer, the New York lawyer and promoter, answered the common question as to the cause of industrial unrest with, "Injustice of existing conditions and American ambition," and then declared that "capitalists surrender only when forced to; the individual worker when unorganized has not a fair chance."

The financial expert, Mr. Roger W. Babson, put the blame for industrial unrest on absentee control of corporations. "It is warfarecapital and labor-just warfare," he cried, and gave profit-sharing as his panacea for many evils. "But it must be real profitsharing, not of the quieting-powder kind," he said. "It must be a genuine attempt to give the employee a greater share in the value of his labor.'

E. J. Berwind, Jacob H. Schiff, and George

W. Perkins followed each other in uneventful succession. Interesting, if not profound, however, was the testimony of Mr. Daniel Guggenheim, of the American Smelting and Refining Company. Mr. Guggenheim said: "The difference between the rich man and the poor man is too great. The only way to get away from industrial unrest is to reduce that difference. No man should be refused a job if he wants to work. It is up to the State or the Federal Government to give it to him. Laborers have as much right to organize as capitalists; they are human beings. The workingman does not want merely an increase in wages; he wants comforts for himself and his family, and he will get them ;" and "if it were not for the philanthropic work now being done there would be a social revolution."

DISCUSSION OR CURE?

We have given typical quotations from the minutes of the investigation conducted by Chairman Walsh and his Committee on Industrial Relations. It would be hard to deny that they make interesting reading. It would be easier to question whether such a hearing as we have here described furnishes the wisest and best approach to the great problems of industrial relations. Whatever one's opinion upon this matter, certainly it cannot be questioned that the Commission having such a duty in its charge should approach the matter with a careful and judicious spirit. There are indications in the remarks made by Chairman Walsh before the first session of this hearing was held that he considered his position to be one of a prosecutor rather than of a judge. Whatever his own view of his work may be, it is unfortunate that this impression of his attitude should be so widespread.

The Commission on Industrial Relations was founded, it will be remembered, practically coincidently with the division of the Department of Commerce and Labor, in tacit recognition of the fact that the prob lems of commerce and the problems of labor have an intimate concern with one another, and of the fact that, therefore, the solution of these problems can best be sought after under the guidance of a single organization. Problems of such far-reaching importance can hardly be solved, however, by the summoning of any number of distinguished gentlemen to give their personal opinion of the proper solution. In so far as such a

hearing stimulates public interest in the questions involved, it may be of definite public benefit; but in so far as the spectacular side of such a gathering of witnesses is permitted to overshadow the slow and necessary process of constructive and detailed investigation of actual conditions confronting both commerce and labor, such a proceeding is of doubtful value.

As widely noticed testimony as any was that of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who stated his attitude as a stockholder toward the conditions of labor shown in the strike in the Colorado mines, gave his creed as to the relative rights of labor and capital in the distribution of the products of industry, and told of the purposes of his father's gifts for science and for other public objects. Perhaps the most dramatic occurrence of the hearing so far has been his meeting with the strike leader "Mother Jones" (whose picture appears on another page in connection with the strike in New Jersey), and his consequent invitation to her to call and talk over labor conditions.

GETTING JOBS FOR THE JOBLESS

There are indications of increasing prosperity in this country; many individual industries are now in far better condition than they were a few months ago. But other industries are still embarrassed by war conditions and by industrial and financial restrictions not arising from war. What is needed, and needed instantly, is knowledge of the facts and a plan for men to get work, or (if it is impossible to give them work) to get relief. At a meeting in New York City recently, Mayor Mitchel, Judge Gary, of the United States Steel Corporation, Mr. Henry Bruère, Chamberlain of the city, and others discussed three questions: How Many Workers Are Idle? What is Being Done to Give Them Employment? What about Unemployment and Prosperity ? The discussion was helpful and hopefulerhaps with the emphasis iaid too much on optimism for the future rather than immediate action. Mr. Bruère estimated that in New York 300,000 men are out of workthree times the normal number. Urgent advice was given to business men to keep men at work, on half-time and half-pay if necessary, to use slack time to build or improve plants, to make reserve stocks for the future, to remember that the remedy for

THE SLAUGHTER AT

ROOSEVELT

Further reports confirm and strengthen the comments made last week in The Outlook upon the shooting by temporary deputy sheriffs, or hired gunmen, as one chooses to call them, of unarmed strikers at Roosevelt, New Jersey. Thus a newspaper investigation of the addresses given by the deputy sheriffs showed that in a large number of cases the addresses were those of business buildings or vacant lots, or in other cases that the men named never lived at the addresses given. The significance of this is in its support of the assertion that these men were not citizens of New Jersey, but were hired from a New York detective agency. In his charge to the Grand Jury in this matter Judge Bergen, of the State Supreme Court, charged that the sheriff had no right to appoint deputies not resident in the county, nor indeed to appoint "special deputies" at all. It was, he added, the duty of the Mayor to preserve order.

It is to the discredit of the owners of the fertilizing factories, in whose behalf these armed guards were employed, that after the shooting the so-called deputies were continued in their employ. A number of these men were placed under arrest, but newspaper accounts state that the men first arrested were not those who did the shooting, and there was the implication that the really guilty men were shielded and others put forward. Later several " deputies" were identified as men who had shot at the strikers, and they will doubtless be put on trial. No wonder that the strikers at Roosevelt-no matter what may have been the merits or demerits of their claims in the strike-listen eagerly to radical and indignant talk by representatives of the Industrial Workers of the World. A scene at such an indignation meeting is shown in a picture on another page.

The New Jersey Legislature has under consideration an investigation of the strike conditions at Roosevelt, of the shooting of unarmed men in a public place, and of the question whether additional legislation is necessary to prevent such incidents. One of the resolutions in its preamble declares that the sheriff of the county "appointed for duty as deputies men residing without his county who were paid and placed under the immediate direction and control of the said employers of labor." If this is so, additional legislation is surely

needed! If one of the parties to a labor dispute may hire irresponsible men from outside the State, heavily armed, and capable of the crime of shooting down men belonging to the other side of the controversy, on what appears to be slight provocation, on the public streets or railway station yards, and not within the premises they are supposed to guard, the inquiry may well be made, and made with emphasis, whether this condition of things exists widely in this country; and, if so, whether it is endurable or is consonant with our much-boasted ideas of liberty or justice. If the facts are as stated, there is little to choose between such a state of things and a Russian pogrom.

SENATOR LODGE ON THE
SHIPPING BILL

In an able speech before the Senate recently, Senator Lodge voiced his opinion of the Ship Purchase Bill. In opposing this measure in its entirety and the purchase of ships from any belligerent in particular, Senator Lodge, though he laid by far the greatest emphasis upon the international difficulties that would confront us upon the passage of the Ship Purchase Bill, had this to say on the practical side of the question:

The vessels which it is believed the Government intends to purchase are those belonging to the North German Lloyd Line and the Hamburg-American Line. There are thirty-eight ships belonging to those two lines now laid up at American ports. . . . Some of those passenger ships are of the finest type, and the Vaterland is conspicuously one of the greatest of modern Atlantic steamships. It is safe to say that none of these ships are fit for cargo ships and freighters. The ostensible purpose of this bill is to buy ships to carry freight.

...

Speaking generally, it may be said that passenger ships on the North Atlantic route between Europe and the United States are wholly unfit for freight carrying. In proportion to their tonnage they have very little space for freight. Their engines are constructed for the highest speed; their coal bunkers are built to carry a very large amount of coal; their machinery, together with the accommodations for passengers, including dining-saloons, readingroom, bath-rooms, etc., take up a large amount of space, which leaves very little for cargo. The freight ordinarily carried in these vessels in normal times is what is generally called fast freight, consisting of goods of great value and comparatively small weight and size, where speedy delivery at a high freight rate is desirable, and where the goods are so valuable as to

bear the rate without loss. To attempt to use ships like these as general cargo carriers would be absurd on its face.

The only practical way of gettting a steamer thoroughly suitable for any trade is to build her particularly for that trade. The operation in any trade of any steamers not suitable for that trade seriously increases the cost.

Senator Lodge pointed out, in some contradiction to the views of the writer of the article on the Ship Purchase Bill in this number of The Outlook, that our South American trade is suffering, not from a lack of shipping, but from a lack of purchasing power in the Southern republics. Furthermore, in his discussion of the South American trade, Senator Lodge showed very clearly that ships must not only be built for a particular purpose, but, to be used with the greatest economy, must be constructed for particular voyages. None or

few of the German ships in our ports are therefore adapted for the South American service. The long tropical voyage that must be undertaken at moderate speed is a very different proposition from the costly express service of the North Atlantic.

Why, as Senator Lodge has asked Congress, with such potent reasons against the launching of our Government into so hazardous a field of commercial operation, handicapped by tools so ill adapted for the purpose for which they are offered, is the Administration so insistently bent upon the accomplishment of its desire?

An editorial discussion of this bill is to be found on another page.

THE DACIA, THE
SHIP PURCHASE BILL,
AND ENGLISH OPINION

Those who, in opposition to Senator Lodge, contend that the transfer of German ships to American registry since the outbreak of hostilities will be accepted by the Allies with equanimity or with any willingness to abate what they consider their rights under international law, should read with attention the leading editorial in the London "Spectator for January 24. This editorial, a judicial statement of the attitude of the English people in the present crisis, gives adequate testimony to the international difficulties which will be raised for this country if the Administration persists in its intention to force through Congress the Ship Purchase Bill. Says the "Spectator :"

Englishmen... cannot help feeling at this moment acute anxiety and alarm at the way in