and may check the arrogance of the Lords; but walk a little softly, and wield a little carefully the slender wand which we give you in place of the big stick which you have carried for four years.

We want our navy strong, but we still trust your pledges that you will keep it so. Mr. Price Collier, in his recent book England and the English" (a book, by the way, which I found many Englishmen to admire and none to criticise or resent), has elaborated the dictum that England is the land of compromise. The outcome of this election seems to me amply to justify that judgment. The policies of the two parties were on two points diametrically opposed; the Conservatives demanded an unequivocal mandate for tariff reform, the Liberals an equally strong mandate for land taxation and reform of the House of Lords. The electorate compromised by continuing the status quo ante dissolution, but with tremendously reduced power to the Government. England, another student said the other day, "works out her problems.' In other words, she advances by evolution, not by revolution.

The next question which suggests itself as we look at " Punch's" delineation of Mr. Asquith and his majority is: What will he do with it? Here again we border on prophecy, but this time we almost know at least what he will try to do.

First the Budget, for the State must have money, and the only escape from financial chaos lies in a quickly enacted Finance Bill. And there seems no reason to suppose that the Cabinet will consent to alter the Budget's provisions, for to do so would be to surrender the very principles on which the victory has been-not easily-won.

Next, according to his pronouncements during the campaign, to deal with the House of Lords. This means, says the Premier, not only to establish beyond shadow of question the exclusive right of the Commons to control financial legislation, but to limit by definite bounds the right of the Lords to veto legislation upon which the popular majority in the House of Commons is unquestionably determined. He would make the will of the people, as expressed by the Commons, effective in legislation "within the limits of a single

Parliament." Just what this would mean in practice, and just how he would hope to bring it about, Mr. Asquith has not tried to explain. He will doubtless elaborate his plan in his own good time. And just what the effect would be, and whether good or bad, is also a matter for debate. It is contended that Mr. Asquith's proposal would result in practical single-chamber legislation, a system which the nations are unanimous in considering unwise. But it is asserted with some force, on the other side, that single-chamber government is exactly what England has when the Conservatives are in power. House of Lords is overwhelmingly Conservative, and seldom if ever tampers with the legislation of a Conservative Cabinet.

The

An incident related by Lady Stanley in the autobiography of Henry M. Stanley well typifies the function which a second chamber like the House of Lords ought to perform :

John Bright frequently called on us on his way to the House of Commons. He seldom would take tea, preferring to pocket two or three lumps of sugar. One day, however, I handed him a very hot cup of tea; we were discussing the House of Lords, and I asked him, "Now, Mr. Bright, what do we want with a House of Lords?" He made no reply, but carefully poured the hot tea into his saucer to cool it. Impetuously I repeated my question, whereupon the great Liberal statesman, smiling, gently tapped his finger on the saucer, and said, "This is the House of Lords."

The problem which confronts English statesmen is to reconstruct the House of Lords and its procedure so that it will cool measures born in the heat of conflict in the lower house without chilling into inanimation every measure fathered by a Liberal Ministry. The conviction is widespread in England, even among the Tories, that the hereditary chamber needs something, but just what it needs is a bone of strenuous contention.

If Mr. Asquith succeeds in putting his little steed over these two barriers, the third which will inevitably confront him will be Home Rule. Here prophecy stands dismayed. Who lives will see;

more it would be foolhardy to say.

more space to the Budget than to any other subject because, as I have intimated, I believe it deals with serious problems of English political and social economy, and because those problems have a parallel in America. Both countries are suffering from great aggregations of wealth, whose danger lies not in the mere fact that they are great aggregations of wealth, but in the power which their possession carries with it. In America those accumulations take the form of great corporations; in England, of great landed estates. Both tend to monopoly-the one of production and distribution, of commerce and industry, the other of the nation's natural resources. Each tends to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few, to the detriment of the interests of the many. The one is the growth of centuries, having its source in the days of feudalism. The other is the fruit of modern economic and political conditions, and tends to develop a new feudalism.

The solution of our own problem, by which we shall retain the advantages of combination without the disadvantages of monopoly, we have been and are seeking under the preceding and the present Administration. Mr. Lloyd-George, in the land taxes and valuation proposals of his Budget, has made a tentative beginning in the solution of England's problems.

In both countries an economic autocracy has arisen, closely related to a political autocracy, each of which helps to sustain and uphold the other. In both countries the remedy lies in more democracy. It is applied in the United States through Government regulation and control of the great combinations of wealth, so as to protect and preserve the rights of all the people; in England by taxation of the great landed estates so that the whole people may share in the profits which the few have been enabled to accumulate, without much effort on their own part, from the common store. Even the arguments which are advanced against the proposed measures of reform are essentially the same on both sides of the ocean. "Vested rights and interests," "discrimination against a special kind of property," disturbance of business," "destruction of confidence," "driving

capital out of the country," are some of the cries which I heard directed against the Lloyd-George proposals, and which it is very easy to parallel in our own country. But when I heard the time-honored and threadbare charge directed against one item in the Budget that it would rob the "widows and orphans," who apparently in England as in America own the overwhelming majority of the stocks and bonds of the country, the circle was complete I was at home again.

There is, however, a closer parallel to be drawn between the Lloyd-George proposals and one policy of the Progressive movement in America. The land taxes in the Budget and our own movement for the conservation of natural resources have their foundation on the same principle. It is the principle to which I have already referred, that since the only natural right to property is the right of every man to the product of his own labor, natural wealth belongs of right to the whole people. What a man makes by his hand or his brain, or through any other expression of his personality, is his, to have and to hold and to enjoy against all the world. What God has made and given to man— land, water, forests, streams, mineralsbelongs to all men. The only right which an individual may have to any of these things is an artificial one, derived from some arrangement made by society, that is by all men, who are the real owners.

This principle we are coming to recognize in the Conservation movement. The Government, that is, society, that is, all men in the United States acting together, still owns vast natural resources-a third of a billion acres of land, including stores of coal and other minerals, forests and water powers. Till now the real owners of this wealth have given it freely to all comers, in order that the country and its resources may be rapidly developed. Now the owners—you and I and the rest of the ninety million people-are stopping to consider and saying or preparing to say: "We will not give away our resources any more. We will let individuals develop them, and make fair and generous profits from their development, but they must pay us, the real owners, for the privilege, and the ownership must still rest in us."

England no longer, practically speaking,

has any natural resources which nominally belong to the whole people. The land, forests, mines, water powers, have passed into private ownership. To those private owners the Chancellor of the Exchequer says, "A large part of the profits which you make from your land is the result of nothing which you have done, but comes from the common store of wealth which naturally and justly belongs to the whole people. Therefore in the future you must give back to the people--through the Government-a small part of those profits." The proposals in England are much less thorough and drastic than in the United States, for there they are dealing with vested interests, and with conditions hallowed by the passage of centuries; and even Mr. Lloyd-George, demagogue as his enemies believe him, recognizes the force of existing rights, on however unequitable a basis they have been built up.

In both countries the Progressive movement is called by its opponents by the horrid epithet of Socialism. But just as in America Government regulation is in reality quite a different thing from Government ownership, so in England the nationalization of land, the germs of which the Conservatives see concealed in the Lloyd-George Budget, is far removed in principle from the nationalization of the tools of production. National ownership of land and national ownership of the means of production are based upon two diametrically opposed principles. If the latter is Socialism, the former is not.

The Progressive movement in England has won a small victory. I believe that victory is the thin end of a wedge which, slowly and by painful degrees perhaps, will force open the vise-like grip of an ancient and stifling monopoly.

HAROLD J. HOWLAND.

T

HE "Grand American Palace was packed with a strangely unaccustomed crowd. Every night "Professor" Somebody's orchestra (the "professor" and two pasty-faced helpers) dispensed music from the little platform. in the corner, and some scores of workworn immigrant boys and girls, at so much per head, struggled and giggled through the waltz and the two-step. But now, instead of these weary revelers, from gaudy wall to gaudy wall were jammed girls with determined, workaday faces. Strikers they were a group of shirt-waist makers, whose strike in New York has been the biggest and most bitter strike of women in the history of American labor troubles.

And the faces of this group were fixed on the " Professor's" stage, and on that stage stood a slight, pale girl of perhaps nineteen, her dark eyes flashing. "Girls, from the bottom of my heart," she cried, "I beg you not to go back to work. We are all poor, many of us are suffering hunger, none of us can

afford to lose a day's wages. But only by fighting for our rights, and fighting all together, can we better our miseries; and so let us fight for them to the end !"

The strikers applauded long, and in scores of other East Side dance-halls at the time when the strike was at its height and forty thousand girls were out, just so at this same hour were other speakers applauded by other groups; and by meetings such as this was the spirit kept in the girls for their remarkable fight. When the girl left the platform, I edged my way to her and asked her for her story. She had come from Russia, she told me—come with her parents, who had found life in the land of the Czar no longer endurable.

"Close your eyes and point to any girl in this hall," said the little shirt-waist maker, "and my story will be her story. We are all the same. Why do we strike? I will tell you where we work, how we work;' from that perhaps you will understand. My shop is a long and narrow loft on the fifth floor of the building, with the

ceiling almost on our heads. In it one hundred electric-power machines are so closely packed together that, unless I am always on the lookout, my clothes or hair or hand is likely to catch in one of the whizzing machines. In the shop it is always night. The windows are only on the narrow ends of the room, so even the few girls who sit near them sew by gaslight most of the time, for the panes are so dirty the weak daylight hardly goes through them. The shop is swept only once a week; the air is so close that sometimes you can hardly breathe. In this place I work from eight to six o'clock six days in the week in the ordinary season; and in the busy season, when we are compelled to work nights and Sundays, I put in what equals eight work-days in the week. Thirty minutes is allowed for lunch, which I must eat in the dressing-room four flights above the shop, on the ninth floor. These stairs I must always climb; the elevator, the boss says, is not for the shopgirls.

Then

"I began as a shirt-waist maker in this shop five years ago. For the first three weeks I got nothing, though I had already worked on a machine in Russia. the boss paid me three dollars a week. Now, after five years' experience, and I am considered a good worker, I am paid nine. But I never get the nine dollars. There are always charges' against me. If I laugh, or cry, or speak to a girl during work hours, I am fined ten cents for each 'crime.' Five cents is taken from my pay every week to pay for benzine which is used to clean waists that have been soiled in the making; and even if I have not soiled a waist in a year, I must pay the five cents just the same. If I lose a little piece of lining, that possibly is worth two cents, I am charged ten cents for the goods and five cents for losing it. If I am one minute late, I am fined one cent, though I get only fifteen cents an hour; and if I am five minutes late, I lose half a day's pay. Each of these things seems small, I know, but when you only earn ninety dimes a week, and are fined for this and fined for that, why, a lot of them are missing when pay day comes, and you know what it means when your money is the only regular money that comes in a family of eight."

She told me other grievances, many of them. And as I went from meeting to meeting talking to the girls, as I walked with them on picket duty, I found that she had spoken truly when she said, “My story is their story.'

An olive-skinned Italian beauty of eighteen said to me: 66 If only I speak the English good, I go and tell everybody what awful place is our shop. Just like a prison, the doors always locked. When we are very, very sick sometime, we never can go home; always the bosses scream, say bad words to us. When we no got work we must sit, sit in the shop all day, and wait, and sometime we have just thirtyfive cents at the end of the week. Oh, so bad! so bad!"

The "fining" system just referred to is not the only method by which, the girls claim, their meager wages are subtracted from. "There ain't nothing too low for my boss to do to make a few cents' extra profit," said another girl. "He ain't ashamed to do plain stealing from us girls. In our shop we have no books to mark down our work--just little slips of paper, checks, are given us when we turn in a bundle of work. For these slips we are given money at the end of the week. The boss has these slips made small purposely, so they'll be easier to lose. One week I lost two of these tiny pieces of paper, and I could not get one cent for the work I had done. It was half my week's wages. Every day some of us lose these tickets. But our loss is the boss's gain, so he won't change the system."

There is one very simple explanation for the wretched conditions under which the girls have worked--they have been very easy to exploit. Ninety per cent of the workers are Russian and Italian girls between eighteen and twenty-five. These girls enter the shop almost immediately after landing in America. They come from great poverty and oppression, where they were compelled to accept conditions without complaint. And so, accustomed to fear and obey, these girls have for years suffered their grievances here, and kept silent.

Now and then in the past there have been attempts made by the workers to fight the conditions, but the individual