task of meeting a complex problem with intelligence. Using this dilemma as its weapon, it is not difficult for a persistent group of Prohibitionists to stampede a legislature against its instinct and its good sense. For to oppose prohibition in the United States is to run counter to a sulky vein of Puritanism which succeeds in befogging every "moral question with the blankest unreason. It is so much easier to pass a sweeping law than to consider the enormous problem of regulating personal habits; it is so much easier to legislate goodness than to achieve it. But in a democracy it is futile, for no law so intimate in its effect can achieve anything but dishonesty and evasion if it is imposed against the real assent of an overwhelming public opinion.
DURING all the discussion over the military unpreparedness of the United States, the aspect of our national policy which does most to disqualify this country from fighting under any circumstances has been wholly ignored We refer to the Federal system of military pensions. A nation which has not fought an important war during forty-nine years and which is still paying approximately $160,000,000 a year to its surviving veterans and their widows—such a nation simply cannot afford to go to war. Modern warfare is costly enough in material, equipment and all manner of preparation, but if to these necessary costs is added the obligation of a service pension, the nation would gradually be drained of its economic vitality for the benefit of a comparatively small class. People with an aroused social conscience object to war not merely because it brings with it so much agony and brutality but because it diverts to essentially wasteful purposes the product of so much good human labor. Our pension laws raise this wasteful diversion of American labor to the highest available power, and as in other cases of economic waste, the excessive costs are only the outward sign of a grave spiritual disability. By practically declaring that American citizens must be bribed with partial subsequent support for having served their country, they imply a moral unpreparedness for war far more dangerous and less remedial than any lack of physical preparation. Of course neither these physical nor moral disabilities could prevent the American nation from going to war on any sufficient provocation, but under the circumstances the economic and social consequences of such a step are nothing less than terrifying.
KINDNESS of heart is certainly never to be chided, but has not someone spoken of the danger that in excess of virtue lies? The recurring discussion of the use of force takes us back to tender sentiments expressed by Patrick MacGill in "Children of the Dead End." "I never saw Joe kill an insect," says the author of this semi-autobiography. "He did not like to do so, he often told me 'If we think evil of insects, what will they thing of us?' he said to me once. As for myself, I have never killed an insect knowingly in all my life My house for so long has been the wide world, that I can afford to look leniently on all other inmates, animal or human. Four walls coffin the human sympathies For those of us whose hands are imbued in the blood of countless mosquitoes, this standard seems to put Mr. MacGill on the pinnacle almost alone. What would he think of a callous country whose motto is "swat the fly"? But the rich humor of Mr. MacGill's philosophy is not best tested by references to the Hackensack meadows. it needs to be lined up with Mr. Roosevelt's startling tales of those Brazilian insects that develop the ill-bred habit of dining on his shoes and socks.
THE late Mark Twain proved from statistics that the only safe place to live is on a railroad train running sixty miles and hour and that the most dangerous place in the world is in bed. The number of deaths upon railroad trains is small; you may travel no one knows how many hundreds of millions of miles before, on the law of probabilities, your train dashes over an embankment, whereas the number of deaths occurring in bed is simply appalling. By much the same use of statistics, opponents of workmen's compensation seek to prove that if you want industrial accidents, all you need to do is to compensate for them. Enact a good law and your accidents increase. They quote the recent report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics to show that during the last five years the number of Federal employees insured by the government increased only 20% (from 82,650 to a trifle over 100,000), while the number of reported accidents increased 122.7% and the amount of compensation paid, 6%. But does this show that there are more accidents, or merely that more accidents are reported? Moreover, the figures when analyzed are not really portentous, for in the fiscal year 1913 the total cost of compensation was under $400,000, or less than eight cents per week per employee insured.
SAYS Mr. George W. Perkins to the National Civic Federation, "Before laboring men had the advantages of our broad educational system, before they could think well, could reason well, they approached the subject of wages about like this: 'We are getting $2.00 a day We would like $2.25 a day, and we are going to strike for it.' And they did. When they got it, the $2.25 looked good for a while, and they then struck again in the same way for $2.50. But, suggests Mr. Perkins, when
