those of labor unionists who wish to monopolize the interests of the workers. In this network of confused opposition the New York State Factory Investigation Commission is now hesitating. The Commission is to report to the Legislature in January, but its decision is now in the making, and there is danger that the strength of the opposition may balk its recommendations.
Against every form of opposition must be weighed the supreme fact that there are industries in this State which do not pay enough wages to support life. Even if the minimum wage did not have behind it a long record of fairly successful practice, any proposal to end such a condition would be an experiment which New York State could afford to try, and should. No other agency has yet been suggested which reaches the most deeply exploited groups of women workers, and none which proposes in direct and dignified fashion to place within the state bulwarks below which American civilization shall not sink.
To those who complain that the sweated industries could not survive, the obvious and irrefutable answer is that industries which can't support themselves are uneconomic and should not be subsidized out of the health and sanity of their employees. If any subsidy is necessary, if the real cause of bad conditions isn't an intolerable inefficiency, then the subsidy should be public and frank. To those who fear State interference the reply is that voluntary action has failed. To those who point out that much of this sweated labor is incompetent the reply is that it must either be made competent or treated openly as a public charge. To those who realize the administrative difficulties of minimum wage legislation the reply is that wisdom and skill are made by experience.
ALTHOUGH Americans have responded with splendid generosity to the appeal of the starving Belgians, it becomes daily more apparent that no merely private philanthropy will suffice to meet this stupendous relief problem. Even in times of peace, millions of Belgians, because of their poverty, are chronically underfed; to-day starvation threatens to become universal. Year by year, despite a marvelously intensive cultivation of the soil, Belgium has become increasingly dependent upon foreign nations for her food. With the nation's ports now sealed by war, its railroads wrecked, its farm-horses killed or commandeered, its cattle gone, its harvest ungathered or confiscated, there is today no food for the six or seven millions of people still still huddled in the little kingdom. The cost of feeding a whole nation should not be borne entirely by philanthropic individuals.
What we propose is that Belgium's allies, England and France, deposit each month with the American government the sum of five or six million dollars, necessary for the most inadequate and partial relief of Belgian distress. Food could be shipped from this country, and by arrangement with Germany could be distributed that none of it would pass into the hands of Germans. The cost of such relief, even if it went further than mere food and amounted to one or two hundred million dollars during the year, could in the end be met by Belgium itself, or be paid for by the vanquished, and in any case it would be an inconsiderable item in the war budgets of the allied nations. The problem, however, is immediate. Unless something upon a national scale is done soon and is planned immediately, we shall witness the slow catastrophe of a whole people.
STUDENTS of financial phenomena are hard pressed for a satisfactory explanation of the increase of $111,000,000 in the gold holdings of the Imperial German Bank since the war began. Those of the Bank of England have increased even more ($162,000,000 since the low point in August), but that is different. London though its stock exchange is closed and notwithstanding the English moratorium, is still the money center of the world, and has the power to command gold from other countries. Germany is financially and commercially isolated from all the rest of the world, save, of course, Austria, which in this matter does not count. The Imperial Bank could have built up its gold holdings only out of the national resources. What were they? It is supposed that the Kaiser's famous war chest was emptied into the Bank, but that would account for only $60,000,000, so that $50,000,000 would still remain to be accounted for. Where did that come from? One theory is that it has been "gained from the circulating medium," which is to suppose that people, instead of hoarding gold privately, have actually been surrendering it for the bank notes. That is a wholly unsatisfactory explanation, one financial writer declares, "unless all previous principles of political economy have been turned upside down." And why not? One weakness of political economy has been to disregard human emotion of the sort that does not turn its principle upside down. That could easily happen, for instance, in a country where the brides prefer iron rings to gold ones, and married women send their gold bands to be melted up for the war fund, replacing them with iron, as they are doing now and as they did one hundred years ago, giving the Emperor his inspiration for that wholesale and inexhaustible symbol of distinction, the Order of the Iron Cross.
