and exploratory as this paper is, it may perhaps encourage others to a more thorough investigation. Whatever the past can tell us to aid in solving the problems that perplex men, will not be lightly regarded.

REFERENCES:

Jewish Encyclopedia, sundry articles.

Graetz: History of the Jews.

Emanuel Deutsch: Essay on the Talmud.

W. Robertson Smith: The Religion of the Semites.

Karl Budde: Religion of Israel to the Exile.

Sir Henry Maine: Ancient Law.

Fustel de Coulanges: The Ancient City.

Moses Mielziner: Jewish Law of Marriage and Divorce.

Talmud Babli.

Jewish Codes.

The Bible.

CHILD LABOR AND LOW WAGES.

JEROME JONES, Atlanta, Ga.

Editor, the Journal of Labor; President The Southern Labor Congress.

When men, women and children are steeped in ignorance, they are more completely at the mercy (?) of brutal taskmasters of the world. Not knowing their rights, they dare not or cannot maintain them unorganized-like "dumb driven cattle" they are pitilessly exploited, plundered and profaned.

It has been so all through the ages. History shows that where there was the densest ignorance and most galling poverty of the masses, there was also enormous wealth in the hands of a few. When the artisans and peasants of France received but a few cents per day and lived on black, unsalted bread (salt was too great a luxury), Louis XIV. built the palaces of Versailles at a cost of seventy million dollars. To-day over 85 per cent. of the population of Mexico are wholly illiterate, living on less than ten cents per day, and yet the few landed proprietors and other large employers for the past 30 years have become enormously wealthy, some families owning several million acres of land.

Current news dispatches tell that in Chicago many thousand women and girls work for less than $5 per week. The president of one of the great department stores which employs thousands of them admits, under oath, that his company cleared over seven million dollars the past year-and that the company could easily pay a minimum wage of $9 per week without appreciably lessening dividends.

The United States Steel Corporation, which employs several hundred thousand men, pays handsome dividends on its twelve hundred million dollars of capital stock-including, confessedly, over $450,000 of "water," and the wages of many of its employes are beggarly, entailing bitter privations upon their families. The cotton mills of the South generally pay enormous dividends-some as high as thirty and forty per cent. per annum. And yet cotton mill em

ployes, both in the South and in the East, are the poorest paid of all skilled and semi-skilled labor of the country.

The peons of Mexico, the women and girls in department stores and sweatshops of our large cities, the steel workers, the cotton mill operatives-mere samples of the evils of low wages-are blinded by ignorance, lack initiative, courage and method, else they would make a brave effort to obtain living wages.

I do not protest against the "rights of property"—and other "vested rights." I simply assert the superior rights of those whose sweat and brawn largely create such property. I do not indulge in Utopian dreams and demand the immediate abolition of the wage system; I simply demand that the wage system be made fairer and juster to the other partner in the common enterprise-the employe.

I do not ask that the impossible be performed, that the employer pay more wages than the business will legitimately justify; I simply demand that the employer shall not declare hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars in dividends when his employes are in the midst of poverty and surrounded by nameless tragedies, which come too often to the wretchedly paid women and girls of our land.

I have no sympathy with him who would break down all the barriers of law and order and bring on anarchy in its worst form. But I respect less the coldly calculating, grasping employer who, day after day, witnesses the hopeless struggle of his adult male employe trying so hard, but vainly, to furnish the necessaries of life to his hapless family; the grim tragedy which follows the footsteps of girls who receive absolutely too small wages to exist in decency; the children in the mills and sweatshops who work from dawn to dark upon wages which would not properly feed and house a respectable dog or horse.

I did not come here to exploit the cause of organized labor, knowing that this conference is made up of many excellent people of divergent views, and, in my crude way, I would be pleased to observe all the proprieties of the occasion. But, from many years of study and practical experience in my vocation as journeyman printer, I have never yet discovered any other practical way to measurably obtain better wages, shorter hours of labor and safe and sanitary environment. Perhaps, some day, other, better means or methods will be devised. God speed that day!

Next in importance and practical benefit are such associations as yours, composed of men and women of broad views and brave and sympathetic hearts, who labor without other reward than that which comes to noble souls when they help

"A worn and weary brother,

Pulling hard against the stream."

It is you who prick the public conscience, stir the sluggish waters of indifference and neglect, challenge, with mailed hand, the barons of greed and plead with the tongues of angels with those otherwise kind employers, who are not innately grasping and cruel, but whose point of view is sadly warped.

It is such as you who give rise to such investigations as are now going on in Chicago, where vast good will speedily come from exposing the sordid conduct of many employers. Your noble association has come to the assistance of organized labor and helped to strike the shackles from the limbs of thousands of factory child slaves.

A Living Wage.

My friends, in this country of magnificent natural resources, blessed above all other lands in soil and climate, richer than any other country in the world in its agricultural and industrial wealth, there is no real basic reason why any industrious, law-abiding man or woman should work for less wages than will pay for decent shelter and raiment and food.

THAT should be the irreducible minimum in our industrial life. The public conscience should be so aroused that, when it becomes known that any employer hires children under 16 years of age, or pays any older employe less wages than will buy such unstinted necessaries of life, while he, himself, is arrayed in fine linen and fares sumptuously every day, the finger of Scorn should be pointed at him and he should be denied the association of honorable, right-thinking men.

Public opinion, properly aroused and set in motion along these lines, will do more substantial good than statute laws.

WORK is the primal law of the Universe. Idleness blights mentally, morally and physically. But there should be no aristocracy

in one form of labor over against another; no gross inequalities, no oppression and cruelty. I think it was Browning who said:

"All service is the same with God,

With God whose puppets, best and worst,
Are we: There is no last nor first."

Low Wages Related to Child Labor.

There is a strong connection between child labor and low wages. I speak particularly of cotton mill labor, with which I am more familiar.

There is not a doubt in my mind but that if the mills had to pay as much for child labor as for adult labor there would be no child labor problem. The child is thus brought into competition with adult labor and what is the result? Both child and adult get starvation wages. As long as the men and women have to compete with children they cannot struggle effectually for a fairer wage. And as long as their own earnings are pitifully small, the children. cannot expect to receive more than they now do. One reacts upon the other, the sum total of which horrible condition is, that the mill operatives remain, as a class, largely illiterate and poor, without hope or courage.

Shall such conditions ever be?

Shall we always see

"Truth forever on the scaffold,

Wrong forever on the throne?"

No, thank God! there are throughout this broad land new forces at work. As declared by President Wilson in his inaugural address, the old, old indifference, cruelty and neglect shown towards the masses, is disappearing under a new dispensation of brotherly love. Thousands of good men and women are doing more, at this hour, to better conditions of their more unfortunate brothers and sisters, than at any previous stage of the world's history. This fact should urge us on!