A S 200 mia, the eppo iths. r. FA Fr. G r. G4 GOMPERS DEFEATS THE DEFEATISTS A DELICATE SITUATION confronted Mr. Samuel Gom- "The war-aims committee of the Inter-Allied Labor Conference in London has presented a report recommending that the conference 'subscribe to the fourteen points formulated by President Wilson, thus adopting a policy of clearness and moderation as opposed to a policy dictated exclusively by changes on the war-map.' The report in effect approves the suggestions made to the conference by Mr. Gompers and his fellow delegates, who declared that the armies of the Central Powers 'should be opposed so long as they respond to the orders and control of their militaristic and autocratic governments, which now threaten the existence of all self-governing peoples.' This is the only position that a genuine labor conference can adopt without stultifying itself." The fourteen proposals of President Wilson may be thus summarized from his address to Congress of January 8, 1918: Days of private international understandings are gone and covenants of peace must be reached in the open. Freedom of the seas in peace or war. Removal of economic barriers among nations associating themselves to maintain peace. Guaranties of the reduction of armaments. Impartial adjustment of colonial claims, based on popular rights. Evacuation of French territory, and righting of the Alsace- Readjustment of Italy's frontiers along lines of nationality. Free opportunity for autonomous development of the peoples of Austria-Hungary. Evacuation of Roumania, Servia, and Montenegro, and guaranties for all the Balkan states. Sovereignty for Turkey's portion of the Ottoman Empire and autonomy for other nationalities. An independent Poland with access to the sea. General association of nations for mutual guaranties of independence and territorial integrity to large and small states alike. the basis of your family income, about how much you ought to receive of that $6,000,000,000 in gilt-edged securities which the Government is offering to beat the Hun, and, incidentally, to inculcate habits of saving in these extravagant States. It is stated that the responsibility for the success of the Liberty Loans to be raised this year rests largely on families receiving incomes of $10,000 and under. Such families receive over eighty per cent. of the entire national income, which is conservatively estimated at $60,000,000,000. Still more striking is the fact that of the 23,500,000 family groups into which our population naturally falls, 23,140,000, having incomes of $5,000 or less, receive seventy-six per cent. of the national income, and 21,175,000 of these families, receiving incomes of $2,000 or less, are credited with over two-thirds of the national income. In the preparation of the table at the end of this article, we are told, the fact should be borne in mind that the calculations are based upon the requirements of the Government for a full year; the table, therefore, indicates the approximate amount of a family's yearly income which should be set aside. The average number of persons in a family is assumed to be 4.5, on the basis of the census calculations. In using the table, it is to be remembered that it is a table of averages, similar to the longevity tables issued by insurance companies, and is therefore to be corrected to fit individual cases. If the head of a family has few calls upon his income, he should plan to invest more heavily than the man who has debts to liquidate, or many dependents. Contributions to war-charities, assuming that the large organizations will require perhaps $300,000,000 during the year, are shown in the right-hand column of the table. Systematic giving is recommended as preferable to hit-or-miss methods. In applying the table to the present issue of $6,000,000,000 in Liberty Bonds, probably the forerunner of other issues to the total amount of $10,000,000,000 more during the fiscal year ending next June, there must first be deducted from the amount indicated by the table the estimated amount of the Federal income tax, which must be paid on June 15, 1918. This amount should be set aside as income is received, and, if the sum is large enough, invested in United States four per cent. certifi SLACKERS AIDING THE "U"-BOATS T HE SHIPYARD SLACKER, "as shameful a creature as a coward in the Army in France," as Colonel Roosevelt calls him, is held responsible by the press for the fact that the greatest ship-building yard in the world is not doing half that is expected of it. While the enormous majority of American shipyard-workers are given credit for breaking all the world's ship-building records in August and putting American ship-production ahead of all Allied losses that month, rather bitter comment is leveled at labor conditions in some of the Delaware River yards, and there is uneasiness lest a similar state of affairs may be found in the other yards. As VicePresident Piez, of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, candidly confessed: "The Hog Island yard expected to turn out fortyeight ships. It will do well to turn out twenty." As proof of slacking, newspaper writers note that while on September 13 the Hog Island riveters, spurred on by wagers or prizes or a desire to celebrate General Pershing's birthday, drove 195,242 rivets, only 89,407 were driven on September 17. Says the New York Sun: "The trouble comes from slackers of different types. Some are inefficient men, wholly incapable of doing a good day's work, who have wormed their way into the shipyards in order to pick up high wages and escape the draft. Ball-players, actors, pugilists-men from every non-essential walk-have found the shipyards the place for soft living. Their employment has incensed some of the men who really know how to work. In the Cramps' shipyards some of the workers have quit because these impossible fellows were put over them as bosses. The hiring of these dodgers of the draft, these creatures who come to 'work' with flowers in their coat-lapels and whisky on their breath, has been the worst evil of shipyard labor... "The other evil in the yards comes from a common human weakness, the desire to loaf, that has afflicted man since Adam's time. In a great many men that desire finds accomplishment when wages are abnormally high. When a workman is able to make three or four times as much money as he made before the war he often succumbs to the temptation to work only half as long. This weakness has been observed for a year, not only in the shipyards, but in almost every industry where war-prices and the cost of labor have fattened the pay-envelops. . . . This, we say, is a human weakness, but it is not easily pardonable. Real labor, the kind that America depends on, will have no sympathy for the loafer who, with a yellow heart and a spaghetti spine, has cut in two the production of ships at Hog Island." Patriotic shipyard workers along the Delaware--and they are a vast majority, the Philadelphia Inquirer insists-have no use for the "easy-job" slackers, we gather from the Philadelphia newspapers and press dispatches. One complaint is voiced as a slogan: "It's not what you know; it's who you know." At the Cramps' yard 2,000 men went on a brief strike as a protest against the presence of actors, ball-players, friends of politicians, and others, who, to escape army service, were being given jobs they were utterly incompetent to fill. Admiral Bowles, in charge of the Delaware River district, has admitted that "there are slackers" at Hog Island, tho the large majority are doing In the Newburg speech containing the already 166 confident prediction by those in authority that by the first of next year American yards will be delivering ships at the rate of 500,000 tons a month. Even on the basis of present construction, say shipping officials quoted in the New York Journal of Commerce, after the first six months of next year the United States will be independent in the matter of shipping and will not have to charter British and other European vessels, as at BUILD TO KILL Hog Island, "the ideal shipping plant of the In fact, so far from disappointing are the figures that the present, in order to transport and supply its forces in France. Total losses (Allied and neutral), August, 1914-Sept. 1, 1918.. 21,404,913 |