which would result from retaining superannuated employees, and for protection against that discontent which would result from discharging the superannuated without providing for them financially, it is a part of the business expense. Since the cost of making old age provision is thus either a part of the employees' daily cost of living or of the employer's daily business expense, it should be treated as a current expense, and may be likened to the premium for fire or accident insurance. Whether in the adjustment of relations between the employer and the employee this current cost of providing old age pensions should be borne wholly by the employer, or wholly by the employee, or jointly by both, is an open question; but European and American experience make it clear that under our present industrial system some comprehensive financial provision for the superannuated worker is essential to social if not to industrial solvency. To neglect such a requirement is as dangerous as it is for the manufacturer to ignore the depreciation of his machines.

For the protection of the wage earner it is obviously necessary that the right to a pension shall not depend upon his being in the employ of a particular concern. If his right to an annuity is dependent upon his remaining in a particular employ he loses all protection whenever he ceases to be so employed, whether he leaves voluntarily, or is discharged, or in case the concern discontinues business by failure or for other cause.

Adequate old age protection, therefore, cannot be secured to the wage earner through the promise of a pension from a particular concern. He should have old age insurance which will protect the wage earner in whosesoever employ he may happen to be when he reaches the period of superannuation. For the protection of the wage earner it is likewise necessary that the pension system should confer an absolute right. No pension system can be satisfactory which makes the granting or the continuance of a pension after it has been nted a matter of discretion.

Germany, France, England and other European countries have undertaken to secure through government action old age pensions for those who work in private businesses. The system adopted in each of these countries differs in some respects from that prevailing in each of the others, but each system embodies the essential requirements referred to above, namely: the pension is not dependent upon the

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workingman remaining in any particular employ, nor is it dependent upon the discretion of any individuals.

In America the providing of old age pensions for wage earners in private businesses is left wholly to private initiative. Many large concerns railroads, public utilities, industrial and financial concerns -have established their own pension systems. Under substantially all of these systems the wage earner receives no protection unless he remains in the company's employ until the age of retirement is reached, and even in that event the original grant and the continuance of the pension are, in large measure, discretionary.

Thus, the pension plan of the United States Steel Corporation, which took effect January 1, 1911, provides pensions only for those who have been in the employ of the company at least twenty years, and remain until the time for retirement; but no one has the right to remain in the employ:

Article 26: "Neither the creation of this fund nor any other action at any time taken by any corporation included under the provisions of the fund, or by the board of trustees, shall give to any employee the right to be retained in the service, and all employees remain subject to discharge to the same extent as if this pension fund had never been created."

Even if the worker has remained in the employ until the time fixed for retire.

ment, and has served faithfully, he has no right to a pension:

Article 24: "The pension plan is a purely voluntary provision for the benefit of employees superannuated or totally incapacitated after long and faithful service and constitutes no contract and confers no legal rights upon any employee."

And a board of trustees, in whose selection the workers have no voice, and on which they have no representation, may refuse to grant them a pension or may terminate it after it has been granted for what they, in their discretion, deem adequate cause:

Article 22: "Pensions may be withheld or terminated in case of misconduct on the part of the beneficiaries or for other cause sufficient in the judgment of the board of trustees to warrant such action."

The pension plan of most other corporations embodies similar provisions. Thus, the pension plan of the International Harvester Company provides:

Article 14: "Neither the establishment of this system nor the granting of a pension nor any other action now or hereafter taken by the pension board or by the o" cers of the company shall be held or construed as creating a contract or giving to any officer, agent or employee the right to be retained in the service, or any right to any pension allowance, and the company expressly reserves, unaffected hereby, its right to discharge without liability, other than for salary or wages due and unpaid, any employee, whenever the interests of the company may, in its judg ment, so require."

It has often been said by the corporations that one of their purposes in establishing a pension system is to "develop loyalty." But provisions like those quoted above suggest a purpose rather to compel than to develop "loyalty." The system is in effect a form of strike insurance. The pension is made dependent upon continuity of employment for a fixed period. The worker cannot receive a pension unless he remains in the company's employ until the date for retirement, and he has no right to remain in its employ, since the company reserves the full power to discharge him at any time, with or without cause. After a wage earner has served a number of years and feels himself growing older, the prospect of a pension becomes a potent influence. He realizes that if he abandons. his position or is discharged, he loses not only immediate employment, but protection for old age. He realizes also that the chance of securing other employment is greatly diminished by reason of his advancing years; diminished not because he is already old and less efficient, but because he will become superannuated sooner than a younger man, so that his employment by another concern will impose upon it or its pension system a superannuation burden sooner than if a younger man were selected.

Features in a pension system like

those quoted above tend to make the wage earner compliant. He can be more readily relied upon to prove "loyal" and not to "go out" even if others strike for higher wages and better working conditions. The "continuous employment feature" of the pension system tends thus to rivet the wage earner to his employer, and the provision by which the allowance of a pension is made discretionary further insures "loyalty" of the wage earner during his employment. An employee of the United States Steel Corporation advancing in years might well be deterred from hazarding the prospect of a penion by trade union activity, or even by joining a union.

The tendency of such provisions in a pension system to destroy industrial liberty is the more potent because the system is being adopted quite generally by those trusts and other powerful corporations which are determined to eliminate trade unionism. Indeed, in many cases the pension system was introduced as an aid to carrying out that labor policy. Individual employees, working under conditions which preclude collective bargaining, obviously lack industrial liberty so long as they are so employed, for they have no part in determining the conditions under which they work. After entering such employment, the only remnant of liberty remaining to them is the liberty of leaving it, and the features of the pension system just referred to undermine that remnant of liberty.

A pension system with such features must either prove a delusive protection or operate as a bribe to induce the wage earner to submit to a new form of subjection to the corporation. A frank employer recently said: "By providing so liberal a pension we have bought from the employee the right to leave us." Such a use of the pension is obviously illegitimate. The legitimate need of the employer for a pension system is satisfied if the provisions protect him from the necessity of keeping superannuated employees on the pay roll. This need of the employer is equally satisfied whether the employee retires on a pension or leaves the employ before the age of retirement. In other words, what the employer should seek to accomplish by the pension is merely to protect his business from the incubus of superannuated employees, and this purpose is accomplished as to each employee if he leaves the employ before he becomes superannuated. the workingman so leaves, he should in some form carry with him the accrued right to a pension-the proportionate value

If

of the time service-which would ripen into a pension if the workingman or his new employer paid the premiums of later years. Under these private pension systems that part of the pension earned by years of service is wholly lost when he leaves the company's employ, whatever the cause.

Employers seek to justify provisions in the pension systems like those quoted above by the fact that the pension fund is contributed wholly by the employer. But this fact furnishes no justification. The employer should not be permitted, even at

his own expense, to establish a pension system which tends to rob the workingman of his little remaining industrial liberty. A practice bearing such fruits is clearly against public policy. Many of our States have, in aid of industrial, liberty, prohibited the employers from making it a condition of employment that their employees should agree not to join a labor union. It may become necessary to apply a similar prohibition against features in private pension schemes which have a tendency to unduly abridge the liberty of the individual workingman.

F

IFTEEN years ago the word militarism, and the thing it denotes, were almost unknown in this country. It was something foreign, something to congratulate ourselves that we did not possess.

Today no country on earth expends so large a percentage of its revenues for military purposes.

Counting the expenditures because of past wars, and on account of preparation for war, the United States is spending more money for militarism than any other nation.

There was a time when Germans came to America to escape the crushing burden of militarism, but the United States is now expending $136,000,000 a year more than Germany for military purposes, past, present and future.

The expenditures in this direction are growing with leaps and bounds. For the eight years from 1891 to 1898, inclusive, the total appropriations for the army and navy amounted to $421,241,784. A stupendous sum, to be sure, but one which shrinks into insignificance in comparison with the expenditures already authorized for the eight years from 1903 to 1910, inclusive. During these eight years Congress has appropri

ated $1,483,401,525 for the army and navy. This sum would more than duplicate every university in America.

We are complaining because the high price of wheat is taking food from the hungry throughout the country. During the last ten years we have made into battleships, fired away in target practice and used up in preparation for wholesale murder three times the value of the wheat crop of the United States.

Add to this the money spent during the same time for pensions on account of war, and we find that during the last decade the United States has expended for militarism a sum equal in value to the entire wheat crop of the world.

The total value of the wheat crop of the United States has never exceeded $650,000,000 even in the final market. The appropriations for military purposes at the last session of Congress amounted to $525,700,000. In other words, five-sixths of the wheat crop of the United States is used in preparation for killing instead of feeding people.

This is supposed to be a civilized nation. It boasts of being at the very climax of millions of years of racial progress. Yet more than two-thirds of the annual appro

priations of the federal government are for war purposes. Did any savage tribe everexpend two-thirds of its energy in preparations for war?

All of these figures take no account of the millions of dollars expended by the various states to maintain the militia. They say nothing of the waste of time by the thousands of able-bodied men in the barbaric display and silly evolutions of these militia companies. They make no record of the sums expended to maintain military schools and academies by private institutions.

Yet these expenditures by the federal government alone represent a waste of human energies that, if used for socially valuable purposes, would transform the whole face of society.

Were this money devoted to the draining of swamps, the building of great irrigation works and the cultivation of the soil thus redeemed, it would absolutely abolish involuntary poverty in the United States.

Were it used for education it would double the educational facilities of this country. It would feed and clothe every hungry child now attending the public schools and supply free text books for every pupil.

If devoted to the building of homes for the workers it would within ten years pull down every slum on this continent and replace them with well-built, healthful structures and give work for every unemployed man while it was being done.

It would build a Panama canal every year or provide a pension for every workman crippled by industrial accident.

It would pay the entire expense of the postal department twice over and carry all mail free, and leave a tremendous surplus beside, for the total expense of the department last year was only a little over two hundred million dollars.

Imagination is simply staggered at the possibilities of any rational expenditure of this sum.

Yet it represents but one phase of the terrible wastes of war and but a small fraction of the still more terrible wastes of the competitive, or monopolistic, system in which we now live.

While nations are but instruments in a competitive war for markets and profits, this hideous waste must and will continue. Only when governments are instruments in the hands of the workers for the production and distribution of wealth will all incentive for war, and all need of expenditure for murder, wholesale or retail, cease.

HE Republican party is now, as always, a party of advanced and constructive statesmanship. It is prepared to go forward with the solution of those new questions which social, economic, and political development have brought into the forefront of the nation's interest. It will strive, not only in the nation, but in the several States, to enact the necessary legislation to safeguard the public health; to limit effectively the labor of women and children; to protect wage-earners engaged in dangerous occupations; to enact comprehensive and generous workmen's compensation laws in place of the present wasteful and unjust system of employers' liability, and in all possible ways to satisfy the just demand of the people for the study and solution of the complex and constantly changing problems of social welfare.

"In dealing with these questions, it is important that the rights of every individual to the freest possible development of his own powers and resources, and to the control of his own justly acquired property, as far as those are compatible with the rights of others, shall not be interfered with or destroyed. The social and political structure of the United States rests upon the civil liberty of the individual; and for the protection of that liberty the people have wisely, in the National and State constitutions, put definite limitations upon themselves and upon their governmental officers and agencies. To enforce these limitations, to secure the orderly and coherent exercise of governmental powers, and to protect the rights of even the humblest and least favored individual are the function of independent courts of justice.

"The Republican party reaffirms its in

tention to uphold at all times the authority and integrity of the courts, both State and Federal, and it will ever insist that their powers to enforce their processes and to protect life, liberty, and property shall be preserved inviolate. An orderly method is provided under our system of government by which the people may, when they choose, alter or amend the constitutional provisions which underlie that. government. Until these constitutional provisions are so altered or amended, in orderly fashion, it is the duty of the courts to see to it that when challenged they are enforced.

"We favor the amendment of the Federal employes' liability law so as to extend its provisions to all government employes,

as well as to provide a more liberal scale of compensation for injury and death.

"We pledge the Republican party to the enactment of appropriate laws to give relief from the constantly growing evil of induced or undesirable immigration, which is inimical to the progress and welfare of the people of the United States.

"We favor the speedy enactment of laws to provide that seamen shall not be compelled to endure involuntary servitude, and that life and property at sea shall be safeguarded by the ample equipment of vessels with life-saving appliances and with full complements of skilled, able-bodied seamen to operate them."

"It is opportune to point to the record of accomplishment of the Democratic House of Representatives in the Sixty-second Congress. We indorse its action and we challenge comparison of its record with that of any Congress which has been con trolled by our opponents.

"It has passed a bill to prevent the abuse of the writ of injunction.

"It has passed a law establishing an eight-hour day for workmen on all national public work.

"We repeat our declarations of the platform of 1908, as follows:

""The courts of justice are the bulwark of our liberties, and we yield to none in our purpose to maintain their dignity. Our party has given to the bench a long line of distinguished justices, who have added to the respect and confidence in which this department must be jealousy maintained. We resent the attempt of the Republican party to raise a false issue respecting the judiciary. It is an unjust reflection upon

a great body of our citizens to assume that they lack respect for the courts.

"It is the function of the courts to interpret the laws which the people enact, and if the laws appear to work economic, social, or political injustice, it is our duty to change them. The only basis upon which the integrity of our courts can stand is that of unswerving justice and protection of life, personal liberty, and property. As judicial processes may be abused, we should guard them against abuse.

"Experience has proved the necessity of a modification of the law relating to injunction, and we reiterate the pledges of our platforms of 1896 and 1904 in favor of a measure which passed the United States Senate in 1896, relating to contempt in Federal courts, and providing for trial by jury in cases of indirect contempt.

"'Questions of judicial practice have arisen, especially in connection with industrial disputes. We believe that the parties to all judicial proceedings should be